While big-bucks programs may get the headlines, daily U.S. Navy operations are also coming under scrutiny, says Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations. “We’ve got to get a culture of judiciousness,” Greenert said Oct. 13 during opening remarks at the 2011 Naval Energy Forum in Washington. “We need judiciousness in everything we do.” The Navy, he says, has lost that culture over the past decade and can no longer afford to squander its resources. “There’s no new money coming,” he warns.
HOUSTON — Appearing before a House oversight panel this week, NASA’s chief human spaceflight official and two of the agency’s independent safety experts endorsed Russian efforts to investigate and recover from the Aug. 24 loss of a Soyuz rocket without forcing an evacuation of the six-person International Space Station.
CHINOOK PROBE: U.S. Central Command’s investigation into the Aug. 6 CH-47 Chinook crash in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, confirms the primary cause of the accident was an insurgent-fired rocket-propelled grenade strike to the aft rotor blade as the helicopter approached its combat landing zone.
HOUSTON — Virgin Galactic has named Michael Moses, NASA’s final shuttle launch integration manager, as vice president of operations at the company’s Spaceport America headquarters and launch site in New Mexico for commercial suborbital flights of SpaceShipTwo. In his new post, Moses will develop and lead the team responsible for Virgin Galactic spaceship operations and logistics, flight crew operations, customer training and spaceport ground operations. The former NASA flight director also will oversee operational safety and risk management.
Top Aerospace & Defense Programs 2011-2020: Expendable Launch Vehicles Top Aerospace & Defense Programs 2011-2020: Expendable Launch Vehicles Worldwide Expendable Launch Vehicles Top 10 Programs Per Category In Terms Of Total Value Of Production -- 2011-2020 (In 2011 Dollars)
It appears that defense budget pressures in the U.S. and Europe are starting to bite into profits — a reality reflected in midyear declines in the Aviation Week Top-Performing Companies (TPC) scores of several major defense contractors. Halfway through 2011, defense contractor Lockheed Martin maintained the top spot in the TPC study rankings for companies with annual revenues of more than $20 billion, but its TPC score dropped to 85 from 88 at the end of 2010. Raytheon and Northrop Grumman saw even bigger declines.
U.S. budget woes have claimed another victim — the required integration of the U.S. Navy’s proposed Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) with its next planned Aegis combat system upgrade. The Navy is removing the engineering requirements to include its proposed AMDR as a “price competition line item” in the request for proposals (RFP) for the next round of Aegis capability upgrades, known as Advanced Capabilities Build (ACB) 16.
Ten years ago, the notion of transformation meant chasing new technological capabilities. But today, change for the military generally means preparing for cutbacks. On the verge of recommending more than $400 billion in budget reductions to the Pentagon over the next 10 years, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta tells the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington that he sees a smaller military in the future, facing a nontraditional battlespace.
LONDON — BAE Systems hopes to conclude by year’s end talks with Saudi Arabia on its purchase of Eurofighter Typhoons. In a trading update, BAE notes that the first batch of 24 Typhoons has now been delivered as part of Project Salam, finalized in 2007. At the time, plans called for final assembly to transition from Warton to Saudi Arabia. That is no longer on the agenda, although how exactly the rest of the program will unfold remains uncertain.
DEEPWATER: Despite recent comments by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to the contrary, U.S. Coast Guard acquisition and recapitalization programs are being well-managed, says Rear Adm. John Korn, assistant commandant for acquisition. In recent congressional testimony, GAO has warned that “additional cost growth is looming” for the Coast Guard’s Deepwater modernization program because the service has yet to develop revised baselines for all assets. During an Oct.
Predictions from Capitol Hill on the possibility of a massive electronic attack on the U.S. and its allies are becoming dire, and include a claim that the military and Republican Guard forces of Iran have been practicing for the low-space detonation of a nuclear weapon.
NEW DELHI — India has successfully launched a new satellite, Megha-Tropiques, to study climatic and atmospheric changes in tropical regions. Produced jointly by India and France, the one-ton satellite was one of four spacecraft placed into orbit on Oct. 12 by the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the launch pad near Sriharikota at the Satish Dhawan Space Center in southern India. The PSLV stood 44 meters (145 ft.) tall and weighed 230 tons at launch.
HOUSTON — The U.S. is preparing to launch a developmental spacecraft designed to preview a long-delayed network of satellites for weather forecasting, storm tracking and climate-change studies.
NEW DELHI — Still recovering from repeated failures of its heavy-lift Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) in 2010, the Indian Space Research Organization is eyeing the next flight of the vehicle in 2012. “We have a major task ahead of us ... [the] development and perfection of [the] indigenous cryogenic stage,” ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan says. “We are making good progress and we plan to have the next flight of GSLV ... in the second quarter of 2012.”
Operating AAI RQ-7B Shadow unmanned aircraft systems alongside Bell OH-58D Kiowa Warrior armed scout helicopters as part of a “full-spectrum” combat aviation brigade could lead the U.S. Army to revisit its stance on arming the tactical UAS.
Industry says it is ready to respond if the U.S. Army proceeds with plans for flight evaluations, as early as April next year, of potential off-the-shelf replacements for its Bell OH-58 Kiowa Warrior armed scout helicopter. Announcement of plans for a flight demonstration came as a surprise to manufacturers, who were waiting for the Army to release the results of a two-phase analysis of alternatives (AoA) for its Armed Aerial Scout (AAS) requirement.
More than 90 teams have registered to compete in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (Darpa) UAVforge “global crowd-sourcing competition” to design and fly a small, vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL), perch-and-stare unmanned aircraft. Videos of the concepts are appearing on the uavforge.net website as the competition nears its first milestone.
Pentagon weapons programs and operating costs will bear the brunt of military spending cuts aimed at reining in the federal deficit, the U.S. defense secretary says. In an Oct. 11 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Leon Panetta said modernization and operations will be the “largest area” of change and vowed to scrub every program, contract and facility for savings. But his address provided no details about which programs the Pentagon’s ongoing review of spending might wipe away.
The U.S. Navy’s recent cancellation of a contract with ship repair contractor Earl Industries of Portsmouth, Va., won’t bar the company from future Navy competitions, according to Naval Sea Systems Command (Navsea), but the company’s past performance will be considered in future source selections.
The U.S. Army’s main priority for the upgrade of its ground vehicle fleet is still the Ground Combat Vehicle, but its number two choice might come as a surprise — the M113 infantry carrier replacement, also known as the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV).
GENOA, Italy — The fate of Lockheed Martin’s Medium Extended Air Defense System (Meads) is far from assured, but the chances it will at least persist through its development phase are increasing. One decisive event is the upcoming flight test, the first of a planned series of three. After integration and testing at Pratica di Mare in Italy, and then at Lockheed Martin facilities in Dallas, the Meads battery was moved to White Sands, N.M., in preparation for the Nov. 17 test.
The U.S. Army is looking for “heavy and intense industry involvement” in its biannual testing program at Fort Bliss, Texas, known as the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE), according to Col. John Morrison, director of LandWarNet. The next round of testing is slated to begin at the end of this month, and will be focused on WIN-T (Warfighter Information Network-Tactical) network integration, which provides network integration down to the company level, Morrison said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington.
LONDON — The U.K. may establish a regulatory body to oversee sole-source defense procurements, although details of the changes will remain open for responses from industry and other interested parties until Jan. 6. The move to revise sole-source contracting rules is one of several reform efforts under way at the British defense ministry aimed at improving operations. The reform recommendations were developed by David Currie, a member of the U.K.’s upper house of Parliament.
