On Wednesday, January 20 at 8:02 a.m. EST, SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites to orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center, completing the seventeenth Starlink mission. The Falcon 9 rocket, a workhorse for the company, had a successful and on-time liftoff from the space center – the first Starlink launch of 2021.
California-based satellite launch group, Virgin Orbit, confirmed that its LauncherOne rocket reached space during the company’s second launch demonstration recently, successfully deploying 10 payloads for NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP).
Virgin Orbit’s novel launch system uses a technique called air launch, in which a rocket is launched from under the wing of a jet aircraft, rather than from a traditional launch pad on the ground. In addition to improving the payload capacity of the rocket, this technique allows the LauncherOne system to be the world’s most flexible and responsive launch service — flying on short notice and from a wide variety of locations to access any orbit.
For this mission, Virgin Orbit’s carrier aircraft, a customized 747-400 dubbed Cosmic Girl, took off from Mojave Air and Space Port and flew out to a launch site over the Pacific Ocean, about 50 miles south of the Channel Islands. After being released from the aircraft, the two-stage rocket ignited and powered itself to orbit. At the conclusion of the flight, the LauncherOne rocket deployed 10 CubeSats into the team’s target orbit, marking a major step forward for Virgin Orbit in what it calls “its quest to bust down the barriers preventing affordable and responsive access to space.”
The payloads onboard LauncherOne were selected by NASA LSP as part of the agency’s CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI). Nearly all of the CubeSat missions were designed, built and tested by universities across the U. S., including Brigham Young University (PICS), the University of Michigan (MiTEE), and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (CAPE-3).
The flight also marked a historical first: no other orbital class, air-launched, liquid-fueled rocket had successfully reached space before today.
“A new gateway to space has just sprung open. That LauncherOne was able to successfully reach orbit today is a testament to this team’s talent, precision, drive, and ingenuity. Even in the face of a global pandemic, we’ve maintained a laser focus on fully demonstrating every element of this revolutionary launch system. That effort paid off today with a beautifully executed mission, and we couldn’t be happier,” said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart.
“Virgin Orbit has achieved something many thought impossible. It was so inspiring to see our specially adapted Virgin Atlantic 747, Cosmic Girl, send the LauncherOne rocket soaring into orbit. This magnificent flight is the culmination of many years of hard work and will also unleash a whole new generation of innovators on the path to orbit. I can’t wait to see the incredible missions Dan and the team will launch to change the world for good,” said Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson.
With this successful demonstration in the books, Virgin Orbit will officially transition into commercial service for its next mission. Virgin Orbit has subsequent launches booked by customers ranging from the U.S. Space Force and the U.K.’s Royal Air Force to commercial customers like Swarm Technologies, Italy’s SITAEL, and Denmark’s GomSpace.
The company says its next few rockets are already well into integration at its Long Beach manufacturing facility.
Automated software testing company, Parasoft, announced its C/C++test update to support IAR Systems’ build tools for Linux for Arm. IAR Build Tools for Linux inspired the update of Parasoft’s unified testing solution for C/C++test software development. With these tools combined, software developers gain the ability to configure fast and scalable CI/CD pipelines on Linux servers and automate the testing process.
IAR Build Tools for Linux uses the leading build tools from IAR Embedded Workbench and empowers software developers who build safety-critical applications to work directly on the Linux host environment, eliminating toolchain version management.
Development teams can also boost flexibility and productivity by enabling containerized deployments of the IAR Build Tools for Linux for use when with C/C++test. They reap the benefits of running these pre-packaged containers when performing static analysis and unit testing.
A joint webinar, “Simplify Automated Linux Builds & Testing for Safety-Critical Applications,” will be held on Wednesday, January 27, 2021. The webinar is focused on how to benefit from the Parasoft C/C++test support of ARM on Linux.
“At IAR Systems, we see a huge customer need for streamlined automated testing and a more reliable delivery of code changes. IAR Build Tools for Linux are based on the well-known build tools in IAR Embedded Workbench and provide an easy transition from day-to-day development into automated workflows on Linux. With support by Parasoft’s C/C++test, companies are able to accelerate their development projects with focus on compliance and code quality,” said Anders Holmberg, general manager Embedded Development Tools, IAR Systems.
