spacetoday.net: News briefs: June 27

Posted: Fri, Jun 28, 2002, 8:38 AM ET (1238 GMT)

Boeing is considering laying off some of its employees at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida Today reported Thursday. The company is considering staffing changes as it gets a temporary extension of a payload processing contract. Boeing is competing for a new contract, and said it would be forced to lay off more employees if it lost the contract.
The US has rejected a proposal by Russia and China to ban weapons in outer space. The proposal, presented at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva this week, is seen as an effort to prevent possible deployment of missile defense systems in orbit. American diplomats at the conference said they saw "no need" for such a ban and that the US has no plans to put weapons in space.
NASA has selected a team to develop an advanced ion engine, the space agency announced Thursday. The NASA Glenn Research Center will lead the development of the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT), while a division of Boeing will work on a specific component of ion engines known as ion optics. NEXT is designed to build on the success of the ion engine flown on the Deep Space 1 mission; NEXT will have a longer lifetime and greater payload capacity.