ALTAIR: In August and September, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems will deploy its Altair unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the Canadian military to perform littoral and maritime surveillance off Canada's east coast. After being launched from a main operating base at Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and flown on an instrument flight plan, control of the aircraft and payload will be passed to an Ottawa-based remote operations center for beyond-line-of-sight operations via satellite.
The U.S. Army has begun real-world testing of a new system that allows a gun mounted atop a Humvee to be operated from inside the vehicle. Four prototypes of the Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS) were installed on Humvees and sent to Iraq in December for urban missions, including patrols. CROWS, developed for the Army by Recon/Optical Inc. (ROI) of Barrington, Ill., eliminates the need for a gunner to be outside the vehicle, where there is little protection against enemy fire and severe weather.
NIST CUT: The Bush Administration's fiscal 2005 budget proposal would eliminate the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which has helped small companies move technology from research to demonstration, to help attract venture capital. Administration budget documents say other NIST research and development programs are more effective in supporting the technological needs of U.S.-based businesses and are similar to those being carried out by firms not receiving subsidies. However, Rep.
END STRENGTH: A move to high-tech platforms will allow the U.S. Navy to reduce its end strength more than it predicted just last year, a senior Navy budget official says. Navy end strength would decrease rapidly throughout the Future Years Defense Plan and would be significantly reduced under President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget request, compared with 2004 projections. Personnel numbers are 373,800 in both fiscal 2004 and fiscal 2005, but would drop to 357,400 by fiscal 2009 under the FY '05 budget, compared with a drop to 370,100 in the FY '04 projections.
PANTERA TESTS: Norway's air force is Lockheed Martin's first international customer to flight test the Precision Attack Navigation and Targeting pod (PANTERA), the company said Feb. 6. All the features were exercised in the December tests and "performed accurately," the company said.
Feb. 10 - 11 -- 7th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference 2004, Fairmont Hotel, Washington, D.C. Call (877) 443-2670 or go to www.organization21.com/ast.faa. Feb. 10 - 11 -- AIAA Defense 2004, "Moving to Meet the Needs of Joint Warfighting," Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington, D.C. For more information go to www.aiaa.org/events/defense.
RIGHT-COST READINESS: Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, says the Navy needs to "learn how to run this business - a warmaking business - better. The leaders in the Navy must understand that readiness at any cost is no longer an option. We need readiness at the right cost." Clark spoke last week at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and U.S. Naval Institute West 2004 conference in San Diego.
SAN DIEGO - The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are creating a "maritime NORAD" to monitor ship movements and identify terrorist threats, according to Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of Naval operations. The idea is in the concept development stage, Clark said Feb. 4 at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and U.S. Naval Institute West 2004 conference here.
The U.S. Air Force plans to start taking a serious look at potential replacements for several C-130 variants used by its special operations forces, a service representative said Feb. 5. Maj. Gen. John Dorris said the Bush Administration's fiscal 2005 budget request, submitted to Congress Feb. 2, contains "seed money" to develop concepts for an "MX" aircraft, which would replace the MC-130E/H airdrop/transport aircraft, and an "AX" which would replace the AC-130 gunship. The analysis could take about two years.
Senior leaders at Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the Marine Corps will meet at Camp Lejeune, N.C., next month to discuss ways of making the two organizations more interoperable, according to Brig. Gen. Robert Neller, director of the operations division at Marine Corps headquarters.
Although Northrop Grumman's sales for the fourth quarter of 2003 increased to $7.1 billion from $4.8 billion, the net income of $224 million was the same for both reporting periods, the company said Feb. 4.
SECURE COMMUNICATIONS: Palomar Products will supply the secure communications capability for the US101 medium-lift helicopter, US101 team member Lockheed Martin said Feb. 5. Lockheed Martin, AgustaWestland and Bell Helicopter Textron are pitting the US101, a variant of AgustaWestland's EH101, against Sikorsky's VH-92 for the VXX competition to replace the presidential helicopter fleet. Their proposals were submitted to the Navy earlier this week (DAILY, Feb. 4).
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The U.S. and Canada could reach an agreement within the next month on a famework for cooperation on missile defense, according to Lt. Gen. E.A. "Rick" Findley, deputy commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). David Pratt, Canada's minister of defense, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their staffs "have all really accelerated the framework for an amendment to the NORAD agreement [between the two countries] within the next four weeks," Findley said Jan. 29 at a conference here.
Negotiations between the U.S. Air Force and the Boeing Co. over a KC-767 lease-purchase deal are suspended until at least May, when the results of four Defense Department reviews are due, a defense official told The DAILY. A Pentagon source said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will wait for reports from the Defense Policy and Science Board, the National Defense University and the DOD inspector general and general counsel before proceeding with the controversial plan.
Australia soon may request additional information from Northrop Grumman on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle, a company official said Feb. 5. Australia's defense minister, Robert Hill, spelled out a need for a squadron of long-endurance UAVs for land and maritime surveillance on Feb. 4, saying the requirement was spurred by the Global Hawk's performance in Afghanistan and Iraq. He made the comments as he released Australia's new defense budget (DAILY, Feb. 5).
SAN DIEGO - A major multinational initiative aimed at thwarting terrorist attacks on the United States and other nations with shipborne weapons of mass destruction is underway, according to Adm. Walter F. Doran, Pacific Fleet Commander. "We need to gain visibility of what travels via the sea throughout the region - we need the same situational awareness of what is on our oceans and waterways that we have about what is traveling through the skies," Doran said.
Lockheed Martin expects to decide by April whether to use a continuously moving assembly line to produce the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a company official said Feb. 5. Current-generation fighters are built on pulsed or bay-build assembly lines, meaning an aircraft stays in one place for a long time while it is worked on. The downside to that approach is that a problem can quietly fester because it is isolated from the rest of the assembly line, said Edward Linhart, vice president for JSF production operations at Lockheed Martin.
The U.S. Army has awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation's Information Technology (IT) sector a $10 million task order contract over three years to provide support to the Army's newly created Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), the company announced Feb. 5. Northrop Grumman estimates this contract will bring approximately 10 new jobs to Northrop Grumman IT. Work on the contract will be conducted at the Northrop Grumman IT site in Aberdeen, Md.
LAUNCHERS: Lockheed Martin has received a $3.2 million Army contract to supply an additional 92 M299 helicopter-mounted missile launchers for U.S. and international forces, the company announced Feb. 5. The order includes 34 launcher units for the U.S. Army and 58 units for Israel and Kuwait. Deliveries are scheduled to run through the third quarter of 2005.
Spacehab, a provider of commercial and government space services, finished refinancing its Astrotech Spacecraft Processing Facility (SPF) in Titusville, Fla., with money it used from a contract cancellation fee from Boeing, the company said Feb. 3. The facility provides the location for satellite fueling, encapsulation, and even ground control capabilities through launch, a Spacehab representative told The DAILY. The company mostly works with rocket manufacturers Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp., she said.
In anticipation of a human landing between 2015 and 2020, NASA plans to begin launching robotic scouts to the moon by 2008 to create new maps and hunt for its natural resources, according to Edward Weiler, the associate administrator for space science.
