LOS ANGELES The Lockheed Martin team’s development of the lift fan was a top reason it won the Joint Strike Fighter competition, according to the losing Boeing team, which was “outbriefed” by high government officials last week. Despite initial pessimism about a Boeing role on the F-35 program, the door cracked open to cooperation on Nov. 1 when Dain Hancock, president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., started talking with Jerry Daniels, president and CEO of Boeing Military Aircraft and Missile Systems.

WASHINGTON EchoStar and Hughes will portray their proposed $25.8-billion merger, in part, as a way to help close the “digital divide” that deprives rural Americans of high-speed Internet access by making it easier to use satellites to beam interactive broadband service to homes without terrestrial broadband capability.

LONDON BAE Systems’ 12% share of the $200-billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is forecast to generate as many as 8,500 U.K. jobs in its mature phases. That represents a gradual boost to recession-bound British manufacturing, though it will do nothing to stop the plunge in global tourism and air travel.

WASHINGTON A high-powered independent panel has found that NASA’s International Space Station program “is not credible” as it stands, and can only be fixed by deep staff cuts, longer “expeditions” to the orbiting lab with fewer space shuttle flights to support them, and austere Russian-style ground control.