APPROVAL: The U.S. Department of Defense has approved the participation of all military services in the May 10-16, 2004, Berlin Airshow, the show said Jan. 23. European and international attendees will see "displays of new technology that would not be possible without DOD interest," show officials said.
Raytheon Co. will provide five Ship Self Defense Systems (SSDS) Mk 2 tactical ship sets under a $26 million contract from the Naval Sea Systems Command, the company said last week. The SSDS systems are being installed on all amphibious transport LPD-17 class warships, all amphibious assault LHD class warships and all CV/CVN aircraft carriers, including the Navy's newest carrier, the George H.W. Bush (CVN-77). Additional systems
ACQUISITION NOMINATION: President Bush says he plans to nominate Navy acquisition chief John Young to be the No. 2 acquisition official for the entire Defense Department. Young would succeed Michael Wynne, whose nomination to be the Pentagon's acquisition chief is pending before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
NASA TOPLINE: NASA's topline budget request for fiscal year 2005 will be approximately $16.2 billion, according to Administrator Sean O'Keefe, which represents a 5.6 percent increase over the agency's FY '04 budget request of $15.4 billion. To help NASA fulfill the president's new vision for space exploration, the agency will receive roughly $1 billion in new funding over the next five years, and must reprogram $11 billion in existing programs (DAILY, Jan. 15).
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) has asked NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe to reconsider his decision to cancel servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope, and is requesting that he appoint an independent panel to review the issue. In a Jan. 21 letter to O'Keefe, Mikulski, the ranking member of the Senate subcommittee on VA/HUD and Independent Agencies, also asked that all preparation and training activities associated with the servicing mission be continued until Congress has reviewed the situation and made a decision.
NASA has postponed its plan to establish an International Space Station Research Institute (ISSRI) in the wake of President Bush's new space exploration plan, which targets missions to the moon and Mars. "A refocused research effort for the International Space Station will be to better understand and overcome the effects of human space flight on astronaut health, increasing the safety of future space missions," NASA said in a Jan. 22 statement.
TRAINERS: A CAE-Thales Training & Simulation team has been selected as the preferred bidder to provide a range of NH90 helicopter training systems throughout Europe to NHIndustries (NHI). Contract negotiations are underway and should be completed this year, and the work is expected to be worth about 400 million euros ($520 million), CAE said.
TRAINER: Environmental Tectonics Corp. will provide its GYRO Integrated Physiological Trainer, Generation II flight simulator to the U.S. Air Force under a $1 million contract, the company said Jan. 22. The Air Force Research Laboratory will use the simulator for research into ways of combating pilot fatigue.
NASA FUNDING: The Senate Jan. 22 approved the fiscal 2004 omnibus conference report, which contains several appropriations measures, including the one that funds NASA. The legislation, which the House approved in December (DAILY, Dec. 9, 2003), now heads to President Bush for his expected approval. The conference report fully funds the Bush Administration's $3.97 billion request for the space shuttle but trims $200 million from the $1.7 billion request for the International Space Station.
Lockheed Martin has chosen its missile production facility in Troy, Ala., as the site where it would build Joint Common Missile (JCM) if the company wins the prime contract for the program. The Troy facility produces the Longbow, Hellfire, and Javelin missiles, according to Rick Edwards, director of tactical missiles for Lockheed Martin.
Raytheon Co. will supply turnkey air traffic management (ATM) systems for airports in Iraq under a $10.5 million contract, expanding its air traffic management systems presence in the Middle East. The contract includes equipment options worth up to $38.9 million, the company said. Other customers in the region include United Arab Emirates, Oman, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.
The next test of the Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system has been scheduled for Jan. 26, according to an MDA spokesman.
SPACEDEV of Poway, Calif., has been awarded a study contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to explore new approaches for deploying a constellation of small communications satellites with a single or few launches, the company said. The project is a "great follow-on" for a company project "that is designing a cluster of three formation-flying small satellites for national missile defense," SpaceDev CEO Jim Benson said in a statement.
TCM: The Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin and Boeing contracts worth approximately $472 million each to begin the risk reduction and system definition phase of the Transformational Communications MILSATCOM (TCM) space segment (DAILY, Jan. 20). The space segment will consist of four or more geosynchronous and three polar-orbiting satellites.
Arianespace plans to launch the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet rendezvous spacecraft on Feb. 26, the company said this week. Arianespace began launch preparations in Kourou, French Guiana on Jan. 19 and plans to roll the Ariane 5 launch vehicle to the launch paid on Feb. 24. Rosetta was to have launched early last year to visit Comet Wirtanen, but the failure of Arianespace's heavier-lift Ariane 5 forced ESA to delay the launch and find a new target. Rosetta now is to visit Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014 (DAILY, June 2, 2003).
A U.S. Air Force study conducted on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has concluded that a commercial airliner would not be adequately protected if it were equipped with "aimpoint bias" technology that steered a shoulder-fired missile to a less vulnerable part of the airplane, according to Air Force researchers.
EURENCO: France's Group SNPE and SNPE Materiaux Energetiques (SME), Sweden's Saab and Finland's Patria have completed the merger of their explosives and propellants operations into a new company, European Energetics Corp., or Eurenco. SME and Group SNPE will own 60.2 percent of the company and Patria and Saab each will own 19.9 percent, Group SNPE said Jan. 22.
NASA is investigating a "serious anomaly" with the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) "Spirit" that has left it unable to send data back to Earth and apparently put it into a preprogrammed "fault mode," the space agency said Jan. 22. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., discovered the problem on the morning of Jan. 21 after sending a series of commands to the rover, which was poised to begin examining a rock near its landing site at Gusev Crater.
The United Kingdom plans to spend 4 million pounds ($7.2 million) on the new Missile Defense Center in the first year of its operation, 1 million pounds ($1.8 million) less than the government had indicated it would spend.
The Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor and the Defense Department's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could have trouble sticking to their testing schedules, according to a new report by the office of the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E). The F/A-22 is slated to begin initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) in March, but that may not give the Air Force enough time to fix any problems that arise in the preceding test phase, the report says.
