Tagged: Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin announces plans for SR-72 hypersonic spy drone

Written by RT News

Published time: November 02, 2013

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Aircraft experts and military aficionados have cause to rejoice now that Lockheed Martin has debuted the SR-72 unmanned spy plane, the long-awaited successor to the SR-71 Blackbird and potentially the first hypersonic craft to enter service.

Plans for the SR-72 drone were first unveiled Friday in an  Aviation Week article which revealed that Lockheed Martin’s Skunk  Works advanced development program has drafted plans for a plane  that could fly as fast as Mach 6 – twice the speed of the  Blackbird.

The SR-72 would have the ability to gather intelligence, conduct  surveillance and reconnaissance, and launch combat strikes at an  unprecedented speed. The plane is designed to fill what is  considered in military circles to be a gap in capabilities  between the spy satellites orbiting Earth and the manned and  unmanned technology meant to replace the SR-71.

The original Blackbird, which was introduced in 1966 and served  until 1999, was primarily used by the US Air Force and NASA to  collect intelligence through the Cold War. Along with flying at  speeds fast enough to outrun a surface-to-air missile, the  Blackbird also avoided enemy radar by flying at low altitudes. A  total of 32 aircraft were built and, although 12 were lost to  accidents, not a single one was lost to enemy combat.

Yet the sheer cost of replicating the Blackbird has prevented the  US military from commissioning such a powerful weapon at a time  when the Air Force has dominated international skies with the  drone program.

But Lockheed Martin now believes it has encountered a  technological breakthrough rendering the conversation around  costs irrelevant.

Brad Leland, portfolio manager for air-breathing hypersonic  technologies, said the crux of the new project hinges on an air  breathing engine that combines the traditional turbine with a  scramjet. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency  (DARPA) explored the idea on previous projects but abandoned it  because of cost.

“The Skunk Works has been working with Aerojet Rocketdyne for  the past seven years to develop a method to integrate an  off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the aircraft from  standstill to Mach 6 plus,” Leland said. “Our approach  builds on HTV-3X, but this extends a lot beyond that and  addresses the one key technical issue that remained on that  program: the high-speed turbine engine.”

Leland, who said that roughly 20 employees have worked on the  project so far, elaborated in an interview with Reuters.

“What we are doing is defining a missile that would have a  small incremental cost to go at hypersonic speed,” he said.   “Hypersonic is the new stealth. Your adversaries cannot hide  or move their critical assets. They will be found. That becomes a  game-changer.”

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Cronyism: Senators supportive of Syria strikes bring in big bucks from defense contractors

posted by Jason Pye

Tue, 10/09/2013

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Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who voted last week to authorize military force against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime have brought thousands of dollars more from defense contractors than those who voted against it, according to a report from David Kravets of Wired:

Senators voting Wednesday to authorize a Syria strike received, on average, 83 percent more campaign financing from defense contractors than lawmakers voting against war.

Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $1,006,887 to the 17 members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who voted yes or no on the authorization Wednesday, according to an analysis by Maplight, the Berkeley-based nonprofit that performed the inquiry at WIRED’s request.

Committee members who voted to authorize what the resolution called a “limited” strike averaged $72,850 in defense campaign financing from the pot. Committee members who voted against the resolution averaged $39,770, according to the data.

There was a similar dynamic at play during the debate over Rep. Justin Amash’s unsuccessful amendment to limit the National Security Agency’s surveillance to only those who are suspected of terrorist activist, rather than broadly targeting all Americans. Kravets noted at the time that lawmakers who voted against the Amash amendment received twice as much from defense contractors, who spent heavily on lobbying efforts against the measure, as those who supported it.

Similarly, members of Congress who spoke the loudest against the sequester, which cut the anticipated in increase in defense spending by $600 billion over the next 10 years, have been very cozy with the defense industry.

But back to the Syria issue. Kravets compiled the list of members and the contributions they’ve received from the defense industry since 2007, which you can see below

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Even talk of war is good for business. Raytheon, the contractor that produces the Tomahawk missile, saw its stocks surge to a record high at the end of last month, though it has since fallen as congressional authorization of force against Syria looks unlikely.

But there it is, folks, cronyism in Washington at its worst.

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