Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) considers it his job to ensure that House Republican leadership knows the consequences of cutting defense spending more deeply than the amount to which Congress has currently agreed.
ARMY The Boeing Co., St. Louis, was awarded a $181,663,400 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract. The award will provide for system engineering support and field service representatives for the Early-Infantry Brigade Combat Team low rate initial production. The work will be performed in St. Louis; Bedford, Mass.; Bloomington, Minn.; and Vienna, Va., with an estimated completion date of Dec. 31, 2013. One bid was solicited, with one bid received. The U.S. Army Contracting Command, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-09-C-0452).
THE SIMS: The Indian Air Force (IAF) is looking at advanced simulation technology for effective training and combat capabilities. “The present requirement of advanced simulators for providing effective training to Indian armed forces in a cost-effective manner is significantly high,” IAF Vice Chief Air Marshal K.K. Nohwa said on Sept. 12. “The use of simulators will significantly reduce both flying and fuel costs and most importantly, reduce the loss of life and equipment,” he says.
PARIS – Russia’s Express-AM4 satellite is fully functional and is sending and receiving signals following its Aug. 18 launch, but the Astrium-built spacecraft remains in the same useless orbit that its faulty Proton M/Breeze M rocket dumped it into shortly after liftoff.
HOUSTON — NASA’s 20-year-old Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), a school bus-sized sentry that pioneered the observation of high-altitude interactions between man-made chemicals and the life-shielding ozone layer, is expected to crash back to Earth in late September or possibly early October with a one-in-3,200 chance of a human casualty, according to orbital debris experts from U.S. Strategic Command and NASA.
BEIJING – South Korea will receive four Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aerial systems in 2015 and 2016 under an order that is in the final stages of negotiation. The U.S. State Department is likely to advise Congress within a few weeks of the proposed sale, which also will include the ground infrastructure for the surveillance aircraft. A U.S. official says that the contract will be worth about $850 million. Two of the aircraft will be delivered in 2015 and the other two in 2016.
LONDON – NATO members at their next summit meeting are expected to consider a range of multinational cooperation projects to help spend money more efficiently as defense procurement throughout the alliance comes under pressure.
NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (Grail) spacecraft got under way Sept. 10 with launch on a Delta II rocket, kicking off a mission that planetary scientists hope will give them highly accurate measurements of the Moon’s gravity.
MORE LIFE: Honeywell says a five-year, $450 million contract with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., to provide ground systems and mission operations services for the agency’s fleet of scientific research satellites will focus on extending their life. “Today, our technologies will re-set the operational life and value of NASA research satellites, enabling the agency to continue to meet commitments on a wide range of missions of vital importance to humankind,” says Charles Harvey, president of Honeywell Technology Solutions.
Aviation Week MRO Military Europe September 28, 2011 IFEMA Madrid, Spain Mark your calendar! MRO Military Europe returns to address continued military sustainment in a market that is constantly in flux. Europe represents 23% of the $85 billion global military sustainment market. How will military and defense agencies cope with the current challenges and changes facing maintenance and sustainment, including:
LONDON – Northrop Grumman is pushing forward on its counter-improvised explosive device Cutlass unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) along with an export derivative called Cobra. Although exact fielding time lines for Cutlass are not being revealed, Nigel Essenhigh, chairman of Northrop Grumman U.K., says the first production-standard vehicles are about to be delivered.
Though U.S. Air Force officials are hailing the forthcoming launch of a military payload hosted on a commercial satellite, funding could be an obstacle to a future Pentagon satellite infrastructure that relies heavily on hosted payloads for service. SES-2 is slated to launch Sept. 17 on an Ariane 5 rocket. The satellite, made by Orbital Sciences Corp., will carry the Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (Chirp) made by Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).
AIR FORCE M1 Support Services, Denton, Texas, is being awarded a $10,039,809 firm-fixed-price with reimbursable line items contract modification to maintain mission-capable helicopters 24/7 at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont.; Minot Air Force Base, N.D.; and Yokota Air Force Base, Japan, as well as performing helicopter aircrew flight equipment support at Warren AFB and Malmstrom AFB. 21 CONS/LGCZB, Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., is the contracting activity (FA2517-10-C-8002, P00028). NAVY
Early cost estimates for the heavy-lift Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress has ordered NASA to build indicate the agency believes it can test an unmanned version of the “core” vehicle selected by Administrator Charles Bolden for about $18 billion by the end of 2017.
Steven Squyres, the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover mission and chair of the National Research Council (NRC) panel that determined priorities for the next 10 years of U.S. planetary exploration, doesn’t want his colleagues to try to kill the troubled James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to carve out funding for planetary science.
CUTTER CONTRACT: The Ingalls Shipbuilding unit of Huntington Ingalls Industries has received a $482.8 million fixed-price-incentive-firm contract from the U.S. Coast Guard to build the fifth National Security Cutter (WMSL-754) at the company’s yard in Pascagoula, Miss. Ingalls has delivered the first three NSCs, which are designed to replace the 378-ft. Hamilton-class High-Endurance cutters from the 1960s era.
The inflight failure of Blue Origin’s second test vehicle isn’t necessarily a failure of the secretive company’s efforts to begin launching scientists and space tourists on a reusable suborbital rocket, and won’t affect NASA’s plans to use private launchers to get cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS)
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) Sept. 12 — Aviation Week A&D Finance Europe, Landmark Hotel, London, U.K. For more information go to www.aviationweek.com/events SEPT. 12 - 15 — Introduction to Aeronautics: A Practical Perspective, National Institute of Aerospace, Hampton, Va. For more information call (970) 887-3155 or go to www.practicalaero.com
PRICEY REPORT: A second Pentagon audit of alleged contractor overpricing in U.S. Army depot work is catching attention on Capitol Hill. “Unfortunately, this latest report from the Department of Defense’s Inspector General is yet another example illustrating the department’s broken and ineffective inventory and accounting systems,” says Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of that chamber’s Federal Financial Management subcommittee. The Sept. 8 audit found that Sikorsky overcharged the Army $11.8 million, or 51.4% more, than fair and reasonable prices for various parts.
PARIS — Astrium Services has landed its first contract for Pleiades high-resolution optical satellite imagery and data, inking a deal with Japan’s Pasco Corp., the satellite services division of EADS announced on Sept. 9.
LightSquared has proposed additional changes to its planned broadband wireless network to mitigate interference with GPS, but pressure is growing for further testing before a decision is made on whether to approve deployment of the revised system. LightSquared believes sufficient testing has been conducted to show most GPS receivers will not be overloaded by transmissions from its revised terrestrial network, but government witnesses at a congressional hearing Sept. 8 said tests already performed were not enough to ensure GPS would not still be compromised.
