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- Written by J.J. Gertler | Teal Group
- Category: The Latest
The Department of Defense released its latest round of selected acquisition reports and tucked away in their review of the biggest program in DoD history was an interesting footnote that said the F-35 is now expected to operate in US service until the year 2088.
That’s 11 years later than previously expected. Yet the same report declared that the plane’s service life is still expected to be 30 years. So, if it’s retiring 11 years later but not staying in service longer, that implies it will be in production for 11 more years than anticipated.
At first blush, that sounds like a good thing for Lockheed Martin and its investors. But the target total number of aircraft for the US has not budged, so given an 11-year slowdown in procurement, that would imply lower numbers per year, at least for the United States.
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- Written by Marco Caceres | Teal Group
- Category: The Latest
It now looks like the Russians will continue to participate in the International Space Station (ISS) past 2024. As you may recall, on July 21 it was reported that Yuri Borisov, the director of Russia’s national space agency (Rosaviacosmos), said that Russia would pull out of the ISS in 2024. This caused a minor stir in the West because the station depends on the Zvezda Service Module for a lot of important stuff, including living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing systems, flight control systems and propulsion systems.
Zvezda is the core module for the station, and without it it’s unclear what the United States and its international partners would do to keep the station operating another few years. By now, NASA should have had contingency plans on the off chance the Russians might decide to quit the program earlier than the envisioned 2028 or 2030. But none exist, mainly because the US lacks the heavy launch capability needed to carry a replacement module to low Earth orbit (LEO)—the kind once provided by the Space Shuttle fleet.
But not to worry, it seems the Russians are having second thoughts...
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- Written by Phillip Finnegan | Teal Group
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Europe is introducing new unified regulations in an effort to replace what had been a fragmented market.
Following a six-month delay over original plans due to the pandemic, national UAS regulations in European Union Member Nations will be replaced by a common European Union regulation beginning in 2021. The transition to the new regime will end at the beginning of 2023.
The new European regulation established three categories, which are based on risk. In the easiest ‘open’ category UAS operators with less operational risk can carry out an operation without authorization. The second ‘specific’ category is a category of UAS operation that, considering the risks involved, requires an authorization by the authority before the operation occurs that considers the mitigation measures identified in an operational risk assessment. The third ‘certified’ category includes unmanned operations that, considering the risks involved, requires the certification of the UAS, a licensed remote pilot and an operator approved by the competent authority, in order to ensure an appropriate level of safety.
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- Written by Marco Caceres | Teal Group
- Category: The Latest
There are a lot of things that SpaceX has done in recent years that are absolutely marvelous. The company has quickly come to dominate the launch services industry with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy partially reusable rockets. In 2020, the company successfully launched a record 26 times, vastly outpacing any other rocket program, including Chinese and Russian ones. Falcon left other American launch programs in the dust long ago.
Equally amazing is SpaceX’s ability to diversify its launch manifest, so that it not only launches lots of civil missions to NASA International Space Station (ISS), but it also launches lots of commercial satellites for companies and military satellites for the Pentagon. I should stress that it has not been easy to make Arianespace nearly a minor player in the commercial launch market and United Launch Services (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) practically a minor player in the US military launch market. But the company managed to do both rather quickly and seemingly without breaking a sweat.
Oh, I would be remiss if I did not highlight SpaceX’s pièce de résistance—its success in launching US astronauts to ISS aboard its Dragon 2 capsules launched by Falcon 9 rockets. This achievement alone would have gotten massive amounts of international recognition last year had it not been sucked away by all this COVID business.
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- Written by David Rockwell | Teal Group
- Category: The Latest
Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) sensors are still the default sensor for the vast majority of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). UAV EO/IR system funding increased rapidly in the decade after 9/11, with some growth continuing in recent years. But the financial crisis of 2008, proposed budget cuts, and sequestration resulted in several years of up-and-down funding, and considerable uncertainty. Teal Group historical data show a $779 million market for UAV EO/IR systems in FY09 and only $781 million in FY13.
However, we saw this end of growth as only a pause, as most major U.S. endurance UAV platform programs were ending or nearing the end of their planned production runs. As we forecast, since 2015 budgets have extended future production for MALE programs such as the USAF Reaper and U.S. Army Gray Eagle. And the USAF also received additional HALE Block 30 Global Hawks (albeit in danger of being retired again in 2020). Global Hawk international sales have now begun with urgent orders from South Korea and Japan (though Japan may cancel its order), and Triton buys for Germany (now cancelled) and Australia (going ahead).