LONDON - The British parliament on Feb. 14 delivered a generally positive progress report on the government's Defense Industrial Strategy, but with critical caveats, including issues with a new-generation aircraft carrier and the Joint Strike Fighter. The House of Commons Defense Committee report is broadly positive on making headway in DIS implementation. But it expresses concern about the lack of progress on restructuring the country's surface ship manufacturing sector and how that affects the aircraft carrier program.
Responding to congressional questions about the Air Force supplemental request for three F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as replacements for F-16s lost in military operations, Maj. Gen. Frank Faykes, Air Force budget director, said the proposal is technically proper and operationally desirable. "The request met all the DOD requirements for a supplemental," Faykes said Feb. 15 during a break in the Defense Technology & Requirements Conference 2007 in Washington.
The final NASA fiscal 2007 spending bill passed by the U.S. Senate Feb. 14 shifts $460 million in space shuttle and earmark funding over to exploration, which Sen. Barbara Mikulski thinks should be enough to keep the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares I rocket programs on schedule. The continuing budget resolution essentially freezes FY '07 spending at FY '06 levels, which for NASA amounts to a $544 million cut to the agency's topline request. This led to concern that the Orion and Ares might miss their scheduled 2014 debut.
U.S. Marine Corps aviation leaders still want their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as soon as possible, but they acknowledge aircraft buys need to be slipped because the Navy requires later model F/A-18 Super Hornets for current conflicts, said Marine Brig. Gen. Robert Walsh, assistant deputy commandant for aviation.
The Homeland Security Department's Secure Border Initiative network's (SBInet) December 2006 spending plan is a high-level and partial outline of a large, complex and multiyear initiative, and it lacks "explicit and measurable commitments" over capabilities, schedule, costs and benefits associated with individual program elements, congressional auditors have concluded.
THE HAGUE - Italian-based Galileo Avionica, a Finmeccanica company, has won a contract worth 20 million euros ($25.8 million) to provide the Surveillance Information Management (SIM) system within Australia's Coastwatch program for the aerial surveillance of maritime areas surrounding Australia.
BANGALORE, India - Competitors for India's potential bumper fighter purchases are struggling to straighten out political and procurement snags prior to the eventual release of a request for proposals.
Prompted by China's recent demonstrations of its capability to attack orbiting satellites, the Defense Department is stepping up its space protection efforts, said John Young, Pentagon director of defense research and engineering.
NMT AWARD: The U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command should downselect the Navy Multiband Terminal (NMT) satellite communication system contract to a single winner in the third quarter of this fiscal year, contender Raytheon Co. said Feb. 15. NMT is designed as a system of submarine, shore-based and shipboard communications terminals for the satellite communications component of the Navy's FORCEnet concept.
Recently downed helicopters in Iraq were flying at low altitude, and a move to the V-22 Osprey could reduce that risk, said U.S. Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Robert Walsh, assistant deputy commandant for aviation. "All of the shootdowns have occurred at low altitude," Walsh said Feb. 14 during the Defense Technology & Requirements Conference 2007 in Washington. "All of them." The Osprey's flight and maneuvering capabilities will keep it at a higher altitude in dangerous areas, he said. "This airplane will get people up."
Crews rolled the space shuttle Atlantis to Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center Feb. 15 in preparation for next month's launch to the International Space Station.
Three U.S. Air Force F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs) and a brigade of U.S. Army Stryker vehicles will likely be cut from proposed Pentagon supplemental budget requests for fiscal 2007 and 2008, said U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii). The aircraft and vehicles are not emergency procurement items and have no place in the supplementals, Abercrombie said Feb. 14 during Aviation Week's Defense Technology & Requirements Conference 2007 in Washington.
Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company, which grew out of in-house research into Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) technology conducted at Johnson Space Center by seven-time shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, expects to begin operating a 200-kilowatt "flight-like" VASIMR engine prototype in ground test by the end of the year.
China has come in for some "very specific" criticism over its Jan. 11 test of an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon against a target in space from representatives of several spacefaring nations that have worked with Chinese experts for the past two years to develop U.N. guidelines for controlling space debris.
IRAQ EQUIPMENT: The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate tried to ramp up pressure Feb. 14 on the Bush administration to further equip U.S. troops for Iraq operations. "As Iraqi leaders bicker, the violence in Iraq continues to inflict casualties on our troops at unacceptably high rates," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a letter to the White House.
IT OUTSOURCING: The U.S. government's outsourcing of information technology (IT) work will increase nearly 6 percent annually, reaching $18 billion by 2011, according to a new forecast. The report by Input, an IT market research firm in Reston, Va., finds that as federal agencies move to shift more core IT activities to the private sector, they're moving away from mega-contracts and breaking up work into smaller pieces that can be outsourced without a lot of red tape.
Researchers using notional six-dimensional geometries predicted by string theory to map energy distribution in the infant Universe hope Europe's upcoming Planck background energy mapper will give them some real data to work with.
The U.S. Army is eyeing about $52 billion in additional spending requests outside the budget plan it submitted this month for the next several years, including around $10 billion in unfunded priorities starting next fiscal year, the service's outgoing chief of staff told lawmakers Feb. 14.
COST CONCERNS: Cost growth concerns about the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) vertical lift-off and landing variant played into the U.S. Navy's decision to delay F-35 buys, Rear Adm. Stanley Bozin said Feb. 14 at Aviation Week's Defense Technology & Requirement Conference 2007 in Washington. "The primary reduction is on the cost side," Bozin said. Before, Navy officials said the JSF-buy delays mainly were due to service budget restraints. The Navy cut its proposed fiscal 2008 JSF buy to six from eight, and halved its propose FY '09 buy, bringing it down to 18.
TWO HATS: Alan Stern, NASA's newly named associate administrator for science, will continue as principal investigator (PI) on the New Horizons Pluto flyby mission that he shepherd to the launch pad in the face of opposition from former NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. But he will stand down as PI on a mission to study the upper atmosphere of Mars that is in competition for funding as a Mars Scout spacecraft by the end of this year, NASA says.
The U.S. Navy is once again reconsidering the mix they will buy of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs), F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and unmanned combat aircraft to carry them into the world beyond 2030. From the beginning of the JSF program, it was planned by both the U.S. Air Force and Navy that the F-35, late in its production life, would compete with an unmanned aircraft for funding. But with JSF numbers and production slipping in defense budget planning, that competition is ever more likely.
