The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office has three more intelligence spacecraft to orbit in the next four months, following Tuesday’s launch of its classified NROL-25 payload — probably an imaging reconnaissance satellite — from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. Liftoff of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta IV Medium-plus 5.2 rocket from Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex-6 came at 7:12 EDT, and the NRO termed the launch “successful.” Launches from the California military site go into polar orbit for global overhead coverage.

HOUSTON — Boeing’s candidate in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) initiative, the CST-100 capsule, completed the first in a series of parachute drop tests this week at the Delmar Dry Lake Bed near Alamo, Nev. A second test is planned for later this month, and will incorporate the landing system drogue chute for the first time, demonstrating the full anticipated parachute system sequence.

COST GROWTH: Procurement cost growth in the portfolio of nearly 100 weapons programs analyzed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in its recently released assessment amounts to nearly $61 billion; half of that is from quantity changes. There were 59 programs with no quantity change; 22 increased and 14 decreased. Four programs are new to the 2011 portfolio: Apache Block IIIB New Build; HC/MC-130 Recap; KC-130J and Small Diameter Bomb II (Aerospace DAILY, March 30, April 3).

Now armed with additional information, the Obama administration and Congress are revisiting whether LightSquared should be able to build its 4G broadband communications network.

SUPERCOMPUTING: Rice University, partnered with IBM, is looking to a May start-up for a P-series Blue Gene supercomputer for collaborative research in the engineering disciplines, including aerospace, astronomy, particle physics, climate modeling, geophysics and medicine. “We are open to collaborations with government, industry and academia,” says Jade Boyd, a Rice spokesperson.

Flight control teams in Moscow and Toulouse combed through International Space Station electrical data on April 2 in a bid to pinpoint the cause of a Russian power system failure that nearly prompted a premature jettison of the European Space Agency’s recently docked Automated Transfer Vehicle-3.

SWEDISH SCANDAL: Swedish Defense Minister Sten Tolgfors has resigned over a Defense Research Agency program to build a weapons plant in Saudi Arabia. The secrecy of the deal has been highly controversial in Sweden since the effort became known.

APOLLO 11 SALVAGE: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos may try to recover one or more of the F-1 rocket engines that powered Apollo 11 on its historic mission to the Moon in 1969. The engines were located with advanced sonar 14,000 ft. down in the Atlantic, where they fell with the Saturn V first stage that they powered, and Bezos hopes to raise them for restoration and display in a museum.