PARIS NATO has rounded up the signatures for 15 countries that will participate in the Allied Ground Surveillance program, an effort to field unmanned aircraft fitted with a ground target tracking radar. A program contract is due next year. Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United States are the project participants. Other countries can still join, NATO says. NATO lost a few participants owing to budget pressures during the last round of talks.
MOROCCAN PODS: The Royal Moroccan Air Force’s newly purchased F-16 Block 50 aircraft soon will be flying with Lockheed Martin Sniper Advanced Targeting Pods (ATPs) under a $30 million foreign military sales contract. The Sniper pods will include a video downlink that relays high-resolution, streaming video to forward-deployed forces for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and rapid target coordination via the Rover ground receiver.
TWIN TANKERS?: Could Boeing offer both the KC-767 and KC-777 against Northrop Grumman/EADS’s Airbus A330-based tanker for the U.S. Air Force’s KC-X requirement? The company says it’s reviewing the draft request for proposals released on Sep. 25 (Aerospace DAILY, Sept. 25) to “help us decide which plane to offer or whether to offer both planes.”
SATELLITE LOBBY: EchoStar, Intelsat, SES and Telesat have banded together for a U.S. commercial satellite services lobbying group led by former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), once a powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We call on the Defense Department, the State Department and other national security arms of our executive branch to take a new look at our country’s launch vehicle capabilities and relevant export control policies,” Warner says. “Current U.S.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) Demo mission launched aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II rocket from Space Complex 17B at Cape Canaveral Sept. 25 following two days of launch scrubs.
Beyond the opening statement that the campaign in Afghanistan has been under-resourced and remains so, the new assessment of the war put together by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of the NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces, Afghanistan, reveals a number of basic planning details.
TRYING AGAIN: Masten Space Systems plans to try again in October to qualify for prizes under the NASA-sponsored Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge prize competition. The company unsuccessfully attempted to meet the contest’s “Level 1” requirements for simulating a lunar landing on Sept. 16 in Mojave, Calif. The vehicle must lift off from a concrete pad, ascend to 50 meters, travel horizontally to land on a second pad after remaining aloft at least 90 seconds, then refuel and make the reverse trip within two and a half hours.
PAN WORKING: Lockheed Martin says the A2100-based PAN satellite it built for a classified U.S. government mission is performing “as required” following its Sept. 8 launch by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 from Cape Canaveral (Aerospace DAILY, Sept. 10).
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Sept. 28 - 30 — Unmanned Systems Summit 2009, “The Roadmap to Remoting Combat Tasks: Advances in Autonomy, Functionality, and Adaptability,” Washington, DC Metro Area. For more information go to www.unmannedsystemsevent.com
Sometimes a second look is a good idea, as evidenced by NASA’s surprising discovery of ice in freshly made craters on Mars. As they pored over mid-latitude images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists using its Context Camera saw dark smears on the surface that often are evidence of new impact craters from meteors.
CAPODICHINO, Italy The first refurbished Italian G-222, bound for the Afghan National Army Air Corps, was delivered to the U.S. Air Force during a Sept. 25 ceremony here at Alenia Aeronautica’s facility. The Afghan corps will begin operating the G-222s, designed as the C-27, in April. Initial operational capability, which includes the first three aircraft and maintenance support, is expected in November.
USCG AUTHORIZATION: The U.S. Coast Guard Authorization Act for fiscal 2010 and 2011 (S. 1194) would authorize appropriations totaling nearly $16.4 billion through FY ’14, primarily for ongoing operations during 2010 and 2011. Implementing title V, which addresses the service’s acquisition practices, could result in future savings in discretionary spending, says the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in a Sept. 24 cost estimate.
ITAR ENDING?: American satellite manufacturers are convinced that U.S. technology export rules are in for a change. “I see a strong interest in ITAR reform in the Obama Administration,” Space Systems/Loral CEO John Celli says. “It could even happen overnight,” he suggests, expressing confidence that one of three reform bills currently before Congress will be passed. “I believe responsibility [for supervising the rules] will return to [the Dept of] Commerce, which did a good job before [it was shifted to the State Dept.],” says Orbital Sciences Corp. CFO Garrett Pierce.
FURTHER FLANKERS: Sukhoi has begun work on airframes for the additional 12 Su-27SM Flanker aircraft ordered by the Russian air force in August. These aircraft are being re-manufactured from unfinished Su-27SK aircraft that were intended for export. They will be delivered in 2010-11. A total of 60 aircraft have been ordered. The Su-27SM is an improved version of the Flanker with upgraded avionics and the ability to use air-to-ground weapons.
President Barack Obama let known his continuing opposition to unrequested Boeing C-17 airlifters Sept. 25, but the White House did not raise the ante on veto threats in its response to expected Senate defense appropriations for fiscal 2010. In the official Statement of Administration Policy on the Senate’s pending bill, to be considered this week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said it “strongly objects” to the addition of $2.5 billion in funding for 10 unrequested C-17s in the Senate version of the spending measure for the Defense Department.
A small leak in a kerosene fuel line discovered late Sept. 23 during turnaround operations prompted NASA to scrub a second planned attempt to launch a dual-payload missile defense warning satellite mission from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Sept. 24. The leak has been fixed, and the team is now targeting Sept. 25 from 8-9 a.m. EDT to launch the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) Demo mission, which will orbit two missile warning satellites.
SETTING SAIL: Australian officials said they expect the launch of the country’s new Landing Helicopter Dock 1 ship in Spain in March 2011, with its Australian debut at the Williamstown dockyard in 2012. LHD 2 will arrive in 2014. BAE Systems Australia Defense is the prime contractor for the $3.3 billion Project JP2048 Phase 4A/B. Spanish shipbuilder Navantia is subcontracted to BAE as the design authority and is required to construct and fit out the hulls of two large amphibious warships for the Australian Defense Force.
MADRID, Spain — Airbus says it has come to an agreement in principle with A400M launch customers to restructure the contract for the airlifter, and is keeping to its objective of performing a first flight this year. “We have agreed to a new program baseline, and have an agreement in principle on a revised technical schedule,” Rafael Tentor, the A400M program head at Airbus Military, said here at briefings Sept. 22. “We are now working on the details,” he said, with the aim of signing an addendum to the existing contract by the end of the year.
The unequivocal and unexpected discovery of widespread water in the uppermost layer of the moon’s surface means a whole new set of challenges for engineers working on methods for future astronauts to extract lunar resources.
The U.S. Marine Corps has managed to get ahead of what it feared last spring would be a capability gap due to higher than anticipated scrap rates on the rotor blades of its CH-53D Sea Stallion fleet. In May, program manager Capt. Rick Muldoon said the D-blade scrap rate had spiked more than 80 percent. “We’re in a bit of a tight spot,” he said. “We’re very diligently managing the inventory we have while we accelerate getting the aircraft to fly with [E model] blades (Aerospace DAILY, May 21).”
The U.S. Air Force’s new KC-X replacement tanker acquisition “is not a rerun of the last competition,” senior Pentagon officials assured lawmakers who were briefed the morning of Sept. 24 ahead of the next day’s release of the draft request for proposals (RFP).
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CHINA LAKE, Calif. — Customers coming to the U.S. Navy’s ranges here to test a sensor payload, a networking device or a weapon designed for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can pick a platform from the Weapon Division’s stable of ScanEagle and Pioneer UAVs if they don’t have one of their own. The UAV facility at China Lake is easy to spot. It’s next to a B-29 that was rescued from the ranges here.
