Lockheed Martin may not be happy with the Pentagon’s negotiating stance on the next lot of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, but a key lawmaker is. The Defense Department is refusing to sign a contract for the fifth lot of F-35s until Lockheed agrees to pay for a “reasonable share” of concurrency costs, which result from the overlap between development and production.
NEW DELHI — India plans to test launch the Agni V nuclear-capable, long-range missile in February 2012. The Agni V is designed to hit a target up to 5,000 km (3,100 mi.) away. Scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) say the missile should be inducted into service by 2014. “It is right on schedule, and the successful test of Agni IV will prove to be a building block in development of this missile,” DRDO chief V.K. Saraswat says, referring to the successful flight of the Agni IV on Nov. 15 (Aerospace DAILY, Nov. 16).
The U.S. Army has flown a hypersonic boost-glide weapon demonstrator, derived from a maneuverable winged re-entry vehicle designed by Sandia National Laboratories and flight tested in the early 1980s. Early in the morning of Nov. 17, the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) was launched by three-stage booster on a 2,500-mi., non-ballistic flight from Kauai, Hawaii, to the planned impact location in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
NEW DELHI — India’s stealthy Nirbhay cruise missile will be tested in the first quarter of 2012. The indigenously developed subsonic missile is going through its final integration stage, says Defense Research and Development Organization chief V.K. Saraswat. The missile is being developed by DRDO’s Advanced Systems Laboratory. Nirbhay will be the second cruise missile from India’s defense research stable, after the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, which was jointly designed and developed with Russia.
WASHINGTON and PARIS — Space agency chiefs from Europe, Russia and the U.S. are setting up talks aimed at finding a way to work toward a Mars sample return mission in the face of budget uncertainty in the U.S. that threatens to upend the joint effort worked out by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
HOUSTON — NASA and the rest of the nation’s human spaceflight industrial base must plot a path forward that includes a greater emphasis on lean development, strategic investments in technologies that lower future production costs and flight tests that retire risk, according to Jeff Hanley, who managed the agency’s ill-fated Constellation back-to-the-Moon program. “In the phase we are in, it may feel like we are wandering, but that does not mean we are lost,” Hanley told the American Astronautical Society’s annual conference here Nov. 16.
BEIJING — Chinese officials have declared complete success for the Shenzhou 8 mission of their manned space program, after the capsule — designed for human transportation but unmanned on this occasion — returned to Earth on Nov. 17. The mission’s chief objective was to show that Shenzhou 8 could dock with the Tiangong 1 orbital laboratory, which was also unmanned. The procedure was executed twice.
An analysis of the military communications market by Forecast International projects that defense departments across the globe will spend more than $7 billion to develop, acquire and maintain 25 multimission communications programs over the next decade, with about 480,468 individual units expected to be sold during that period.
LONDON — The bulk of the cost increases incurred by the U.K. Defense Ministry in the past year are linked to decisions taken in last year’s Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR), the National Audit Office (NAO) reports. The Watchkeeper unmanned aircraft and Meteor missile programs are among those that have seen their development schedule slip during the past year.
HOUSTON — Though tentatively targeted for early January, the NASA-sponsored Space Exploration Technologies Inc. (SpaceX) cargo resupply demonstration mission of the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station could slip a little later into the new year.
SASC CUTS: The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee has pulled $21 billion out of its fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill. That includes more than $3 billion in reductions to U.S. Army spending, which aligns the bill with Army plans to terminate its version of the Joint Tactical Radio System.The new bill reduces Air Force investment accounts by nearly $1.5 billion, including cuts to the A-10 and Amraam missile. It also reduces war spending by $5 billion and transfers nearly that much from base budget operation and maintenance accounts.
Thanks to more efficient shipyards and the completion of unfavorable past deals with the U.S. Navy, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) expects to see better contract deals, CEO Mike Petters says. HII’s better deals would run counter, investment analysts say, to what they are seeing with other contractors and other programs.
With the U.S. military presence in Iraq ending next month and the return of over two million pieces of military gear from that conflict, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and some members of Congress are eyeing the gear heading home.
Lockheed Martin has awarded Vision Systems International (VSI) a contract to continue development work to improve the night-vision performance of its helmet-mounted display (HMD) system on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Problems with night-vision performance led Lockheed last month to award BAE Systems a contract to supply an interim helmet-mounted display to support F-35 testing and training. The HMD is flight-critical because the F-35 does not have a head-up display.
Pressed by House lawmakers to name their ground vehicle priorities if U.S. defense spending becomes even tighter, the U.S. Marines are choosing the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV). Brig. Gen. Daniel O’Donohue, director of capabilities development, told a House Armed Services subcommittee Nov. 16 that the ACV is the service’s No. 1 ground vehicle priority. The program was created after the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was canceled.
HOUSTON — The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft delivered three U.S. and Russian astronauts to the International Space Station early Nov. 16, briefly restoring the orbiting science laboratory to full six-person operations for the first time in two months. Dan Burbank, who will take command of Expedition 30 later this month, Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin were greeted by U.S. station commander Mike Fossum and flight engineers Sergey Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa.
DUBAI — L-3 Communications is about to put its Spydr intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance demonstrator aircraft through an upgrade program to extend the nose of the King Air 350ER to add additional payload capacity. Modification is planned to begin after the aircraft returns from the Dubai air show, with the work likely to be completed around April, says Joe Siniscalchi, vice president for strategy and business development at L-3. The goal is to add an electro-optical/infrared sensor under the nose to provide better full-motion video.
GENOA, Italy — Italy’s emergency government is dealing with a dire financial situation that will force substantial cuts in both the defense procurement budget and investment funding, and flagship provider Finmeccanica is set to feel the brunt of the come-down. Details of Finmeccanica’s first reactions emerged last week when the company announced third-quarter financial results that saw it swing to a loss equaling its profit for the same quarter a year before.
PARIS — Gilat Satellite Networks advanced its strategy to become a contender in the Ka-band arena this week with an agreement to provide network equipment and Ka-band end-user terminals for Russia’s future constellation of multi-spot-beam satellites.
The Bath Iron Works unit of General Dynamics is scheduled to lay the keel for the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer on Nov. 17. Normally a marked milestone for any ship, the keel-laying for the Zumwalt promises to be as unique as the ship itself; the vessel is already about half completed, much further along in overall construction than any other ship at this stage, say U.S. Navy and industry officials.
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