U.S. Special Operations Command (Socom) officials have tested the integration of a wing-mounted 250-lb. GPS-guided bomb on a new MC-130W variant hastily designed to provide armed overwatch for ground personnel in Afghanistan. Testing was conducted in four weeks, a Socom official says, but the system has not been put into operation. This official presented photos and a video of the Boeing Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) on the modified MC-130W during the recent Precision Strike Association annual program review.
DOWNSELECT TARGET: The U.S. Air Force now expects to select a winner in late May for the Small Diameter Bomb II competition to design a 250-lb.-class precision guided weapon capable of killing moving targets. The duel is between a Boeing/Lockheed Martin team and Raytheon. The goal is to field a weapon with the same weight and handling characteristics of the original SDB model, but with a tri-mode seeker to allow the weapon to destroy moving targets in bad weather. A contract should be signed in June.
SELF-PROPELLED: The U.S. Army is working on technologies that will enable it to field a fleet of tactical vehicles that churn out enough wattage to produce their own fuel and water, perhaps from biomass. In the long run, Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, deputy commander of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, wants each designated vehicle to generate a megajoule of energy—equivalent to 1 million joules, or roughly the amount of kinetic energy generated by a 1-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph. “With that level of power,” Vane says, “I could make my own water [and] my own fuel.
ON TRACK: U.S. Army leaders have been dropping hints over the past several months that they might be leaning toward a tracked design for the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), as opposed to the wheeled family of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected or Stryker combat vehicles the service has been buying over the last decade. Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox from the Army’s G-8 department tells AVIATION WEEK that the Army indeed seems to be leaning toward tracks. “As you start asking what you want the vehicle to do in terms of survivability, weight is a factor,” Lennox says.
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) May 3 - 5 — Speednews Eighth Annual Aerospace and Defense Industry Suppliers Conference, Intercontinental Los Angeles at Century City, Los Angeles, Calf. For more information go to www.speednews.com
MOVING ON: NASA Chief of Staff George T. Whitesides, one of the architects of the turnabout space policy embodied in the agency’s Fiscal 2011 budget request, is leaving the agency for a post in the private sector. David P. Radzanowski, deputy associate administrator for program integration in the Space Operations Mission Directorate, will replace Whitesides as chief of staff. The transition is effective May 10. Whitesides was executive director of the National Space Society for four years.
REAL ANGST: Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Evan Bayh (Ind.) are calling on the Pentagon to take immediate action to address counterfeit parts that have apparently slipped into the military’s supply system, according to a new report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office. (See story p. 3.) “Until there is a department-wide system in place to detect these counterfeit parts, we can’t even judge the scope of the problem or estimate the full extent of the risks to U.S.
SENSORY INPUT: ITT Corp. has wrapped up thermal vacuum testing of the new Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS), which is the last sensor to be integrated onto the Ball Aerospace Npoess Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite. The satellite is an operational pathfinder for the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (Npoess). Though the Obama White House terminated the joint Commerce-Defense Dept. Npoess program in favor of separate systems for the two different customers, NPP is needed to demonstrate performance of the sensors.
FORT WORTH — The U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin—prime contractor for the single-engine, stealthy F-35—are in the midst of negotiations for low-rate initial production (LRIP) Lot 4, with price a key sticking point in the negotiations.
A preliminary version of an upcoming report on the link between national security and U.S. commercial launch capabilities warns that U.S. leadership in space is threatened by poor coordination in setting space policy. The Center for Strategic and International Studies is seeking website comment on its report — “National Security and the Commercial Space Sector” — in the hope that several ongoing government space policy reviews will incorporate the best advice on sound commercial launch policy in their findings.
MARTIAN LIFE: Scientists on Earth have made a discovery that could indicate new places to look on Mars for signs of ancient fossilized life or preserved organic material. Researchers at NASA, the University of California at Los Angeles and Arizona State University have for the first time found diverse microscopic fossils in the soft mineral gypsum, which precipitates out of saltwater when it dries up. The discovery has tantalizing implications for Mars, which has abundant gypsum deposits at its north polar and equatorial regions.
