ELECTRIFIED DEFENSE: The Pentagon’s new cyber-operations strategy will try to move the U.S. defense establishment from a defensive posture to one where trained forces actively defend against online threats in an effort to make cyberattack and exploitation fruitless.
HOUSTON — The Atlantis astronauts sailed past the midpoint of NASA’s STS-135 final shuttle program mission on July 14, steeped in a demanding cargo exchange with the International Space Station, but working well ahead of schedule. The 13-day flight to the orbiting science laboratory is scheduled to conclude with a dawn landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on July 21. Touchdown at the Shuttle Landing Facility is scheduled for 5:58 a.m. EDT.
LONDON — With the British government not yet a year out from its last Strategic Defense and Security Review (SDSR), Defense Secretary Liam Fox says he wants to get an early start on the next iteration. By the end of 2013, work is likely to begin on the next SDSR, he tells the Royal United Services Institute. The SDSR itself should be completed in 2015.
LONDON — Northrop Grumman’s self-funded Firebird optionally manned aircraft has piqued potential interest in the U.K. Although the country has no firm requirement for such a system, a Royal Air Force officer notes that the flexibility provided by the approach could be of interest.
BE PREPARED: Huntington Ingalls of Pascagoula, Miss., received a $98.6 million cost-plus-fixed-fee not-to-exceed modification for advance procurement of long-lead-time materials for LPD-27, the 11th ship of the amphibious transport dock ship LPD-17 San Antonio ship class. The U.S. Navy touts the San Antonio ship class vessels’ ability to ply the coastal waters of littoral regions where the Navy and Marines are being charged to fight or offer assistance in the case of natural disasters.
IN ORBIT: Globalstar has taken over control of its latest batch of six second-generation satellites, lofted early July 13 by a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch was performed on behalf of Europe’s Arianespace by its Starsem affiliate. Liftoff took place at 8:27 a.m. local time. The rocket’s Fregat upper stage performed two engine firings and injected the six Globalstar-2s into their targeted orbit 1 hr. 38 min. after liftoff.
Despite the fact that customer service improvement is a high business priority among aerospace and defense (A&D) executives, and increasingly important to win and keep business as national defense budgets get pinched, several industry “disconnects” are making progress difficult, according to a new Accenture survey.
If the U.S. does not invest in aerospace and technology soon — not to mention find a way to attract students into engineering — it risks losing its competitive edge as the leading country for aviation and aerospace in the world, says Jim Albaugh, president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
LONDON — As the Royal Air Force moves to build its Future Force 2020, U.K. Defense Secretary Liam Fox notes that there will be difficult hurdles to overcome. In particular, “the period later in this decade in which the Tornado GR4 is drawn down and the Joint Strike Fighter comes up to speed will be particularly challenging,” he said at the Royal United Services Institute Air Power Conference 2011.
LONDON — Astrium’s U.K. arm is promoting the idea of working with the British government to field a space-surveillance capability that could be modeled on the Skynet 5 commercial satellite service contract.
U.S. congressional budget cutters are once again taking direct aim at new aircraft carrier construction as the U.S. Navy struggles to fund its future shipbuilding plan. Analyst and media reports include a range of recommendations, from delaying the Ford-class carrier acquisition work to sinking the planned second carrier of the class, the CVN-79 John F. Kennedy.
The head of U.S. Transportation Command stood firm on the military’s recommendation to reduce the strategic airlift fleet and retire Lockheed Martin C-5 aircraft, against legislation that would block such reductions and retirements. In July 13 testimony to the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee, Gen. Duncan McNabb says the Pentagon’s Mobility Capabilities and Requirements Study 2016 provides the “analytical justification to recommend repeal of the 316 strategic airlift floor.”
A top lawmaker who sought to end the James Webb Space Telescope indicated July 13 that he may be willing to keep investing in the Hubble replacement. After recommending that funding be zeroed for the infrared telescope being developed by Northrop Grumman, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee in charge of NASA spending, said, “We’re going to try to take care of the James Webb.”
If the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) and their industry partners have their way, in a few years clusters of small satellites operating on ad hoc wireless networks may be taking the place of the large pieces of hardware currently in orbit.
TOUGH TIMES: Forget foreign adversaries — the most serious challenges to an effective U.S. security strategy may well be domestic resource constraints and a failure to plan and manage defense expenditures, says a highly regarded expert at a Washington think tank. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies said July 12 that the U.S. defense community is only beginning to address the full implications of the challenges it faces. “Unless U.S.
SEUXSE SUCCESS: The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration declared this week that recent test results show its second Single Event Upset Xilinx-Sandia Experiment (Seuxse II) is “very resistant” to a severe space radiation environment. Seuxse II is a second-generation experiment that was installed aboard the International Space Station in May to investigate the effects of space radiation on commercial-off-the-shelf supercomputer components for possible use in space-based nuclear treaty monitoring technology.
The U.S. Army and Joint Program Office failed to properly administer maintenance support contracts for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the Pentagon Inspector General (IG) says in a new report.
HOUSTON — It has no solid rocket boosters, main engines, wings or rudder. But “OV-95” is considered as much a member of NASA’s shuttle fleet as Atlantis (OV-104), which circled the Earth while docked to the International Space Station on July 13 with astronauts engaged in a demanding resupply mission.
LONDON — The U.K. has begun looking at potential export opportunities for the MBDA Fire Shadow loitering munition, in advance of next year’s planned fielding of the weapon. The loitering munition being developed under the Indirect Fire Precision Attack program “is progressing well through the demonstration and manufacture phase and is on track to deliver a deployable capability in 2012,” says Peter Luff, the U.K. minister for defense equipment, support and technology.
Lockheed Martin hopes to make headway with the “maturity” flights of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at Edwards AFB, Calif., now that AF-6, the second of two test aircraft at Edwards, was expected to conduct its first maturity flight as soon as July 12.
