Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne told the House Armed Services Committee that canceling the alternate engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was “a very tough call,” involving long-term reliability statistics and economics. He granted that the service needed an alternate engine for the F-16 fighter because of reliability problems, but he said that today’s engines are much more reliable. “The reliability argument began to eat into whether or not there would be an economic shortfall,” said Wynne. He added that if there were “an extra dollar,” an alternate engine would “be one place” it would be spent. Why? Two reasons, said Wynne: “We do worry about the downstream effects. … I don’t like to see our industrial base go to a single supplier.”
A new Space Force partnership with Blue Origin to expand payload processing capacity at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., will allow the launch range to support as many as 16 more missions per year.
