Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

President Donald Trump’s bulldozer-style diplomacy regarding Qatar’s alleged financing of terror groups has left the fate of a military base, security ties and billions of dollars in weapons sales in doubt.

Chinese space engineers see navigation and landing stability among their main challenges in preparing for an historic unmanned mission to the far side of the Moon that they plan for 2018.

The order is the first step toward restarting operations on the oceangoing launch platform.

The Philippines is likely to order up to 12 more Korean Aerospace FA-50 light attack aircraft, taking the Philippine Air Force closer to its required numbers.

Northrop Grumman is getting to work on its fourth and potentially most important contract for the APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR), after securing a $244 million award from the U.S. Air Force to retrofit 72 Lockheed Martin F-16s.

The European Union has created a defense research and development fund.

The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B experimental spaceplane will return to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, the service reports.

EUROCONSULT estimates global space budgets totaled $62.2b in 2016, down 2% from previous year. Governments launched 75 satellites.

The finance ministries of Russia and Turkey are discussing the possibility of providing Ankara a loan for the purchase of S-400 missile systems.

TRAX International, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, was awarded an $111,489,021 modification (P00235) to contract W9124Q-07-C-0504.

Leonardo says it has entered exploratory discussions with the U.S. Army to investigate potential missions for its AW609 commercial tiltrotor.

Among experiments reaching the International Space Station on the first SpaceX Dragon capsule to revisit the orbiting outpost is a 3.5-kg experiment provided by the Beijing Institute of Technology that will study the effects of the in-space environment on genes.

Bell Helicopter has nudged expected certification of its Model 525 back to the end of 2018 as it awaits NTSB’s report into the fatal loss of one of the prototypes in 2016.

Lockheed Martin says hypersonic technologies are now sufficiently mature to enable progress towards a demonstrator for its Mach 6-capable follow-on to the SR-71.

Four U.S. government agencies have received $71.5 million from the Office of Management and Budget to study whether they can auction a minimum of 30 MHz of L-band spectrum used for air traffic control radar and other cross-agency purposes.

Olivier Zarrouati will leave his position at Zodiac Aerospace after serving as its CEO for the past 10 years.

China’s plan for deep-space exploration up to 2030 is close to receiving budgetary approval, a senior program official says.

Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has revealed a radically revised version of its concept for the Next-Generation Air Dominance penetrating counter air combat aircraft.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has rolled out the first of 38 Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightnings that the company is scheduled to assemble.

Lockheed Martin’s U-2 spy plane made its debut at the Northern Edge joint training exercise last month, demonstrating a new capability nicknamed the “Einstein Box.”

RAFAEL unveiled 12.7-kg. Spike LR II missile, a 5th generation Spike variant that can be fired from vehicles, helicopters, ships, and ground launchers. NORWAY’s fifth F-35 Lighgning II, AM-5, touched down for the first time May 25 at Luke Air Force Base, AZ. ELBIT SYSTEMS LTD. has $390m contract for ground electronic intelligence capabilities for undisclosed European customer.

Mitsubishi Electric said June 1 that it has finished construction of a facility at its Kamakura Works’ Sagami Factory in Sagamihara, Japan, that will double its satellite component production capacity. The new site, which sports high-precision machining equipment and automated welding machines, will be Mitsubishi Electric’s central production and testing site for solar array panels, structural panels and other satellite parts. Production starts this October.

View the Boeing: Always There To Keep You AT The Ready in PDF format. Always There To Keep You AT The Ready.

The secretary of the U.S. Air Force has stressed that the OA-X light attack initiative “is not a procurement, it’s an experiment.”

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