International Space Station (ISS) Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineer Mike Barratt overcame concerns about carbon dioxide levels in their Russian Orlan spacesuits to install two sets of antennas for an upcoming automated docking in a four-hour, 54-minute spacewalk early June 5.
Sen. John Faulkner, a highly regarded figure in the Australian government, will take over as defense minister following the resignation of Joel Fitzgibbon, while Bob Ainsworth has been named the new British Secretary of State for Defense. Fitzgibbon quit last week after it was revealed that the major general in charge of defense health services was ordered to discuss possible health insurance savings with Fitzgibbon’s brother, who is the head of an Australian insurance company, and with a U.S. insurer that the brother represented.
STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS: The Kazan-based KAPO manufacturing plant has delivered two heavily modified Tupolev Tu-214s to the presidential flight department. The aircraft, the Tu-214SR, is intended to provide long-range encrypted voice and data communications between the president’s aircraft and land-based stations. The Tu-214SR has a range of almost 5,370 nautical miles.
VOTE WRANGLING: House Democratic leaders will be looking for a way this week to win over opposition to the Senate version of the fiscal 2009 supplemental war spending bill. Legislative leaders called off a planned conference last week to hammer out differences between the two bills because they don’t think they have the votes yet to overcome Republican opposition to the Senate version, which adds $5 billion for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF provision is supported by President Barack Obama. The Senate passed its nearly $100 billion version May 21.
Capitol Hill researchers have laid out four options for providing a presidential helicopter, ranging from tweaking the VH-71 program of record to just upgrading the legacy fleet. In its June 5 primer for U.S. lawmakers, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) attempted to take some of the heated rhetoric out of the VH-71 cancellation dispute raging between the Hill and the Pentagon by evaluating alternatives to terminating the program outright. Four options were examined by CRS:
LEG UP: While, as of June 5, BAE Systems’ Mantis medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle demonstrator had yet to have its debut flight, its main rival for any longer-term U.K. requirement was hit in the latest funding round. A British Defense Ministry official last week confirmed that Royal Air Force ambitions to bring the General Atomics Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle into the core equipment program went unfilled during the course of Planning Round (PR) 09. So far at least five Reapers are believed to have been purchased by the U.K.
BOLDEN BOW: NASA hopes that former astronaut and retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden will get his Senate confirmation hearing to become the next administrator of the space agency by the week of July 7th. Following a vote by the full Senate, “perhaps we’ll have Charlie in place to celebrate the Apollo 40th anniversary” in mid-July, says Alan Ladwig, senior advisor at NASA headquarters in Washington and a former member of the Obama administration’s NASA transition team.
More than five years after entering the small but intensely competitive aircraft training and simulation business with a niche acquisition, Rockwell Collins finally is stepping up its challenge to market leaders CAE, Thales and L-3 Communications.
SUB SEARCH: France has ordered one of its nuclear powered attack submarines to help search-and-rescue crews locate the downed Air France 447 airliner. Defense Minister Herve Morin said June 5 that one of the country’s six attack subs, which are equipped with hyper-sensitive sonar capable of detecting signals from the aircraft’s black boxes, would aid in the race against time to locate the wreck before it’s too widely dispersed and the battery power on the black boxes runs down.
WAY TO GO: As part of efforts to develop an investment plan for rotorcraft technology development, the Defense Dept. plans to ask industry for its ideas on vertical lift beyond 2020. The Pentagon may also mount design challenges in key research areas to develop concepts and help refine the technology roadmap, says James “Raleigh” Durham, who is heading up the department’s Future Vertical Lift capabilities-based assessment.
SMALL IS GOOD: Small business programs “are the only game in town when it comes to government funding of early, innovative research and development,” Aerospace Industries Association CEO Marion Blakey told Congress June 5, calling for an increase in contract award sizes and overall funding for the Small Business Innovative Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. Small firms employ 38 percent of all scientists and engineers in the U.S., she testified.
SHIFT MANAGEMENT: A report that could presage considerable changes in how London acquires defense equipment is expected to be made public in the next month or shortly thereafter. The work is being led by Bernard Gray, a former special adviser to the U.K. Defense Ministry. John Hutton, departing secretary of state for defense, says: “I have to be satisfied that the current program of change is sufficient to meet the challenges of the new combat environment that we now face.” Hutton adds: “Bernard Gray has conducted a thorough and wide-ranging analysis.
HYPERSPECTRAL EYE: Raytheon’s hyperspectral imaging sensor, known as ARTEMIS, will spend the next year sending data back from the TacSat-3 spacecraft. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) confirmed June 3 that ARTEMIS had been activated and is fully functional following last month’s launch. The TacSat-3 mission will test the payload’s ability to deliver tactical surveillance information from space to military field commanders within 10 minutes of data acquisition.
DATA DUMP: With cost per flying hour a major issue for the V-22 tiltrotor, program manager Marine Corps Col. Mathew Mulhern says he’s going to come down hard on those vendors not sharing the data required to develop component repairs. A major driver of costs is the level of repair, he says, with the program having to pay full replacement price because it does not have a depot capability to develop repairs for parts. Mulhern expects a 20 percent reduction in cost per hour “within about a year.”
PARIS — France will consider leasing or buying Lockheed Martin C-130J air transports as part of a plan to meet urgent airlift requirements until it receives its first A400M transports, or in the event the program is terminated.
MORE BANDWIDTH: General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies will provide additional satellite communications earth terminals and support services for Increment One of the U.S. Army’s Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) program under a new $119 million contract modification. Under the contract, the company will provide 293 Satellite Transportable Terminals (STT), 6 Unit Hub SATCOM trucks (UHST) and 534 Ka-band upgrade kits and spares. The delivery order was made through exercised options on an existing World Wide Satellite Systems (WWSS) delivery order.
UAV STUDY: The European Space Agency (ESA) and European Defense Agency will pursue joint studies on the use of satellite data links in the operation of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), particularly regarding the use of civil airspace, with a view to launching a demonstration mission in 2010-11. ESA’s planned European Data Relay System is expected to provide data link services for a wide range of uses, including UAS applications.
NEW YORK — Defunct microsatellites pose a growing space debris risk and must be better tracked in orbit, according to Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary of the U.S. Air Force for space. “Some people call these microsats,” Payton said during the Space Foundation’s Space Business Forum here June 4. “Ten years after their launch, they become space debris. They become potential ASATs. We need to keep track of these smaller and smaller spacecraft.”
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Jun. 8 - 10 — Navy Opportunity Forum 2009, “Transitioning Technology to the Fleet,” Hyatt Regency, Crystal City, Crystal City, Va. For more information go to www.navyopportunityforum.com
BOOST PHASE: Technological progress demonstrated by the fielding of high-altitude, large-payload unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is revitalizing the concept of Boost Phase Intercept (BPI) — the tactic of striking enemy ballistic missiles within the first minute or so after launch. With the Pentagon budgeting for more unmanned airborne weapon systems, advocates of the UAV/BPI combination are rallying support for another effort, perhaps built around versions of Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk or larger versions of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Predator.
Top U.S. military officials are increasingly downplaying the pre-eminence of new technology development in the future of U.S. capabilities, in contrast to the previous presidential administration’s spotlight on the issue.
NEW YORK — Space tourist Richard Garriott believes an “inflection point” is coming in which the cost of access to space will drop low enough to reveal a variety of viable new commercial space ventures beyond just tourism or communications. An entrepreneur who made his fortune in the computer game industry, Garriott took his first trip to space last October, flying on a Russian Soyuz vehicle to the International Space Station and spending 12 days in orbit.
