Britain's National Audit Office slammed Eurofighter project managers in its latest parliamentary report, blaming "cumbersome and bureaucratic" management for lengthy, continuing delays and costs ballooning by $3.5 billion over seven years-resulting in a fighter with a nearly $100 million price tag.
A Molniya-3 communications satellite was launched by Russian Space Forces from Plesetsk Aug. 9 to replenish the Molniya constellation. The four-stage Molniya-M launcher inserted the payload into a highly elliptical orbit with a perigee of 472 kilometers, an apogee of 40,851 kilometers, an inclination of 62.8 degrees and an initial period of 12 hours and 16.8 minutes. Later the orbit will be adjusted to ensure daily repetition of the satellite's ground track after every two orbits.
During this month's JASSM industry day at Eglin AFB, Fla., industry and government officials agreed that there aren't any technological risks in JASSM development, says acting JASSM product manager Oscar Soler. But several officials suggested that, for the sake of cost reduction, some technologies-especially those relevant to the weapon's all- weather requirement-be phased in by blocks. This way, DOD can take advantage of ongoing development activities that will lead to a "totally" all-weather system, Soler said.
The House Appropriations Committee approved $410.5 million in reprogramming increases that included funding boosts for the C-XX medium range aircraft ($5.5 million), the Javelin anti-tank weapons system ($5.1 million) and aircraft avionics ($5.5 million). A total of $412 million had been requested.
Look for the Earth Observing System (EOS) to be the biggest difference on NASA between House and Senate lawmakers when Congress returns from its August recess. The House has approved a $322 million cut to the agency's Mission to Planet Earth (MTPE), which includes EOS. But Senate authorizers have fully funded MTPE and EOS, and Senate appropriators, led by Maryland's Barbara Mikulski (D), are also expected to balk at the House's cut when they mark up after the recess.
The Senate on Friday completed all work on the fiscal 1996 defense appropriations bill and worked out a compromise on the national security authorization that will permit it to be enacted on Sept. 5, but only after Republicans abandoned the mandatory provisions of the Missile Defense Act of 1995.
TRW's Space&Electronics Group has developed a low noise, low distortion power amplifier chip, which is already in use internally and could be made available commercially. The chip combines high mobility electron mobility transistor (HEMT) devices, used in receivers for low noise amplification, and heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) units, used as power amplifiers for transmitters, TRW said late last month in a statement.
The planned Aug. 31 launch of NASA's X-ray Timing Explorer on a Delta rocket is on hold pending an investigation into an Aug. 5 Delta launch when a first stage strap-on booster apparently failed to separate. An investigation team is expected to deliver a final report next month. The X-ray flight date is also in limbo because McDonnell is still waiting for flight certification for an upgraded Delta avionics package it planned to debut on the mission. One scenario that hasn't been ruled out is pushing the X-ray launch behind the planned Sept.
With Allison Gas Turbine now safely acquired, parent Rolls-Royce is creating a new U.S. organization to contain it-Rolls-Royce North America, Inc., with Richard T. Turner as Chairman and John W. Sandford as President. The move "recognizes the importance of North America, particularly the U.S., to Rolls-Royce in terms of market, supplier base, partnerships and workforce," Sandford said in a prepared statement.
American Mobile Satellite Corp. (AMSC) reported that second quarter revenues ended June 30 were up 63% over the same period a year before, to $1.8 million. But the company's net losses for the quarter hit $8.3 million, up 88% from the second quarter of 1994. AMSC plans to begin voice revenue service later this year for its AMSC-1 mobile communications satellite, which will serve the continental U.S. and provide fill-in-the-gap cellular phone coverage and other voice, data and fax services.
Even though the Pentagon is making progress whittling down its huge stockpiles of spare parts and other inventory, it still keeps billions of dollars' worth of materiel on hand that isn't really needed, the General Accounting Office concluded. GAO evaluators have looked at the problem several times in recent years, and the Defense Dept.'s response has always been that the watchdog agency is ignoring certain shortages in its review. By DOD's arithmetic, its secondary inventory shortage stood at $26 billion in September 1991.
Contractors believe that meeting the current JASSM cost goal of $500,000-800,000 a unit will be challenging, Soler says. "[The contractors] all thought they could do it, but it will take special attention to their production techniques," he says.
