A ground-launched hypersonic cruise missile could become part of the Pentagon’s portfolio of maneuvering weapons with speeds over Mach 5, Mark Lewis, the director of Defense Research and Engineering for Modernization, said on April 22.
The premature shutdown of one of nine Merlin engines that powered a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit last month was caused by cleaning fluid trapped inside a sensor and igniting, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on April 22.
When life gives you lemons, the adage goes. And when the planned kickoff of the U.S. Air Force’s Agility Prime program at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, was canceled because of COVID-19, the service decided to make lemonade, turning the launch into a five-day virtual event.
Textron Aviation has delivered two Cessna Citation Latitude midsize business jets configured for flight inspection missions to Kanematsu Corp., owned by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force.
Boeing is reorganizing top managers and their duties, the company said late April 21, in what is the first headquarters overhaul under relatively new CEO and president David Calhoun.
The U.S. Marine Corps has delivered eight newly-manufactured Lockheed Martin F-35Bs to MCAS Iwakuni, Japan, replacing the original batch of short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing fighters that first arrived in 2017, the service announced on April 21.
The U.S. Air Force has discovered that vertically mounted wiper blades on the KC-135 Stratotanker reduce aircraft drag by about 1% during cruise conditions, potentially saving the service $7 million annually in fuel costs.
Lockheed Martin proved April 21 why its is probably the best-positioned company in aerospace and defense to ride out the novel coronavirus outbreak, with the company reporting consensus-beating first-quarter financial results and a positive forecast for 2020.
The Pentagon is investing $133 million to increase U.S. N95 mask production by 39 million over the next 90 days to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus.
A Japanese choice of U.S. partners for development of the Next Generation Fighter has been reported by a second major Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, following an article along similar lines last month.
The South Korean finance ministry has reiterated that spending shifts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic will not delay deliveries of Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightnings to the country.
The Weather System Follow-on satellite completed its critical design review with the U.S. Space Force green lighting Ball Aerospace to enter full production.
Lockheed Martin completed the preliminary design of its candidate for the Long Range Standoff cruise missile six months before the U.S. Air Force’s decision to award the $4.5 billion program to rival Raytheon Technologies, the service said on April 20.
The Pentagon predicts there will be a three-month slowdown for major defense acquisition programs because of impacts related to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
NASA has appointed the agency’s chief economist, Alexander MacDonald, to serve as program executive for CASIS, the NASA-backed Florida nonprofit that oversees the U.S. National Laboratory portion of the International Space Station.
