Lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee handed NASA a $223 million increase in its $19.5 billion spending bill for fiscal 2017 Tuesday, generously funding NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion deep-space exploration vehicles.
The transformative CubeSat platform has yet to reach its full space science potential, a goal that can be best achieved through thoughtful oversight at the national level, according to a two-year, multidisciplinary assessment from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
European launch consortium Arianespace successfully lifted two Galileo satellites atop a Soyuz rocket May 24 from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, marking another milestone in Europe’s effort to create an autonomous positioning, navigation and timing constellation.
The search may have begun for its replacement, but Textron Systems’ RQ-7 Shadow is set to be the U.S. Army’s primary tactical unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for another 20 years.
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (Plaaf) is catching up quickly with Western forces, the Pentagon says in its latest annual report on the Chinese military.
With the U.S. Navy awarding Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) a $152 million contract for advance planning for the construction of the aircraft carrier CVN 80 Enterprise, the company is gearing up to design the ship in a whole new way.
Optimized for U.S. Marine Corps aviation, the amphibious assault ship LHA 6 USS America regained its flight-deck recertification for launching and recovering aircraft earlier this month off the coast of its San Diego homeport, moving one step closer to joining operations with Amphibious Squadron 3 and Expeditionary Strike Group 3.
Garnering an investment from the Canadian Federal Government is a “complex” proposition and Bombardier is “working” on it, although timing is uncertain, according to CEO and president Alain Bellemare.
On May 20 the U.S. Navy accepted delivery of the future DDG 1000 USS Zumwalt, the lead ship of the Navy’s next-generation of multi-mission destroyers. Zumwalt Program Manager Capt. James Downey calls the DDG 1000 “the most technically complex and advanced warship the world has ever seen.” The 610-ft., wave-piercing tumblehome ship supports a deckhouse that reduces radar cross section. The ship is the first Navy surface combatant to employ an Integrated Power System distributing 1000 volts of direct current across the ship to allocate 78 megawatts of installed power.
NASA is likely to enter an agreement with China late this summer aimed at collaborating on improvements to the Asian nation’s air traffic control (ATC) system.
A pair of Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters have completed the first-ever eastbound transatlantic crossing by the new fighter.
India has successfully launched the first test model of its indigenously developed Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), aimed at reducing the cost of future space missions.
With the U.S. Navy using its F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets more rigorously than initially expected, Boeing has started preliminary assessments of what is needed to overhaul the aircraft, increase its combat life and keep it relevant much later into this century.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, newly arrived at its Florida launch site, faces a round of end-of-the-month ground tests at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a planned Sept. 8 liftoff on the nation’s first attempt to retrieve a sample from an asteroid and return the material to Earth.
The Tether Eye is designed to act as a virtual observation tower to provide 24-hr.-a-day surveillance for security at strategic infrastructure or forward bases.
Best known for its prowess at finding and characterizing hundreds of extrasolar planets, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is offering new insight into possible processes that enabled early Earth to generate the chemistry and climate necessary for biological activity.
The U.S. Navy could save money by shifting its missile-salvo defensive anti-air warfare (AAW) strategy away from long-range interceptors and toward medium-range surface-to-air interceptors, hypervelocity projectiles, directed energy weapons and electronic warfare systems, the CSBA says.
