The U.S. Navy’s new Common Submarine Radio Room (CSRR), which includes the Submarine Exterior Communications System (SubECS), appears to be working as expected but the service needs to ensure there are enough satellites and other resources to reap the benefits, says a report from the Pentagon Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) released earlier this month.
PATIENCE PLEASE: The U.S. Air Force, still wrestling with an embarrassing data-swap mishap among KC-X bidders while it races to award the aerial refueler replacement program, is stinging from new charges that it did not adequately address congressional concerns over the issues during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week (Aerospace DAILY, Jan. 28).
CYCLONE ARRIVAL: Sikorsky now expects to deliver the initial six of 28 CH-148 Cyclone maritime helicopters to Canada in the first half of this year. Originally planned to begin in November 2008, deliveries were rescheduled to November 2010 because of development delays, but slipped again late last year. Three aircraft are in flight testing, with one undergoing rough-weather ship landing trials off Halifax. The six Cyclones are being built to an interim standard, to allow training to begin. Deliveries of fully compliant aircraft will not begin until July 2012.
REMEMBRANCE: The failings of NASA’s human spaceflight team, which led to the loss of the Challenger and Columbia crews, must be lessons that are implemented every day, agency space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier says. “The crews lost were my friends, my co-workers and I saw an engineering team that I love fail,” Gerstenmaier said Jan. 28 during a memorial service marking the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. “The human spaceflight team has learned tremendous lessons from these events,” he says.
Lockheed Martin/Raytheon and Boeing/Northrop Grumman have each submitted proposals to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) for the Ground-Based Missile Defense (GMD) development and sustainment contract. A downselect is expected May 31. The deal could be worth up to $10 billion if all 10 years of options are exercised, and the work will involve sustainment of the GMD system, development of new capabilities, flight testing and disposal of outdated components. The initial contract period is for seven years; annual value is estimated at $600 million.
GE CUTS: GE Aviation is cutting 44 engineering and manufacturing test employees at its Germantown, Md., avionics facility, the last remnant of the erstwhile Fairchild Space and Defense business. Under GE the site specializes in displays, platform computing systems, mission management, flight management systems, distributed computing systems and fuel gauging, according to industry websites. Employees will be paid through April 1 and will then receive severance payments if they do not find positions elsewhere in GE, a GE representative tells Aviation Week.
NEW DELHI — The U.S. government has removed all remaining Indian space and defense-related organizations from the Department of Commerce’s so-called “Entity List”—a roster of organizations that must clear additional U.S. export licensing hurdles due to their perceived proliferation risk. It is mostly laboratories within India’s Defense Research Development Organization (DRDO) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) that are affected.
Mobile satellite services (MSS) operators feel that the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to relax requirements for Ancillary Terrestrial Component (ATC) hybrid MSS service will facilitate roll-out of the service without compromising essential ATC objectives. On Jan. 26, the FCC granted Lightsquared, which is controlled by Harbinger Funds, a waiver that will enable its wholesalers to sell terrestrial-only or satellite-only devices in addition to the dual-mode devices mandated by the ATC’s integrated service rule.
CYBER BILL: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the left-leaning chairs of seven Senate committees are pushing legislation calling for “urgent” action to safeguard critical cyber-infrastructure, including the electric grid, military assets, the financial sector and telecommunications networks. The bill, introduced last week, urges incentives for the private sector to assess the risk of cyberterrorism and take action to prevent it and promote investments in the U.S. IT sector—which they assert will create high-paying jobs.
By 2017 the U.S. Army plans to reduce its fleet of 260,000 trucks by 15%, including about 1,500 of its 20,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, according to the service’s new Tactical Wheeled Vehicle Strategy.
BENGALURU, India — India’s Embraer-built Airborne Early Warning & Control System (AEW&C) is scheduled for rollout Feb. 21 in Brazil. A senior defense official confirmed to Aviation Week Jan. 27 that the first flight of the modified EMB-145 is expected around May. “The first EMB-145 will land in India in August 2011 for system integration and subsequent induction into the Indian Air Force (IAF),” the official says.
PARIS — Thales Alenia Space (TAS) has selected Orbital Sciences Corp. (OSC) to integrate and test the 81 spacecraft in the next-generation Iridium mobile satellite system. OSC will integrate the satellite bus and communications payloads, to be provided by TAS, along with hosted payloads that the system, known as Iridium Next, is expected to carry. Iridium and TAS had decided on a U.S. integrator because of the likely presence of classified U.S. government payloads, which could not be accommodated on a non-U.S. spacecraft.
TOKYO and HOUSTON — The International Space Station (ISS) crew successfully grappled and berthed Japan’s unmanned HTV-2 space freighter during rendezvous operations early Jan. 27, initiating two months of external robotic as well as internal cargo off-loading.
PARIS — German space agency DLR has approved a program plan for 2011 featuring new in-orbit servicing, broadband technology and methane-monitoring missions, as well as additional funding for the International Space Station (ISS), the Ariane 5 launch system and a European relay satellite system.
LOS ANGELES — U.S. suborbital launch vehicle and payload integrators are actively helping NASA formulate the next growth steps for the fledgling commercial reusable space launch industry.
CYBER RANGE: Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $7.4 million contract to demonstrate by July the capabilities of an automated cyber test range developed under Phase 2 of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s National Cyber Range (NCR) program. The testbed is located at the company’s simulation and training business in Orlando, Fla. Lockheed Martin and Johns Hopkins University were awarded contracts in early 2010 for Phase 2 of NCR, and the award signals a downselect to one team to complete a revised Phase 2.
Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems and Lockheed Martin Mission Systems & Sensors will continue work on the U.S. Air Force’s proposed Space Fence program, a ground-based S-band radar system to track objects in orbit, under a pair of follow-up contracts announced Jan. 26.
DISUNION: As expected, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Jan. 25 drew criticism from those opposed to trimming $78 billion from the Pentagon’s budget growth over the next several years. “To cut the defense budget during two tough, protracted wars, a rising China, and a nuclear Iran and North Korea is a mistake,” says the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative.
The newest Pentagon restructuring of the $380 billion Joint Strike Fighter program will result in an overall cut of $6.9 billion through Fiscal 2016, according to F-35 program officials. This money was removed from the production portion of the program; 124 aircraft will be cut from the U.S. buy of F-35s through Fiscal 2016 if Congress approves the plan laid out by Defense Secretary Robert Gates early this month (Aerospace DAILY, Jan. 7).
MOSCOW — Russian Space Agency Roscosmos plans to complete the deployment of the national satellite navigation system GLONASS by midyear, with the launch of four additional Glonass spacecraft. Earlier plans that called for ensuring a full operational capability by the end of 2010 had to be scrapped after the loss of three satellites in a Dec. 5 Proton launch mishap (Aerospace DAILY, Dec. 7, 2010).
The U.S. Air Force will respond to a lawmaker’s inquiry on whether the Integrated Fleet Aerial Refueling Assessment (Ifara) can be eliminated from the service’s KC-X aerial refueling tanker competition, as well as comment on how important Ifara is to the award, an Air Force representative told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Jan. 27.
While the White House, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and the commandant of the Marine Corps all support the cancellation of the costly and troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, General Dynamics and Congress have not yet given up hope.
SINGAPORE — EADS Astrium has disclosed that Singapore will be a partner in its suborbital spaceplane program. At the Global Space & Technology Convention in Singapore, EADS Astrium executives announced that Singapore will be building a small-scale demonstrator of the spaceplane and may be involved in developing parts for the commercial product. EADS Astrium is also hoping Singapore will ultimately have a fleet of its commercial spaceplanes stationed at Singapore’s Changi Airport.
