Bolstering its tactical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) portfolio, Saab is entering what it describes as a strategic agreement with rotary specialist Swiss UAV. Saab will add Swiss UAV’s Neo and Koax rotary UAV projects to its larger Skeldar rotary development program as the Swedish company looks to build its product offerings. Swiss UAV is a comparatively small privately held company.
EMBOLDENED: President Barack Obama met with former astronaut Charles Bolden at the White House May 18 to discuss Bolden’s possible nomination to be the next administrator of NASA. A former major general in the U.S. Marine Corps, Bolden is a veteran of four space shuttle flights, including the 1990 flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as two missions as commander. Bolden flew more than 100 sorties into North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the A-6A Intruder in 1972-1973.
REALITY CHECK: Don’t look for the White House panel reviewing NASA’s human spaceflight plans to be a rubber stamp for the agency’s Constellation Program and its Ares moon-Mars rockets — based on the shuttle’s solid-rocket boosters — and Orion crew exploration vehicle. Some space policy wonks detect wishful thinking within NASA that the panel, chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, will be a mere reality check on existing plans and not consider other options.
AIR FORCE The Air Force is awarding a cost plus fixed fee contract to Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., of Herndon, Va., for $11,541,898. The contract action will provide surface warfare mission development research and analysis to commander, Surface Warfare Development Group. At this time, $55,556 has been obligated. 55 CONS/LGCD, Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., is the contracting activity (SP0700-03-D-1380).
PARIS — The French defense procurement agency (DGA) has formally accepted the Spirale space-based launch warning satellite demonstrator. The two EADS Astrium-built Spirale spacecraft were launched Feb. 12 on an Ariane 5. Since then, the sensors have taken 300,000 images in various infrared bands as part of the system checkout phase. Spirale is designed to validate technology for a future missile launch warning constellation. It also will gather infrared data to properly develop missile detection software for the future system.
As the Defense Department increases the size of both the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, the Pentagon is going to have to find a way to control health care and other personnel costs for all those troops while dealing with a shrinking defense budget, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says. Adm. Michael Mullen said the Pentagon wasn’t far enough into its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) to determine if money will have to be shifted from weapons programs to catch up to rising personnel costs.
Moscow has finally decided to buy an upgraded variant of the Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker, the Su-35/Su-27SM2, as an interim until the fifth-generation fighter enters service. The decision was confirmed by Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, during a visit to Sukhoi assembly facilities in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Putin was shown a Su-35 prototype — as well as the Sukhoi T-50 prototype to meet the air force’s next-generation fighter program, known as PAK FA.
NEW DELHI — A large number of Indian Hawk-132 trainers have completed air-to-ground armament training, dropping practice bombs at Jamnagar Air Force Station in the western state of Gujarat. Following a month of training, the advanced jet trainers (AJTs) have returned to their operating base air force station in Bidar in Karnataka, South India. The training was successful and the aircraft performed well, according to officials.
PRESIDENTIAL GROUNDING: The May 15 stop-work order on the VH-71 presidential helicopter program cuts prime contractor Lockheed Martin’s annual revenues by about $400 million, but does not necessarily change Wall Street’s 2009 and 2010 earnings-per-share estimates, according to financial analysts at Jefferies & Co. U.S. Naval Air Systems Command directed Lockheed’s team in Owego, N.Y., to stop work on nearly all activities associated with VH-71 systems design and demonstration.
The fate of Lockheed Martin’s long-troubled Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) could be determined with a series of flight-tests set for this summer. “If the next round of missiles do not perform well, then it will not be positive for the program,” David Van Buren, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force, told reporters during a roundtable May 15.
SEATTLE — Boeing kicked off static tests on the P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft May 14, and says it is close to catching up on its original program schedule, which was delayed two months by last year’s production-line strike. “By this fall we will have totally recovered from last year’s IAM [International Association of Machinists] strike,” P-8A Vice President Bob Feldmann says.
PARIS — A major upgrade of the French navy’s Panther helicopters has begun flight-testing with the goal of starting operational trials next year. The effort should lead to the upgrade of 16 Panthers used aboard French navy frigates through 2014.
Singapore Technologies Aerospace has improved its technology portfolio with the S$7.65 million ($5.2 million) purchase of Precision Products Singapore (PPS). PPS was owned by Nippon Precision Casting, Renaissance Capital Management and Singapore Technologies Industrial Corp. and reported S$15.6 million in 2008 revenues. After tax profits came to S$2.8 million.
SEATTLE — Boeing’s 737-based airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft has received its supplemental-type certification (STC) from FAA, marking the first time one of the company’s larger battle management platforms has received this commercial approval rating.
MESA, Ariz. — Boeing is preparing to test the Lockheed Martin DAGR laser-guided smart rocket off its AH-6 helicopter over the next few days as part of efforts to bolster the vehicle’s international and domestic sales potential. DAGR has been already fired off an AH-64 Apache, and is being offered as a simple drop-in replacement for the Hellfire. Boeing also is completing integration of the Wescam MX-15DI electro-optic system and is expanding the AH-6’s operational flexibility by offering different fuel systems featuring internal or external fuel tanks.
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston — Astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis are taking a small amount of time from their work servicing the Hubble Space Telescope to tend a commercial drug experiment aimed at finding a vaccine against a deadly staph infection that plagues hospital patients. The astronauts essentially have to turn a crank in one of the middeck lockers twice during the mission — once to mix liquids in test tubes inside a triple-redundant containment cylinder to start the experiment, and once to inject a fixative to halt the experiment.
ARMY DRS Sustainment Systems Inc. (DRS SSI) St. Louis, Mo., was awarded on May 8, 2009, a $ 22,972,589 STS cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the base award of 232,000 hours of system technical support for the M1200 Knight vehicle system for FY ’09/FY ’10, with an option for an additional 48,000 hours. The work is to be performed in St. Louis, with an estimated completion date of March 31, 2011. One bid was solicited with one bid received. U.S.A. TACOM LCMC-Warren, AMSCC-TAC-AHLC, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-09-C-0398).
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston — The crew of the space shuttle Atlantis completed all of its work on the Hubble Space Telescope May 18, plus a bonus task, in the fifth and final extravehicular activity (EVA) of the last servicing mission to the orbiting observatory. Spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel replaced the No. 2 fine guidance sensor and a second three-battery power module, and managed to upgrade about twice as much of the 19-year-old spacecraft’s thermal protection as was planned at the beginning of the spacewalk.
