U.S. Army Thales Raytheon Systems Co., LLC., Fullerton, Calif., was awarded a $23,147,096 modification (No. P00003), to a previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract (W31P4Q-13-C-0082), to procure Sentinel Mode 5 Identification Friend or Foe kits and spares. The total cumulative face value of the contract is $30,442,096. Fiscal 2013 procurement funds are being obligated on this award. The Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, Ala., is the contracting activity.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (SS2) suborbital reusable spaceplane went supersonic Monday morning during a 16-sec. flight test of its hybrid rocket motor. The short-duration flight over Mojave, Calif., with two test pilots from Scaled Composites at the controls, brings SS2 a major step closer to its first flight into space, and ultimately to flights with paying tourists and researchers in the pressurized cabin.
A failure review oversight board (FROB) convened by Sea Launch and Energia Logistics Ltd. has accepted the findings and proposed fixes of contractors investigating the Jan. 31 failure of a Sea Launch Zenit 3-SL shortly after liftoff from the Sea Launch Odyssey floating launch pad. The failure cost Intelsat a new communications satellite — Intelsat 27, designed to operate in the C- and Ku-bands for customers in the Americas, the North Atlantic region and Europe — and a hosted communications payload that could have been sold to a government customer.
OBSERVING EARTH: The commercial sector is expected to make up a significant part of future demand for space-based imagery intelligence (Imint), according to Adam Keith, director of space and Earth observation (EO) at Euroconsult. Only 11 countries have developed EO defense capacity dedicated to supporting Imint; the number of unclassified defense and dual-use satellites launched by these 11 countries totaled 75 over the past decade.
BEIJING — China has begun building a high-definition Earth-observation system, with its first space launch of 2013. A Long March 2D rocket launched the Gaofen 1 satellite and three other, small spacecraft for foreign customers on April 26 from the Jiuquan launch center in northwestern China. Gaofen 1 is the first of five or six spacecraft that are planned to be launched for high-definition observation of the planet between now and 2016, say state media. “Gaofen” means “high definition.”
HOUSTON — The International Space Station crew began to unload cargo from the Russia’s unpiloted Progress 51 resupply capsule on April 26, within hours of an automated docking ultimately unimpeded by a navigation antenna that failed to deploy after liftoff. The freighter, filled with just over three tons of propellant, water, research gear, spare parts and other supplies, eased into the aft docking port of the Russian segment Zvezda service module at 8:25 a.m. EDT.
The first Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus commercial cargo carrier is fueled and ready for launch to the International Space Station (ISS), a mission NASA says it can accommodate in late June or early July.
HOUSTON — Russian flight control teams worked to free a rendezvous antenna aboard the Progress 51 supply ship that failed to deploy as commanded after the freighter lifted off early April 24 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station.
Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., will design, manufacture, integrate and test the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) selected by NASA earlier this month for a new all-sky search of habitable zone exoplanets under a $75 million, four-year space agency contract, the company announced April 24.
Launch of the Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares liquid-fueled rocket on April 21 gives NASA a second U.S.-owned vehicle to use in resupplying the International Space Station, vindicating a commercial approach that has been in play through two presidential administrations.
A relatively simple technology originally developed to smooth potentially dangerous vibrations in the defunct Ares I crew launch vehicle is finding its way into the wider world as a way to steady buildings, aircraft, ships and other structures reacting to winds, waves and even earthquakes.
The renowned planetary scientist who chairs the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) says he is happy with two-thirds of the agency’s proposal to capture a small asteroid and nudge it into a high lunar orbit for examination by spacewalking astronauts early in the coming decade.
As he was recently discussing the pivot of U.S. strategic emphasis to the Asia-Pacific region, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter repeated an assertion that the U.S. spends more on defense “than the next 16 largest militaries combined.” While Carter's talking point is more or less technically correct, such a comparison does not indicate what an appropriate level of spending should be. A more useful way to think about U.S.
