UN-FEES-ABLE: The $32.08 billion Homeland Security Department spending bill passed by the House includes $6.3 billion for the Transportation Security Administration but rejects a White House-proposed $1.3 billion airline passenger security fee increase. The spending amount itself is more than $1 billion higher than President Bush's budget request for fiscal 2007. Bush wants to replace the current two-tiered security fee schedule with a single, flat fee of $5 for a one-way trip, doubling the fee for passengers flying nonstop.
P-3C PROGRAM: Lockheed Martin Aircraft and Logistics Centers of Greenville, S.C., has been awarded a $125.8 million contract modification for the U.S. Navy P-3C Orion's sustainment, modification and installation program, the Defense Department said June 9. The work will be done in Greenville, S.C., and is set to be finished in June 2007. The contract was awarded by the Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Md.
SPACE COOPERATION: Italian space agency ASI plans to participate in a pair of projects aimed at reinforcing space cooperation with Argentina. The first, to be undertaken with Argentine space agency Conae and the University of Cordoba, will seek to make Earth observation data and services available to other Latin American countries.
House and Senate appropriators have agreed to a congressional compromise over the mid-year fiscal 2006 supplemental spending measure, including $65.8 billion for the Defense Department's operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same level as the Bush administration's revised budget request. "It will enable the Defense Department to avoid absorbing incremental operating costs from within baseline programs that are critical to future readiness and home-station activities," said a Senate Appropriations Committee statement late June 8.
Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale says that NASA's ability to up the pace of shuttle flights to the rate necessary for completing the International Space Station by 2010 will be contingent not on orbiter turnaround but on how quickly it can analyze in-flight anomalies.
The U.S. Naval Sea Systems Command has extended General Dynamics Corp.'s Electric Boat shipbuilding unit $30.7 million more, via a performance incentive contract modification, for continued performance of developmental studies and design efforts on Virginia-class submarine design and design improvements. Almost all of Electric Boat's work will be performed in Groton, Conn., with 5 percent in Quonset, R.I. and a little in Newport, R.I. The modification runs through September 2007, according to a June 8 Defense Department announcement.
House defense appropriators have marked up legislation providing $377.6 billion for defense spending in fiscal 2007, plus a requested $50 billion bridge fund for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is funded at $3 billion, about $326 million below the request but an increase of $227 million above the FY '06 level. The cut is due to development and contracting delays, according to a House Appropriations Committee statement.
GALILEO PROPOSAL: The European Commission has proposed that the Galileo Joint Undertaking responsible for managing development of the Galileo satnav system and picking a concessionaire to deploy and run the system be wound up by year's end, and its activities transferred to the Galileo Supervisory Authority. GJU officials say concessionaire negotiations are on track for an agreement by the end of December, with a contract signature expected by the second quarter of 2007.
GLOBAL HAWK BASELINE: Total program cost for the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle is now pegged at $7.7 billion in a new baseline approved by Pentagon acquisition czar Ken Krieg, according to a program source. That cost, recently reported to Congress as part of a program certification from the Pentagon, covers development of the high-flying reconnaissance drone and 54 air vehicle purchases. The former price, before cost overruns in recent years, was $5.2 billion.
TANKER RESPONSE: Northrop Grumman and EADS North America have jointly submitted their response to the U.S. Air Force's request for information (RFI) on the replacement for the aging KC-135 tanker aircraft, the companies announced June 9. The companies plan to offer the Air Force the KC-30, derived from the A330 passenger jet, which would be assembled and modified in Mobile, Ala. Rival Boeing plans to offer the service its KC-767.
Pentagon worries about the Chinese military buildup don't foretell a new Cold War-style arms race between the U.S. and China, according to a panel of Asia experts. The economies of the two nations are too intertwined to revert to the 20th century chess game of Soviet expansion and U.S. containment, speakers told a Heritage Foundation discussion of the Pentagon's latest report on People's Liberation Army expansion.
INTERIM CHIEF: L-3 Communications Corp.'s CFO will lead the company on an acting basis while it looks for a permanent successor to CEO Frank C. Lanza, who died unexpectedly on June 6. Michael T. Strianese will hold the dual positions of CFO and interim CEO while three board members lead a search for a new CEO. Strianese has been with L-3 since it was founded in 1997 and was promoted to CFO in early 2005 after co-founder and CFO Robert V. LaPenta left the company. As expected, L-3's board also appointed longtime director Robert B. Millard as its nonexecutive chairman.
Members of the House Science Committee expressed skepticism of the new plan for the scaled-back National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) during a hearing on Capitol Hill June 8, along with frustration over the Pentagon's failure to deliver detailed supporting documents to the committee on time.
A hefty review by the Congressional Budget Office of the U.S. Navy's 313-ship shipbuilding and force structure plan, which casts doubt on the service's surface and subsurface fleet proposals, also raises questions over the future of naval aircraft. The CBO report comes as Navy officials are examining their aircraft enterprise for cost savings and reductions to pay for shipbuilding and other Bush administration priorities, such as increased border security (DAILY, May 19).
Engineers reviewing the biggest aerodynamic change to the space shuttle since it began flying 25 years ago have cleared it for the STS-121 mission upcoming next month. A design certification review at the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans, where the big shuttle external tank is manufactured, concluded that removal of the Protruberance Air Load (PAL) ramp will not subject the pressurization lines and cable trays it protected to excess aerodynamic loads.
Researchers analyzing gravity data collected by the U.S./German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) spacecraft believe they have discovered the site of an ancient meteor impact that wiped out almost all life on Earth. Hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the area south of Australia known as Wilkes Land, the 250-million-year-old crater measures 300 miles across, suggesting it was caused by a meteor as big as 30 miles wide.
IRAN RISING: The U.S. Navy's Littoral Combat Ship and its proposed slew of underwater unmanned vehicles could be useful platforms in a Persian Gulf engagement with Iran, analysts told the House Armed Services Committee. U.S. officials have long been wary of Iran's ability to plug up the Straight of Hormuz, they testified June 8. Still, such a move - stopping or slowing oil shipments - would also be economic "suicide" for Iran, making the likelihood questionable.
