The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has approved Northrop Grumman's design for the Guardian system, intended to protect commercial aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles, the company said Aug. 22. Based on Northrop Grumman's Directional Infrared Countermeasures (DIRCM) system for military aircraft, Guardian is being developed under the second phase of DHS' Counter-MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense System) program. DIRCM automatically detects incoming heat-seeking missiles and blinds them with beams of light.
QUICKER COUGARS: Force Protection Inc. said the Marine Corps Systems Command has boosted its award for Cougar Joint Explosive Ordnance Disposal Rapid Response Vehicles to get the 122-vehicle order to the field faster. Last week, the Corps added $4.5 million to the order, which now totals $91 million. On Aug. 22, Force Protection said it has awarded $2.7 million to Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide for procedure development and process control expertise "to optimize and streamline" the Cougar production line for an accelerated schedule.
AGREED: Volga-Dnepr Group and Vnesheconombank have reached an agreement on financing terms for resuming An-124-100 aircraft production and continuing the Il-76 freighter modernization program, the companies announced Aug. 22. Representatives of Vnesheconombank, one of Russia's oldest banks, will analyze the Volga-Dnepr Group's projects and finance them, Volga-Dnepr said.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking proposals for the first phase of the supersonic "Switchblade" oblique flying wing (OFW) technology demonstration aircraft program. The agency envisions an "X-Plane" program leading to a "revolutionary" capability. Proposals are due Oct. 3. The idea of an OFW aircraft has been studied for years, and NASA flight-tested a subsonic model in 1994.
Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Md., has awarded four contracts for the Persistent Unmanned Maritime Airborne Surveillance capability broad agency announcement.
NFIRE PAYLOAD: The U.S. Missile Defense Agency has decided to add a German laser communications terminal to its Near Field InfraRed Experiment (NFIRE) satellite. While the terminal is a commercial payload and is unrelated to the NFIRE mission, Germany needed a way to launch the device, so MDA is just "giving them a ride," MDA engineer Kevin Robinson says.
Tel-Instrument Electronics Corp. said its first-quarter fiscal 2006 results showed an increase in sales but a decrease in net income over the same period last year. Sales increased 12% over the 2005 quarter, to $3.15 million, while net income was $29,148, down from $52,554 the year before, the Carlstadt, N.J.-based avionics test and measurement system maker said.
PRAGUE - The European Commission has cleared German defense company Rheinmetall to purchase 50% of infrared technology company AIM Infrarot-Module GmbH of Heilbronn, Germany, from EHG Elektroholding GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany. The green light means that AIM will become a joint venture of Rheinmetall and another German company, Diehl, which specializes in electronic controls, avionics and defense.
DIRECTION: Naval Sea Systems Command's focus should be "putting capabilities in the hands of the warfighter," says Vice Adm. Paul Sullivan, the new commander.
The U.S. Army has awarded contracts to five companies to provide training, doctrine and combat development services for its Future Combat Systems program, according to service officials. The Army's Training, Doctrine and Combat Development Directorate awarded deals to CACI, Camber, RTI International, Northrop Grumman and Dynamics Research Corp. to vie for task orders in the training portion of the program. Services that the companies will compete to provide include updating armor-related training products, programs and strategies for FCS.
Aug. 22 - 25 -- Joint ADL Co-Lab Implementation Fest 2005, Orlando Airport Marriott, Orlando, Fla. For more information call (703) 247-9471 or go to www.trainingsystems.org/events. Aug. 23 - 24 -- DOD Enterprise Architectures, "Integrating Service-Wide Architectures in the Global Information Grid," Holiday Inn, Rosslyn at Key Bridge, Arlington, Va. For more information go to www.technologytraining.com.
NEW SLOT: The European Space Agency's second Meteosat Second Generation satellite now will be launched closer to the end of this year, rather than by early fall, ESA says. The weather satellite has been shipped to the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, and is being stored there until launch. The first of the new satellites, MSG-1, now known as Meteosat 8, was launched in August 2002 and declared operational in January 2004.
Allied Defense Group Inc. subsidiary SeaSpace has been awarded a contract worth up to $1 million from Canada's MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. for a ground station tracking antenna. The antenna, which has a dual-channel Ka-band uplink and K-band downlink, will support a technical demonstration of MDA's commercial space-based digital courier service, Cascade, the company said.
The Government Accountability Office is "unaware of any progress" that the U.S. Department of Defense has made in implementing a 2004 recommendation that it work with the Office of Personnel Management to get rid of security clearance delays and backlogs. In a letter to Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on government management, GAO official Derek B. Stewart said the DOD has given his agency "a few actions."
PRAGUE - The Czech Republic's defense ministry has chosen four finalists for a $1 billion contract to provide the country's army with nearly 200 armored personnel carriers. The companies, named Aug. 17, are General Dynamics-owned Steyr-Daimler-Puch of Austria; BAE Systems' U.S.-based subsidiary BAE Systems Land and Armaments; Patria of Finland; and Rheinmetall of Germany. Bumar of Poland, Italy's Iveco Fiat and the Czech company Globtrade Air were eliminated.
MORE AMMO: Alliant Lake City Small Caliber Ammunition Co. will provide additional small-caliber ammunition to the U.S. Army under a $13.4 million delivery order, the U.S. Department of Defense said Aug. 19. The work is expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2006.
SCRUBBER TROUBLE: Expedition 11 Cmdr. Sergei Krikalev is troubleshooting the Russian Vozdukh carbon dioxide removal system onboard the International Space Station, which has been shut down since Aug. 11 while Russian engineers have worked on recovery plans. The station now is reliant on the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) in the U.S. portion of the ISS. The CDRA also failed on Aug. 18 because of a stuck check valve, briefly leaving the station without any scrubbing capability at all, but is back up and running now in a limited mode.
SATELLITE TRACKING: The U.S. Army is considering doing new research to improve its ability to track satellites that could be used to spy on American soldiers, says Michael Schexnayder, deputy to the commander for research, development and acquisition at the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. The Army is concerned that potential enemies increasingly have access to satellite imagery from commercial sources or their own satellites. "If you got a big imaging satellite coming over every couple hours, people probably know pretty well what you're doing," Schexnayder says.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - When the U.S. Defense Department gave the go-ahead earlier this month to develop the JLENS aerostat system (DAILY, Aug. 11, 12), the Army got just about everything it had asked for, with one notable exception.
HUBBLE COSTS: Keeping the option open to perform a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission will begin costing NASA an estimated $10 million a month if the agency defers the decision on whether to proceed past December 2007. "Obviously we need data from the last shuttle flight and upcoming shuttle flights to be able to make a Hubble decision," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin says.
AEGIS BMD: The next test of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD) system is scheduled for mid-November and will be the first test in which the target missile's warhead separates from the missile body, says Navy Rear Adm. Kathleen Paige, program director for Aegis BMD. Although the test will use only part of the capability of the interceptor warhead's newly upgraded divert system, that mode meets all the requirements for the current development block, Paige says.
