PUSHBACK: The U.S. Army is pushing back hard on a Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruling that it erred in awarding a $4.65 billion linguist services contract to DynCorp last December. The loss of the contract to provide translators to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan stunned incumbent L-3 Communications and teammate Northrop Grumman, and forced L-3 to lower its earnings guidance for 2007.
NPOESS: U.S. Air Force and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officials say progress is being made with two troublesome sensors that have contributed to cost and schedule problems for the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). The Raytheon-made Visible/Infrared Imager/Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) only has one remaining issue - "optical crosstalk," or stray light tainting the sensor's readings, according to Mary Kicza, NOAA's director of satellite and information services.
Wall Street analysts say the U.S. Navy's cancellation of Lockheed Martin's second Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the third of the class now shared with General Dynamics, will not significantly impact the massive defense contractor's bottom-line, but they see the unusual Navy move as a telltale sign of a tightening fiscal environment. "We are not changing our financial forecast as the cancellation should have no short-term financial impact for the company," Merrill Lynch analysts told clients April 13.
SATELLITE PIRACY: Embarrassed Intelsat officials are assuring Sri Lanka's ambassador to the U.S., Bernard Goonetilleke, that they will stop "pirate" direct-to-home TV transmissions by the Tamil Tigers going over Intelsat spacecraft. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Sri Lanka-based group listed by the U.S. State Dept. as a terrorist organization, somehow gained access to an unused transponder on Intelsat 12 and used it beam messages into Sri Lankan homes.
WGS FOR SALE: International cooperation at the level seen on aircraft programs has so far eluded the military space realm. But that may be changing. Lt. Gen. Michael Hamel, U.S. Air Force program executive officer for space, says the Boeing Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) - formerly the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite - is a candidate for foreign military sales. Allies including Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia already have cooperated in U.S.-led satellite communications payload developments and use.
A federal information technology (IT) forecasting firm is predicting that contractors will start seeing the bottom-line effects of increased oversight on government purchasing as soon as fiscal 2008, adding to their profit pressures as a growing number of companies chase a limited pool of wartime funding.
COMMON SPACE: U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, U.S. Strategic Command chief, says he's committed to developing a common operating picture for space products that can be shared by U.S. allies. "It is going to have to be done this year or someone is going to have to shoot me," he says. A hindrance to that goal is the multi-level security for allies and a lack of integration between disparate systems that collect data. Cartwright also wants to devise a system with commercial providers of space products that resembles U.S.
RIDE SHARING: NASA is in preliminary talks with potential commercial and military users of the Ares launch vehicles the agency is developing under its Constellation program. The human-rated Ares I and heavy-lift Ares V are designed to get humans back to the moon and beyond. But Administrator Michael Griffin says the more users that can be found for them, the better. Aside from he benefits of larger production runs and more flight experience that would come from a bigger Ares user base, turning the taxpayer-funded launch vehicles over to other U.S.
JSF FUTURE: If Lockheed Martin keeps the price down for its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) it will rule the market around the globe, Teal Group analyst Richard Aboulafia says in his recent briefing on the aircraft (see p. 5). After F-22, F/A-18E/F, Rafale, "Gripen, Eurofighter, Su-35, and F-2 production has ended, most countries will have only one option: F-35," he says. "Their national aerospace companies might get to license-build them, and the planes will have a high local content. But they'll be designed in, and supported by, Ft. Worth.
SMALL SATS: Israel Aerospace Industries and Canada-based small satellite company Caneus NPS Inc. will collaborate on a constellation of small satellites for space-based Earth observation under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) recently signed by the two organizations. The agreement also will enable both companies to jointly pursue new and emerging applications for the satellites, Caneus says. Arie Halsband, general manager of IAI's MBT Space Division, and Caneus Chairman Milind Pimprikar signed the MOU.
MGS REPORT: According to a preliminary report, a computer error made months earlier started the series of events that doomed NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), which orbited the red planet for a decade before failing last November (DAILY, Nov. 10). After receiving routine commands to warm up its camera and move its solar arrays, MGS re-oriented itself at an angle that exposed one of its two batteries to direct sunlight, which eventually caused both batteries to fail.
The U.S. Marine Corps announced April 13 that the first MV-22 Osprey deployment would be to Iraq for seven months starting September, where the aircraft's main role will be carrying troops into combat. The first operational squadron for the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor will be the Marine Medium Tiltrotor 263 of Marine Aircraft Group 26. Although the Ospreys mainly will carry troops, according to Lt. Gen. John Castellaw, deputy commandant for aviation, the aircraft also can be used to carry other cargo such as injured personnel.
An April 13 DAILY story on the Boeing tanker proposal submission misprinted the fuel savings estimate found by an independent analysis commissioned by Boeing for the KC-767 over a 25-year period as compared to the KC-30. The correct figure is $10 billion. Aerospace Daily regrets the error.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be squarely on track, but still faces its share of questions and obstacles related to cost and foreign participation, says a recent report by Teal Group. "The F-35 offers a lot of promise," reported Richard Aboulafia, Teal Group vice president in his March "World Civil & Military Aircraft Briefing" on the JSF. "But it's also a skeptic's playground."
COLORADO SPRINGS -- U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright says the Chinese made two unsuccessful attempts at an anti-satellite intercept before the successful test in January. During those earlier tests, at least one of which took place last year, the Chinese interceptor boosted into space but missed the target. The re-entry vehicles later fell back to Earth, an intelligence official says.
TECH TRANSFER: The Heritage Foundation is preparing a policy study on technology transfer regulations in the post-Cold War world. Baker Spring, a defense spending expert at the conservative Washington think tank, says he's talking to representatives of industry, foreign governments, other think tanks and policymakers in both the legislative and executive branches. The study seeks to come up with proposals for making export controls more effective to meet current U.S. security needs, including the war on terrorism.
Costs in the U.S. Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program have increased by 12 percent as of December 2006, according to recently issued Pentagon Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) figures, and the rise is drawing scrutiny by military space and budget analysts. "That 12 percent is a big deal," said John Edwards of Forecast International. "It's going to have an effect for missile procurement."
The Pentagon's dedication to network-centric transformation is helping it deploy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) information technology (IT) faster than ever to solve urgent wartime problems, according to one of the Defense Department's senior IT officials. David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defense and deputy chief information officer (CIO), says all of the military services, and even U.S. allies, are collaborating in unprecedented ways to create IT systems that can share data across boundaries.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced April 11 that they plan to restore the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Limb sensor to the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) spacecraft and share the costs of the reinstatement equally. NASA and NOAA are giving NPOESS prime Northrop Grumman "conditional authority" to begin work on OMPS, they said, but final authorization will be contingent on negotiating an acceptable price for the work with the company. 'Small but important step'
SMART-T AWARD: Raytheon said April 12 that it has received an $84.6 million contract to produce upgrade kits for its Secure Mobile Anti-jam Reliable Tactical Terminal, or SMART-T, for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, as well as Canada and The Netherlands. The Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) kits expand by a factor of four times the data rate of existing SMART-T systems. The Army's SMART-T is the first AEHF system to go into production to communicate with the next generation of AEHF communications satellites.
LCS 3 KILLED: U.S. Navy Secretary Donald Winter announced late April 12 that the service was terminating construction of the third Littoral Combat Ship (LCS 3). The Navy and Lockheed Martin could not reach agreement on the terms of a modified contract to shift more risk toward the contractor, according to a Pentagon statement. The Navy remains committed to completing construction of LCS 1 under the current contract with Lockheed Martin.
