H-1 UPGRADES: U.S. Navy and Office of the Secretary of defense spokespeople won't confirm or deny, but Reuters has reported that Defense Acquisitions Board officials have decided to let Bell Helicopter Textron keep its $8 billion H-1 helicopter upgrade contract, finding that Bell has taken the necessary steps to better manage progress and costs. The DAB hosted a meeting May 31 to discuss the troubled program, but OSD only said an acquisition decision memorandum would be forthcoming.
PACKBOT ORDERS: On the heels of a similar award to Foster-Miller Inc., the U.S. Navy has ordered $64.3 million worth of iRobot Corp.'s Packbot robots, parts and training for the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office. Joint Robotics repair facilities and imbedded repair teams are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but iRobot will work in its Burlington, Mass., facility. Foster-Miller and iRobot provide the Defense Department robots under the Navy's Man-Transportable Robotic Systems program (DAILY, May 24).
The Russian space agency is moving ahead with development of the first Russian robotic mission to the moon in 30 years. The new "Luna-Glob" mission is now a formal part of the Russian space plan with launch set for 2012, says Nikolay F. Moiseev, deputy director of the Russian space agency. With the new lunar flight plan, Russia joins the U.S., China, India, Japan and Europe in planning for renewed exploration of the moon.
NASA may use some 40-year-old facilities left over from its last moon program to test vehicles under development for the next one, but computing advances over those 40 years will give engineers a leg up on their predecessors. ATK Launch Systems, for example, has just bought an advanced supercomputer to help with the design of the planned Crew Launch Vehicle's first stage. The Linux Network device will deliver 2.24 trillion floating-point operations with 110 nodes, with special displays for large-scale aerospace analysis models.
GUAM GROWING: The Joint Guam Military Master Plan calls for $10 billion to $15 billion in infrastructure improvements in Guam over the next 15 years to transform the U.S. territory from a military logistics hub to the "tip of the spear," defense officials say. The plan, being fine-tuned for delivery next month to Navy Adm. William Fallon, head of U.S. Pacific Command, will usher in a construction boom that's expected to top $1 billion a year.
Looking to focus on its more profitable divisions, primarily aerospace and defense, Textron Inc. announced June 1 that it will sell its Fastening Systems business to Platinum Equity, a private equity investment firm, for $630 million in cash and assumption of debt. Cash proceeds after taxes and transaction costs are expected to be about $670 million, Textron said. The deal, which is subject to certain closing adjustments, is expected to close during the third quarter.
REPOSITIONING RLEP: NASA field centers get official word this week on the work packages they will handle as President Bush's exploration program moves ahead. Administrator Michael Griffin and Scott Horowitz, chief of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, will brief agency staff and reporters separately June 5 on the changes, which feature a shift of two key lunar exploration efforts to Marshall Space Flight Center. Rep.
USAF SERVICES: Large, flexible service contracts are representing an increasingly large chunk of U.S. Air Force acquisition, according to Lt. Gen. Donald Hoffman, military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. "Of my 44 programs that are over a billion dollars, 17 of them are services contracts," he says. "This is really a shift we're having now.
GOLDEN OLDIE: Boeing's rivals in the $11 billion Air Force Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR-X) aircraft competition are taking its HH-47 entry seriously, even though it's based on the 1960s-vintage Chinook cargo helicopter. Stephen Moss, CEO of AgustaWestland North America, ranks Boeing's heavy lifter offering at No. 2 behind his group's US101 entry and ahead of Sikorsky's smaller HH-92. AgustaWestland is teamed with Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter to produce the US101, a variant of which won the VXX presidential helicopter replacement competition last year.
ANOTHER STEP: Crews are preparing Europe's Columbus International Space Station module for checkout at Kennedy Space Center, where it will remain until its planned launch late next year. An Airbus Beluga outsize-cargo transport delivered the 1 billion euro ($1.3 billion) laboratory module to the Shuttle Landing Facility at KSC on May 30. First up on the preflight test agenda is four months of pressure testing, followed by systems power-up seven months before launch, which is currently scheduled for September 2007.
The U.S. Navy on June 1 awarded Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Ship Systems unit a contract for construction of two Amphibious Transport Dock Ships, LPD 22 and 23, as well as material and associated labor for LPD 24. Northrop Grumman asserted that the expected, $2.49 billion award demonstrated the Navy's confidence in its shipbuilding. The company, one of two remaining large U.S. warship builders, has been criticized recently for problems in some programs such as the LPD 17, Virginia-class submarine and Advanced SEAL Delivery System.
The first of the U.S. Air Force's Wideband Gapfiller Satellites (WGS) has completed vibration and acoustic testing, satellite manufacturer Boeing announced June 1. Boeing is preparing the WGS spacecraft for launch on a Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket in the second quarter of 2007. The tests, conducted in April at Boeing's satellite development facility in El Segundo, Calif., exposed the spacecraft to vibration and acoustic stresses to ensure it can withstand launch into space.
GLOBAL HAWK: The U.S. Air Force's Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle program is expected to receive formal Pentagon recertification this week after last year's violation of Nunn-McCurdy cost growth caps, according to an industry source. Under the law, for the program to avoid cancellation the Pentagon must certify that it has a good cost estimate for the program, it is essential to national security and no viable alternatives exist.
June 5 - 7 -- 2006 Navy Opportunity Forum, "Transitioning Technology to the Fleet," Hilton Washington, Washington, D.C. For more information go to www.navyopportunityforum.com. June 12 - 14 -- ACI-NA Marketing & Communications Conference and Jump Start, Hyatt Regency Austin, Austin, Texas, 202-293-3032, email [email protected].
The Defense Department needs to improve operational planning for ballistic missile defense, a congressional report said yesterday. The Pentagon must provide Congress with complete data on the operational costs of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS), according to the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress.
A lost foot restraint slowed but didn't stop the two-man crew of the International Space Station, who completed a 6 1/2-hour spacewalk last week after controllers in Moscow allowed them to add an hour to the time they spent outside in the Russian Orlan spacesuits.
MRO LAUNCH: NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has picked Lockheed Martin's Atlas V rocket to launch the Mars Science Laboratory rover to the red planet in the fall of 2009. The firm-fixed price launch contract is worth $36.2 million, including the rocket and mission integration requirements. The car-sized rover will spend two years exploring Mars searching for the building blocks of life.
SES Americom will use a Land Launch Zenit-3SLB-based booster to orbit its AMC-21 telecom spacecraft in mid-2008 under the sixth contract award for the Sea Launch spinoff.
A long-awaited, in-depth review by the Congressional Budget Office of the U.S. Navy's 313-ship shipbuilding and force structure plan concludes that unless shipbuilding budgets increase significantly in inflation-adjusted terms, or the Navy designs and builds much cheaper ships, its fleet size will fall substantially. In turn, a powerful congressman said June 1 that the CBO report "provides additional validation that the Navy's 30-year shipbuilding plan is unaffordable" for both the U.S. budget and national security.
The Customs and Border Protection's unmanned Predator B aircraft that crashed April 25 was downed by an apparent combination of pilot error and technical glitches, according to a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary notice.
Congressional restrictions on the U.S. Air Force's ability to retire its oldest aircraft appear to be easing up as the fiscal 2007 defense authorization process continues, according to Lt. Gen. Donald Hoffman, military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition.
