The editorial board at Bloomberg News published a critique of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) last week that was full of questionable assertions and as a result came to erroneous conclusions. It complained about schedule delays and cost increases when in fact every major launch vehicle in recent times has encountered such delays, and the SLS cost to date is a fraction of what Saturn V cost. It called SLS technology outdated when in fact the technology was mandated by [ Read More…]

Geospatial intelligence–mainly imagery generated from satellites–is uniquely useful to a wide range of users. However, after years of leading the world in GEOINT technology, the United States has begun to fall behind. The good news is that this problem can be fixed by making policy changes rather than spending taxpayer funds. The bad news is that if new policies reflecting market realities aren’t implemented soon, U.S. companies could find themselves squeezed out of the global commercial market for geospatial information. [ Read More…]

The Air Force plans to upgrade its venerable B-52 bombers for 30 more years of service. The most challenging facet of the upgrades is installing more fuel-efficient and reliable turbofan engines. Each plane has eight engines. The service has four commercial engines from which to choose. However, one of them, the General Electric CF34, has been sold to Chinese civil-aircraft manufacturer COMAC for use on its ARJ21-700 regional jet. COMAC was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Defense in January [ Read More…]

The poor, elderly, and rural Americans will be hit hardest. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is reportedly considering a strategic plan that would severely erode the quality of first-class mail delivery, its most popular product with the American people. According to a February 12 article in The Washington Post, USPS wants to eliminate the two-day standard for delivering first-class mail to a local address and instead lump it into a three- to five-day delivery window. The American people deserve much [ Read More…]

Lockheed Martin wants to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, one of only two major producers of rocket engines in the U.S. The government approved a similar merger of Northrop Grumman and Orbital ATK three years ago, so it’s hard to see what the rationale would be for stopping this latest chapter in defense-sector consolidation. Obviously, there must be an enforceable agreement that Lockheed not be able to leverage Aerojet franchises to gain unfair advantage in the marketplace. However, it’s important to understand [ Read More…]

A quarter-century after the Clinton administration first conceived the “joint strike fighter,” it has turned into a smashing success. Hundreds are in operation with ten air forces around the world, with many, many more to come. But that doesn’t mean everybody in the Biden administration understands why the F-35, as it is now called, is so important to the joint force. If we strip away all the program details, the essence of the story comes down to this: it is [ Read More…]

The SolarWinds supply chain attack exposed vulnerabilities in major commercial and public-sector enterprises, including the U.S. Treasury and the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Commerce and Defense. What is lacking in most organizations, inter alia, is the ability to determine what devices are connected to a network. The federal government overall, and most importantly, DoD must enhance their ability to secure networks and devices. But, the government cannot defend what it cannot see. Having a high-confidence, real-time picture of what [ Read More…]

The U.S. remote sensing industry is in danger of being wiped out by foreign competition. Known in military circles as geospatial intelligence, the industry’s products are vital to commercial and government users alike. But as the rest of the world has caught up with U.S. technology in the field, federal policies have failed to reflect emerging market realities. For instance, it took 15 years for Washington to agree that U.S. GEOINT providers could market satellite imagery with quarter-meter resolution, even [ Read More…]

The commercial geospatial-intelligence industry is growing rapidly. However, most of the growth is happening outside the United States, where foreign providers are matching and surpassing the offerings U.S. companies. Geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) is imagery of activities in relation to the Earth’s geography, usually collected from satellites or aircraft. It is a “dual-use” technology in that it can be useful to both military and civilian users. As with many other industries where the U.S. was once dominant, foreign providers of GEOINT [ Read More…]

President Biden has extended the New START nuclear arms control agreement for five more years, to 2026. That’s a good thing in terms of fostering a stable nuclear balance between America and Russia. However, the stability enshrined in New START depends on preserving a credible retaliatory capability that can severely punish nuclear aggression, and the current decade will be pivotal in terms of assuring that. Because of wishful thinking and bad management in previous administrations, all three legs of the [ Read More…]