EADS North America officials expressed disappointment on Thursday after the Air Force chose Boeing’s 767-based tanker aircraft over their own A330-based KC-45 tanker to replace the service’s oldest KC-135s. “This is certainly a disappointing turn of events, and we look forward to discussing with the Air Force how it arrived at this conclusion,” said EADS North America Chairman Ralph Crosby in a release. He did not indicate whether the company would challenge the Air Force’s decision. “With a program of such complexity, our review of today’s decision will take some time. There are more than 48,000 Americans who are eager to build the KC-45 here in the US, and we owe it to them to conduct a thorough analysis,” stated Crosby. The Air Force is expected to provide EADS officials with a briefing sometime in the next week or so to explain why service officials deemed Boeing’s bid to be better.
The stand-up of the Space Force, and now its early overhaul and the creation of a new Space Systems Command, are all about resilience: Ensuring that space capabilities, which the whole country relies on, could survive a concerted attack by a near-peer adversary. As part of that drive, a new…