Saturday, December 7, 2024
Key Issues MQ-25 Stingray USSF pLEO spending cap JLTV funding
Courtney Albon was senior editor for aviation and space at Inside Defense until December 2021. She covered the Air Force since 2012, reporting largely on space programs and fighter aircraft acquisition, development and budget from inside Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and from military installations around the United States. Courtney previously worked as a general assignment reporter at The Ashland Times-Gazette in Ashland, OH, covering education and local government. She graduated from American University in 2008, where she studied journalism and sociology.
The U.S. Federal Claims Court on May 8 rescinded an earlier injunction that prevented U.S. government agencies and the United Launch Alliance from doing business with the Russian company that supplies rocket engines for ULA's Atlas V launch vehicle.
The House Armed Services Committee's mark-up of the fiscal year 2015 defense authorization bill includes a provision to fund the C-130 Avionics Modernization Program and prohibits the Air Force from pursuing a less capable alternative.
Launch provider SpaceX has filed suit against the Air Force in U.S. Federal Claims Court, contending that a sole-source, block-buy contract signed last year with the United Launch Alliance is unlawful.
SpaceX president and CEO Elon Musk announced on April 25 that the company plans to protest the Air Force's five-year, block-buy of 36 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle rocket boosters from the United Launch Alliance -- a deal that was signed last December.
The impact of a proposed reduction in Air Force and Navy F-35 buys is not inconsequential for prime contractor Lockheed Martin, but it also will not have a significant impact on the Joint Strike Fighter program's cost, according to a company executive.
The Air Force still has some room to improve its understanding and management of performance-based logistics contracts, according to one of its senior contracting officials, which is why the service is looking to the Navy for lessons on how it might develop better cost insights and efficiencies in PBL deals.
By May, the Defense Department should no longer be reliant on a Chinese company for satellite communication coverage over Africa, a space policy official told Congress this week.
The director of the Air National Guard said today that he is in favor of the Air Force's scaled-down C-130H modernization plans provided the service makes key investments in a timely manner to comply with air traffic control regulations the Federal Aviation Administration plans to implement in 2020.
The Air Force and the United Launch Alliance estimate it would cost $1 billion to build an alternate to the Russian-built, first-stage engine used to power the Atlas V rocket booster.
Lockheed Martin has put on hold all ongoing work on a major domestic F-16 upgrade program after receiving a stop-work order from the Air Force, company officials told Inside the Air Force this week.
The F-16 could become a target for steep budget cuts should Congress deny the service's wish to divest its entire A-10 fleet, according to a senior Air Force official.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel today announced nominees to head Air Force Space Command and Air Mobility Command.
The Air Force in its fiscal year 2015 budget proposes cutting 500 aircraft through 2019, including as many as 164 A-10s in FY-15 and 117 MQ-1 Predators between FY-15 and 17.
Despite the Air Force's optimism and stated interest in pursuing disaggregated space architectures and commercially hosted payloads, officials in the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon's Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office are concerned the service's enthusiasm isn't matched by the knowledge and planning required to execute a clear way forward.
The launch of the Air Force's first next-generation Global Positioning System satellite won't occur until 2016 due to a delay in the delivery of space vehicle's the navigation payload.
The Air Force wants to speed up its investment in a next-generation training aircraft over the next five years, and is requesting $500 million in its fiscal year 2015 budget request to do just that.
The Air Force in its fiscal year 2015 budget request is slowing its plans for purchasing next-generation Global Positioning System satellites -- a move that significantly reduces the number of launches available for competition between 2015 and 2017.
The Air Force has requested just more than $8 billion in fiscal year 2015 to fund its top three acquisition priorities -- the KC-46 tanker, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and Long-Range Strike Bomber -- as part of its FY-15 budget plan presented to Congress and the public today.
There are "no technical reasons" preventing the Air Force from migrating its prized Senior Year Electro-Optical Reconnaissance System multispectral imagery sensor from the manned U-2 spy plane to the remotely piloted RQ-4 platform, according to the intelligence-gathering system's prime contractor UTC Aerospace Systems.
The Air Force plans to issue a formal request for proposals this fall for the much-anticipated Long-Range Strike Bomber, according to the service's top civilian official.