The U.S. Navy is postponing the commissioning of the Virginia-class attack submarine SSN-784 North Dakota to an undetermined future date, the service said April 16. The decision “is based on the need for additional design and certification work required on the submarine’s redesigned bow and material issues with vendor-assembled and delivered components,” the service said.
NASA plans to work with Canada and Germany on joint flight tests to study the atmospheric effects of emissions from aircraft burning alternative fuels. The research is a follow-on to flights conducted in 2013 to measure emissions from biofuel blends. The latest series of flights is set to begin May 7 under NASA’s Alternative Fuel Effects on Contrails and Emissions (Access-II) program. The agency’s McDonnell Douglas DC-8 will burn different mixes of fuels while other aircraft make inflight measurements.
The U.S. Navy needs to be particularly protective of its communications networks in the current cyber climate, says Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox. “This isn’t unique to the Navy, but it’s particularly relevant to operating at sea,” Fox said during a speech earlier this month at the Navy War College in Newport, R.I.
TAMPA, Fla. — Light detection and ranging (lidar), one of the latest sensor technologies to get a boost thanks to the Afghanistan war, could make its way to space. Lidar could follow in the footsteps of wide-area motion imagery, full-motion video and hyperspectral technologies that have also garnered interest and funding due to their ability to be tested and prove their value in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While early program decisions to combine a host of technology improvements in one ship still haunt the next-generation aircraft carrier CVN-78 Gerald R. Ford, the U.S. Navy appears to be making strides with the program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
The U.S. Defense Department is highlighting “damaging cuts to military forces, modernization, and readiness that will be required if defense budgets are held at sequester-levels in the years beyond fiscal 2015.” A new report from the department about the effects of sequester-level budgets over the fiscal 2015 future years defense plan (or FYDP, covering fiscal 2015-2019) says the automatic budget cuts would result in continued force-level reductions across the military services. (See charts pp. 7-9.)
HOUSTON — Kepler-186f, a recent discovery from NASA’s five-year-old Kepler mission, a rocky world 500 light years away, is the first validated, Earth-sized planet detected within the habitable zone of a star beyond the Solar System, an international team of astronomers announced April 17.
Much of the $4.5 billion in F-35 procurement cost increases in the past year — part of a $7.8 billion total program increase — to the U.S. portion of the program are due to overly rosy projections on the anticipated decline in the “cost curve,” or price to build the stealthy fighter, says U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, F-35 program executive officer.
HOUSTON — NASA astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson will be prepared for a 2-3 hr. spacewalk to replace a failed backup computer control box outside the International Space Station (ISS) as soon as April 20, ISS mission managers announced April 16.
A new Pacific Dry-Dock and Integrated Maintenance (Pacdim) Ship Repair Facility on U.S. Naval Base Guam (NBG) opened earlier this month to make sure ships and other assets in the region are better maintained and mission-ready. One of the Navy’s recent principal objectives for the region is to sustain viable ship repair operations on the island.
UAV makers can still find good returns in the international marketplace due to higher prices for the aircraft, but the record production numbers seen during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will slacken off now that the U.S. is diverting its resources elsewhere, consultancy Forecast International says.
NEW DELHI — The naval variant of India’s Light Combat Aircraft (LCA-Navy) went supersonic recently, reaching a speed of Mach 1.1. “It a great achievement, since the aircraft was plagued with several problems in-between,” says an official at the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), the nodal agency for the development of the LCA.
KOBE, Japan — A testbed studying software defined radio (SDR) on the International Space Station (ISS) also could be used to validate space-to-space power transmission, a technology that might enable the near-term use of unloaded station cargo vehicles as free-flying, low-acceleration laboratories for experiments too delicate to subject to the relatively rough station environment.
LONDON — Lockheed Martin and fficials from the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.K. defense ministry (MoD) are putting the finishing touches on plans for the F-35’s international debut in the U.K. this summer.
TAMPA, Fla. — Paris-based Airbus Defense and Space is hoping to further eat into DigitalGlobe’s domination of the U.S. market for commercial satellite imagery with a new product called WorldDEM. In 2013, Airbus Defense and Space—then known as EADS Astrium—claimed about 3% of the market; that rose to nearly 15% last year.
NEW DELHI — India’s Mars orbiter spacecraft, launched last year, has traveled more than 340 million km (211 million mi.) and crossed the halfway point on its journey to the red planet, according to the country’s space agency.