B-1B RADAR: Flight testing of an upgraded radar on the U.S. Air Force’s Rockwell-built B-1B bomber has begun at Dyess AFB, Texas. The Reliability and Maintainability Improvement Program (RMIP) replaces the receiver/transmitter and radar processor in the B-1’s APQ-164 radar with derivatives of units from Northrop Grumman’s APG-68(V)9 radar for the F-16. Software has been rewritten from Ada to C++ to improve supportability.
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on counterfeit parts cites a number of incidents in which these parts they have made their way into key Pentagon programs, including the F-15 and V-22 Osprey. While Defense Department officials agree they need to do a better job identifying and dealing with counterfeits, Pentagon officials say they know of no mission that has been compromised. But experts say one of the reasons for that is the DOD has no method to track those parts in its supply chain (Aerospace DAILY, April 22, 26).
CAPITAL CONCERN: Members of the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition rallied on Capitol Hill April 29 to press for far more spending and attention for the U.S. fleet as build cycles for new flattops officially stretch and stabilize at five-year cycles. “While I am heartened by the current plans I have seen regarding long-term stability for aircraft carriers, the reality is that the vendor base may already be in trouble—stretched by the move to five-year [cycles],” says Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.), whose district includes the East Coast home of Navy forces.
MUNICH — The first fuselage has been joined for India’s airborne early warning aircraft, according to Embraer. The fuselage join took place in March for the first of three EMB-145s to be fitted with the Indian-designed radar, the Brazilian aircraft maker says in reporting its first-quarter results, adding that the program “is moving ahead as planned.”
After discovering counterfeit parts in its own systems, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has developed a system for identifying and removing them that the Pentagon should consider using as a template to start its own counter-counterfeit program, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends.
LEAVING SOON: Astrium says it has completed pre-launch testing of the TanDem-X radar satellite, clearing the spacecraft for its transfer on May 11 to the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan. TandDem-X, which will complement TerraSar-X, is to be launched on June 21 on a Dnepr rocket.
BENGALURU, India — The Indian navy frigate INS Shivalik was commissioned at Mumbai on April 29. It is the first in a series of stealth-class ships the navy will receive in the next year. With the induction, India joins the U.S., the U.K., Russia, China, France and Japan in having homegrown stealth platforms for blue sea warfare.
LONDON — Dassault and Swiss partners are close to wrapping up study efforts on a potential human-rated suborbital vehicle, the so-called VSH. Study efforts into VSH, a six-passenger, 11-metric-ton, air-launched vehicle, have been underway since 2004. Two years ago Dassault partnered with Ruag, ETHZ and the Lausanne polytechnic to further refine the concept under the K-1000 project.
Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) contributed to the Big Bang experiment carried out by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) recently. One of India’s leading Defense Public Sector Undertakings (DPSU), BEL supplied 32-channel silicon strip sensors to the Large Hadron Collider to detect subatomic particles generated after high-energy particle beams collided.
TEL AVIV — Iran appears to be developing a further variant of the re-entry vehicle for its Shahab 3 liquid-fueled medium-range ballistic missile, with a revised design on display during the Army Day parade in Tehran this month. “This is the third design that we’ve seen of the Shahab 3’s re-entry vehicle,” says Uzi Rubin, former director of Israel’s Missile Defense Organization.
INTELLIGENT I.T.: As part of its CIA 2015 plan, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency will invest in technology to extend its operational and analytic reach and become more efficient, Director Leon Panetta announced this week. The five-year plan boosts the CIA’s potential for human-enabled technical collection and provides “advanced” software tools to help agency officers tackle the “huge” volume of data they encounter. More details were not provided in the CIA’s public announcement.
Congressional decisions on LPD-17 funding could shape the future capabilities for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, as well as mold the shipbuilding industrial base, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
