TAXING ISSUE: The U.S. aerospace and defense industry might have succeeded last year in helping to persuade Washington to reverse a looming tax withholding requirement on federal contractors, but two senators are not letting the original issue go away silently. Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), senior members of their chamber’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, are publicly pressing the Pentagon to explain what it is doing to help the government gain $4.5 million in unpaid taxes from one U.S.
Boeing's Wideband Global Satcom began merely as a gapfiller project to provide communications for the U.S. military, but 11 years later the WGS satellites have become the backbone for shuttling the Pentagon's wideband data. And at a time when the Pentagon is planning to cut $487 billion over 10 years, WGS is being hailed as an example of an efficient satellite procurement.
China's new medium space launcher, the Long March 7, should fly late next year, entering service in an initial version capable of lifting 13.5 metric tons (30,000 lb.) to low Earth orbit, making it significantly larger than current Chinese rockets. The launcher will have four boosters, says Shen Lin, the principal engineer at manufacturer CALT, adding that China is also planning new upper stages.
Planetary scientists in the U.S. and Europe are smarting from a $226.2 million cut in NASA's requested funding for robotic Mars exploration. That drives the final nail in the coffin of a joint Mars effort with the European Space Agency and obscures the future of Mars exploration in general.
The promise that high-bandwidth satellites can bring fast, cheap Internet to the masses will be put to the test in 2012 as a new generation of Ka-band spacecraft enters service in the U.S. and Europe, with plans to expand into Russia, Australia and Latin America.
U.S. space-policy leaders remain divided over NASA's direction as President Barack Obama's first term winds down, with another slugfest between the White House and Congress over the agency's fiscal 2013 budget request likely this year.
Satellite operators see hopeful signs that their spacecraft eventually will play host to payloads supplied by cash-strapped governments trying to save a buck in today's tight budget environment, but so far concrete new deals have yet to materialize. In July 2011 Lt. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, head of the USAF Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), set up a dedicated hosted-payload office (HPO) to look for military space missions that could take advantage of piggyback rides on other spacecraft, and to help develop and integrate the resulting payloads.
A sigh of relief swept the room last month at the European Space Agency's headquarters in Paris as top ESA and industry officials watched the signing of the 19-nation organization's largest and possibly most politically charged satellite contract.
The House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA funding has rejected the agency’s request to begin shutting down its cooperative Mars-exploration effort with the European Space Agency, until the issue can be debated thoroughly. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), the subcommittee chairman, rejected a fiscal 2012 reprogramming request that would have shifted funds immediately to accommodate the Mars-program downsizing set up in the fiscal 2013 budget request.
PARIS — Iridium CEO Matt Desch says his company will announce an agreement by June with global air traffic monitoring authorities to place automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) terminals on its Iridium Next second-generation satellite constellation, which is scheduled to be fully operational by 2017.
The FCC is extending the comment period until March 16 on a recent notice that LightSquared had not met the conditions set by the agency to begin operational deployment of a high-powered terrestrial 4G voice and data network in the L band. Citing concerns that the network would pose aviation safety risks by interfering with GPS units, the FCC last month indefinitely suspended LightSquared’s conditional waiver to operate the network in bands adjacent to those used by GPS (Aerospace DAILY, Feb. 16).
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden ran into a Capitol Hill buzz saw Wednesday regarding agency plans to cut funding for its internal development of the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion crew capsule, while adding more financial resources to support development of commercial crew transport vehicles.
LOS ANGELES — Boeing’s ongoing efforts to revive the fortunes of its commercial space business received another boost with confirmation of an agreement with mobile satellite service Artel to distribute Inmarsat-3, -4 and -5 bandwidth to potential U.S. government users. The deal, signed between Boeing Commercial Satellite Services and Artel, is initially focused on providing Ka-bandwidth on Inmarsat-3 and -4 satellites. Inmarsat-5 global satellite communications will be available in late 2013, the manufacturer says.
ATV LAUNCH: The European Space Agency (ESA) has set March 23 as the rescheduled date for the launch of the third Automated Transfer Vehicle, Edoardo Amaldi, on a five-month supply mission to the International Space Station. The liftoff from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, atop an Ariane 5 is scheduled for 12:31 a.m. EDT (4:31 GMT). Preparations leading to a March 9 liftoff were postponed on March 2.
XIAN, China — China would develop two large new engines, including one sized for a Moon rocket, under an apparently official plan set out by senior engineers associated with the country’s space propulsion industry. The proposed program would include re-engining the Long March 5 heavy launcher, which is still under development.
XIAN, China — Japan’s space program will employ a new idle-thrust engine mode as a standard method of safely deorbiting second stages in missions of the H-IIB launcher, following a successful first mission last year.
XIAN, China — China’s new medium-heavy space launcher, the Long March 7, should fly late next year, entering service in an initial version capable of lifting 13.5 metric tons (30,000 lb.) to low orbit, making it significantly larger than current Chinese rockets. The Long March 7 will have four boosters, says the principal engineer of manufacturer CALT, Shen Lin, adding that China is also planning new upper stages and launch vehicles, some using solid propellants and others fueled with methane.
NASA is missing opportunities to transfer key technologies from its substantial research and development investments to the commercial sector, academia and other government agencies, according to an inspector general’s audit of the agency’s Space Technology Program.
HOUSTON — Texas A&M University is leading a collaboration on a novel “soft-push” technique for diverting hazardous Near Earth Asteroids that is gathering maturity for a future orbital flight test. NASA’s Ames Research Center and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia are collaborating with Texas A&M Aerospace Engineering Professor David Hyland, as he and his students seek a flight test opportunity as a secondary payload.
ATHENA PAD: Lockheed Martin has picked Alaska’s Kodiak Launch Complex as its dedicated West Coast site for Athena rocket launches. The company has been working with the state of Alaska and Alaska Aerospace Corporation on expansion plans for the new medium–lift launch pad to support potential Athena III launches. The company says it is “positioned to expand the Athena II program as it continues to evaluate the business case for Athena III launches from Alaska.” Lockheed Martin and partner ATK announced the resurrection of the Athena line in 2010.
Controllers are checking out the U.S. Navy's first Mobile User Objective System (MUOS-1) military communications spacecraft after its launch on an Atlas V, but it will be at least next year before troops can use its high-capacity new Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) payload for communications in motion.
In the 1990s the Pentagon was spending a lot of missile defense money on technology that could link its missile-launch warning sensors to “cue” the missile-intercept weapons it was developing. At the same time, astronomers worldwide were using the Internet and an instrument on NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to cue their ground-based telescopes to gamma ray bursts virtually anywhere in the universe.
NASA will try to use its advanced technology programs to mollify planetary scientists outraged over the shutdown of the agency's ambitious plans to explore Mars in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). That may help restore some calm, as long as the capabilities developed as part of NASA's new open-ended technology push advance scientists' stated need to examine Mars samples in laboratories on Earth. So far, it is not clear that the work that is just getting started will be able to do that.