Intelsat has announced the anticipated launch schedule for its nine remaining Intelsat VII and VIII spacecraft, which are scheduled to join six Intelsat VII and VIII satellites already on orbit. Intelsat said the VII and VIII series satellites are designed to accommodate the convergence of computer, communications and broadcast technologies, and will offer telecommunications technologies such as high definition television (HDTV), direct-to-home (DTH) broadcasting, and frame relay. Upcoming launches
Keep an eye on the Internet. The Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to get user-friendly enough that eventually it will post its broad agency announcements and other solicitations on its World Wide Web home page-which more contractors probably have access to than subscribe to Commerce Business Daily, sources say.
Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.) wants to add to the Senate Armed Services fiscal 1996 national defense authorization an amendment that would permit Pakistan to regain $370 million in military equipment it sent to the U.S. for repair. Return of the equipment is caught up in the current controversy over the Pressler amendment, which has blocked delivery of the F-16s Pakistan bought and paid for in 1990. The Pressler amendment prohibits the delivery until it can be proven that Pakistan is not developing nuclear weapons.
The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile program plans to award two pre-engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contracts next July with options for EMD, acting JASSM program director Oscar Soler told The DAILY yesterday.
U.S. Naval Air Systems Command plans to upgrade electronic warfare capabilities for its tactical aircraft over the next decade, and also hopes to preserve the robustness of its rotary-wing force. "The funding that we have now would allow us to get to the 10-year view, assuming we get the follow-on funding in the following two FYDPs [future year defense plans]," Col. Nolan Schmidt, NAVAIR's program manager for tactical EW, told The DAILY this week.
EER SYSTEMS' METEOR commercial experiment carrier has been cleared for launch at 6:20 p.m. tomorrow from Wallops Island, Va., after a problem with one of the spacecraft's inertial measurement units was corrected, a range spokesman said yesterday. The NASA-backed vehicle was originally dubbed the Commercial Experiment Transporter (COMET).
Guy Ilyich Severin, the renowned Russian designer who first became famous in his country for fashioning the life support system for canine cosmonaut Laika, came to the U.S. in 1990 looking for work for his suffering Zvezda Design Bureau. He wanted the U.S. Air Force to buy Zvezda's K-36D ejection seat-which dramatically played on the international stage when Mikoyan test pilot Anatoly Kvotchur ejected from his MIG-29 at 400 feet during the 1989 Paris air show and walked away from the wreckage.
The Joint Attack Strike Technology program office wants to develop nose array technology, known as the Multifunction Nose Array (MFA), under a four-year contract that is part of the overall JAST effort to demonstrate new avionics concepts. The JAST office expects to issue two awards worth a total of $100 million for technology demonstration of multifunction integrated radio frequency systems (MIRFS) technology, an Aug. 9 Commerce Business Daily notice said.
The Koreasat-1 communications satellite started the trip to its intended orbit yesterday, but the extra fuel it must consume to get there could cut its 10-year life span in half. The satellite ended up 3,946 statue miles short of its orbit last Saturday when a first stage strap-on booster apparently failed to separate from the Delta II that was launching the spacecraft (DAILY, Aug. 8, page 194). It was the first failure of a McDonnell Douglas Delta rocket in 50 launches.
The civil aircraft recovery which began slowly last year is picking up steam, and Boeing is the biggest beneficiary, data compiled by the Aerospace Industries Association and released yesterday suggest.
Recovering component-maker Moog Inc. gets high marks from institutional investment analysts JSA Research, thanks to a turn-around that other analysts think could be a bellwether for the industry. Small enough to be often overlooked and under stress for years, the company has finally started consistently posting upturns in its commercial, military and industrial business lines. JSA already rates the stock a Buy, and is weighing whether to boost the earnings forecast for the company.
GENERAL ELECTRIC Aircraft Engines yesterday settled a 1993 whistleblower lawsuit filed by former GE engineer Ian Johnson, agreeing to pay $7 million-of which Johnson gets $1.7 million-despite FAA and Air Force evidence discrediting Johnson's claims (DAILY, Jan. 5, page 17, May 12, page 236). The Air Force asked GE to settle the case to avoid the disruption and expense of trial, and GE said it did so "in the interest of good customer relations," paying the government for testing and investigative costs as well as Johnson.
The Tier II Predator unmanned aerial vehicle is slated to undertake its first flight in Albania equipped with the Ku-band satellite communications capability upgrade. The Ku-band's 1.5 megabits per second bandwidth will allow Predator to deliver motion video, a Defense Dept. source said yesterday. Predator so far has delivered only still photographs at intervals of 10 to 90 seconds because it relied exclusively on its UHF-link with only five kilobits per second throughput.