“IAR Embedded Workbench is one of the most popular IDEs in the world and considered by many the best compiler and debugger toolchain in the embedded industry. Its well-known build tools are available with support for Linux and include the highly optimizing IAR C/C++ Compiler, IAR Assembler, Linker and library tools, IARBuild, and runtime libraries,” said Richard Sherrard, VP of Products, Parasoft. “Combined with Parasoft C/C++test, teams have a complete software development and testing solution that offers assurance in achieving software safety, security, and reliability.”
Loar Group, Inc. (Loar) has recently added Safe Flight Instrument Corporation (Safe Flight) to its family of companies.
Headquartered in White Plains, New York (USA), Safe Flight is a leading designer and manufacturer of proprietary aerospace electronic products and systems with its products installed on nearly two-thirds of the world’s aircraft, the company says. In addition, all Safe Flight’s products are proprietary whereby they own all key intellectual property rights. Their products include flight instrumentation, guidance and controls and they are the world’s premier manufacturer of aircraft lift instrumentation. Safe Flight’s customers include leading aircraft OEMs across all market segments with approximately seventy-five percent of Safe Flight’s products sold to the general or business aviation end markets, with the balance primarily sold to the commercial aerospace end market.
“The acquisition of Safe Flight adds a strong management team, along with expanded engineering, design, manufacturing, repair and overhaul talent to Loar allowing us to address additional unique and niche manufacturing and technological challenges faced by our customers” stated Dirkson Charles, CEO of Loar Group. “By adding Safe Flight to Loar’s suite of product offerings we have added product lines that include stall warning and protection, automatic throttle systems, fuselage airflow angle sensors, control shakers and icing condition detectors just to name a few of the specialized capabilities we have added to our family of companies. With over eighty-five percent of Loar’s sales coming from innovative and proprietary products we are uniquely positioned to solve problems for our customers,” continued Charles. Loar Group’s acquisition of Safe Flight creates a partnership that allows Safe Flight to continue serving its existing customers while providing additional growth capital and human resources to meet expanded future customer needs.
While sensor/IOT data streams have been processed and analyzed, 90% of data in the industry in still in the form of paper or at best PDFs. This ‘dark data’ needs to be unlocked and utilized for predictive maintenance and analytics solutions enabling comprehensive results. Or even quite simply to create interactive manuals (IETM), reducing the use of paper and making them viewable on handheld devices.
Forty percent of MROs are still using Excel and manual copy/paste workflows from source documents like Service Repair Manuals (SRM), Service Bulletins (SB), and Aircraft Maintenance Manuals (AMM) etc to create Engineering Orders compliant with regulators, the companies stress.
Covid 19 has highlighted the short-term crucial need to significantly reduce paper based work-flows to increase productivity and turn-around times due to reduction in maintenance crews and some of them working on shifts to maintain distancing norms. MROs need to accelerate their digitalization solutions for the longer term by implementing Predictive Maintenance and Analytics solutions to speed up their MRO processes.
Stelae Technologies’ software, Khemeia, addresses this problem, transforming documents (PDF, Word, RTF) into structured, searchable, analyzable and reusable outputs, compliant with Aerospace standards like S1000D for Technical Documents, S2000M for Materials Management, DITA, Json and customer defined Data Schemas. The documents types cover the entire spectrum from Task Cards, Panel Lists SRM, SB, AMM, CMM and Illustrated Product Catalogues.
Currently a manual or semi-automated process using scripts like Python, Khemeia can bring scale and efficiency to this process.
Khemeia will be integrated into umlaut’s Digital Transformation solutions which finds extensive business applications for Aerospace and Defense OEMs and MRO service providers.
“umlaut is enabling global OEMs accelerate their digital transformation,” said Dr. Ashish Mishra, CEO, umlaut. “We have built a suite of digitalization products and solutions to improve the operational efficiency and deliver positive business impact. Bringing Khemei as part of our solution will significantly benefit our customers in MRO sector.”
Aruna Schwarz, CEO & Co-Founder of Stelae Technologies added that, “We have been one of the pioneers in this space, working with companies since 2012 in the Avionics and Defense sector, to transform technical publications to S1000D– creating an automated, scalable and cost-effective solution to transform large data volumes. This is the essential first step in order to create Digital Maintenance solutions for the Aerospace and Defense MROs.”
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