Friday, April 19, 2024
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 Air Force science and technology community's vision for future autonomous systems has played a key role in the Defense Department's third offset strategy, and a report to be released this summer is meant to further inform decision-makers on the technology challenges associated with that vision.
Rep. Jim Bridestine (R-OK) said this week he is satisfied with the space reforms including in the House's fiscal year 2017 defense spending bill and his office is working to find support for those initiatives in the Senate.
The Defense Department's most recent F-35 concurrency estimate projects it will spend $1.76 billion to retrofit early Joint Strike Fighter production lots with new capabilities -- a slight increase from last year's $1.69 billion estimate.
The Defense Department's advanced research wing plans to release a solicitation in the next few weeks seeking industry partners in an effort to develop an autonomous, robotic space vehicle capable of servicing on-orbit satellites.
The Air Force is working with KC-46 Pegasus prime contractor Boeing to speed up the new tanker's Federal Aviation Administration certification process by conducting some exercises in parallel -- part of a larger effort to overcome schedule delays and support Boeing's requirement to deliver 18 tankers by next August.
House appropriators favor maintaining F-35 Block 4 follow-on modernization efforts as part of the larger JSF program of record.
As the Air Force considers how, and whether, commercially hosted payloads might make its future satellite architectures more resilient, the service is looking to industry to develop a key enabling technology meant to help protect sensitive information contained in some military payloads.
Senate authorizers are calling on the Air Force to conduct a Nunn-McCurdy review of the troubled next-generation Global Positioning System ground station, regardless of whether the program declares a cost breach.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has approved a defense policy bill that, if enacted, would require the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's follow-on modernization program to be classified as a major defense acquisition program and put a 2019 expiration date on the joint program office.
Senate authorizers this week passed a defense policy bill that would require the Air Force to reveal classified cost information about the next-generation B-21 bomber, restrict the availability of Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines and mandate that the service conduct a competition to develop a replacement for its EC-130H Compass Call fleet.
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter prime contractor Lockheed Martin has completed the final JSF Block 3i software configuration needed to support the Air Force's initial operational capability declaration for the aircraft.
The Senate Armed Services Committee will mark up its version of the fiscal year 2017 defense policy bill next week, and may include language that could have a considerable impact on key Air Force plans, including its strategy to replace the Russian-made RD-180 engine and its approach to contracting for the B-21 Long-Range Strike Bomber.
Highlights from this week's Inside the Air Force.
An amendment included in the House Armed Services Committee's defense policy bill would push the Defense Department to move forward with an analysis of its Global Positioning System infrastructure, a step that one House lawmaker says is crucial to determining whether the department can take advantage of a potential backup positioning, navigation and timing system.
The Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center this week published an industry notice advertising its open-systems approach to setting standards for a new enterprise ground services effort that would consolidate satellite ground control segments into a new, common architecture.
The Air Force is considering options for a six- or eight-satellite constellation for the future Space-Based Infrared System program of record and anticipates the follow-on system could feature a mix of hosted payloads with disaggregated missions.
The Air Force's $82.7 million launch services award to SpaceX this week cost 40 percent less than estimated, according to one of the service's top space acquisition officials.
The Air Force has awarded SpaceX an $82.7 million contract to launch a next-generation Global Positioning System satellite, becoming the first launch provider to break the United Launch Alliance's 10-year monopoly lifting national security space missions.
The Defense Department does not plan to cut its requirement for 2,443 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and does not plan to recommend a smaller fleet when it reports to Congress on the subject early next month.
President Obama has nominated Air Force Gen. David Goldfein to become the service's next chief of staff, according to a Pentagon statement issued this morning.