GROWTH RATE: A projected growth rate of less than 5 percent a year for the U.S. defense budget isn't enough to absorb the $90 billion in contracts that have been issued just since July, according to Credit Suisse/First Boston. "That amount [$90 billion], whose average expected duration is just over five years, suggests that the annual increase in defense investment (research and development plus procurement) spending would have to rise nearly 12 percent to cover these awards alone," CSFB says.
SWORN IN: Dionel M. Aviles was sworn in Oct. 8 as undersecretary of the Navy. Before his appointment, Aviles was assistant secretary of the Navy for financial management and comptroller. From 1995-2001, he was a professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee.
WestStart-CALSTART of Pasadena, Calif. has been awarded a $4.4 million contract by the U.S. Army's National Automotive Center (NAC) to speed development of advanced heavy-duty vehicle technologies for commercial and military uses, the company said Oct. 6. The contract will cover dual-use technology development and heavy-duty hybrid truck deployment.
Ottawa, Canada-based Telesat's Anik F2, the world's largest commercial communications satellite, became fully operational this week after final in-orbit testing, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) said Oct. 7. With its C- and Ku-band transponders and Ka-band demonstration module, the Anik F2 will give customers across North America multimedia services and is the first satellite to fully commercialize the Ka frequency band, CSA said.
SEA LAUNCH: Sea Launch says it's ready to return to flight following an independent review that confirmed a cable short as the likely culprit in an anomaly that left Telstar 18 in a lower-than-planned orbit after its June 28 launch. The short caused the Zenit-3SL rocket's Block DM-SL upper stage to consume fuel faster than planned and shut down prematurely. Telstar 18 later was raised to its proper orbital position and is fully operational. Corrective actions have been taken to ensure the fault doesn't happen again, according to the company.
APPROVED: The Senate Armed Services Committee approved the nomination of Francis Harvey to be secretary of the Army and sent the nomination to the Senate floor Oct. 7, the Association of the United States Army said Oct. 8. Harvey is to take over for acting secretary Les Brownlee.
According to a new report from EADS North America, the company's KC-330 tanker "offers the best overall performance relative to the [EADS] KC-310 and both versions of the [Boeing] KC-767," which the Air Force planned to lease from Boeing before the deal was suspended.
All of the space shuttle's bolt catchers produced from 1995 to 1998, including those that flew on Columbia's last mission, should have been rejected by government inspectors, according to a recent report by NASA's inspector general (IG).
ROBUST GPS: The Global Positioning System could continue to function even if up to four satellites were disabled, according to a study commissioned by the Federation of American Scientists. The study found that the GPS constellation is "very robust because of the altitude (roughly 20,000 kilometers, high enough that it takes 12 hours for each satellite to complete one orbit) and the large number of satellite used, a total of 24." The FAS study recommends that smart weapons that use GPS be "made more robust."
Space Imaging's future is in doubt following the loss of the second and final NextView contract, which was integral to the development of the company's next-generation imaging satellites. Competitors DigitalGlobe of Longmont, Colo., and Orbimage of Dulles, Va., both have received NextView contracts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) that could be worth up to $500 million each and will help the companies build next-generation imaging satellites with resolutions of 0.5 meters or higher.
INTELLIGENCE REFORM: The House of Representatives on Oct. 8 passed by a vote of 282-134 the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act (HR 10), a measure that would overhaul how the U.S. intelligence community is structured. The Senate passed its measure, the National Intelligence Reform Act (S 2845), on Oct. 6 by a vote of 96-2. Both bills would create a national intelligence director to oversee U.S. intelligence activities. The measures now go to a House-Senate conference committee.
The U.S. Air Force's top two officials flew aboard the V-22 Osprey for the first time Oct. 8, according to a spokeswoman at Marine Corps Air Station New River, N.C., where the flying took place. Although the Air Force had no immediate comment on the trip by Air Force Secretary James Roche and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper, the Marine Corps spokeswoman said the event went as planned, including a parachute drop from the Bell-Boeing tiltrotor aircraft by Army Gen. Bryan Brown, head of U.S. Special Operations Command.
The Bush Administration's spending on research and development for space weapons is creating an "unstoppable momentum" that will result in deployment of those weapons in the near term, said Leonard Weiss, chairman of the Federation of American Scientists Panel on Weapons in Space.
The Department of Defense information technology (IT) budget over the next five years is expected to be down slightly from last year's estimate, says a new report by the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA). The DOD's IT budget is expected to be $28.7 billion in fiscal 2005, and it is expected to grow 4.4 percent to $35.6 billion by fiscal 2010, GEIA said Oct. 7. This compares with last year's estimation, when GEIA predicted a 4.6 percent growth rate for DOD IT through 2009, Jim Serafin, GEIA spokesman, told The DAILY.
The U.S. Department of Defense's Naval Air Systems Command at Naval Air Test Center Patuxent River, Md., has awarded London-based Rolls-Royce a $60 million follow-on logistic support contract for the F405-RR-401 (Adour) engines that power the U.S. Navy's T-45 training aircraft, Rolls-Royce said Oct. 5.
ENDGAME: House and Senate negotiators reached agreement Oct. 7 on the fiscal year 2005 defense authorization legislation. A compromise measure is expected to come up for a vote in both chambers Oct. 8, according to Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee. He declined to provide details of the agreement, except to confirm that a modified version of the "Buy American" provision had been retained in the compromise.
The Boeing Co. plans to begin flight-testing a laser-guided version of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) before year's end in hopes of fueling U.S. government interest in the weapon variant. The Boeing-funded testing, which will continue into 2005, will include dropping the modified air-to-surface munition from a fighter aircraft, said Donald Hutcheson, a Boeing business development manager for precision-guided weapons.
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) has won a $6.9 million contract from the U.S. Army for the Common Drive Trainer (CDT) Stryker Variant, part of a line of drive simulators for training soldiers on tracked, wheeled, and heavy equipment vehicles. The contract, awarded by the Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI), has a potential total value of $8.78 million if all options are exercised, the Army said Oct. 5.
The U.S. Air Force's chief of staff is expressing strong support for reviving the Space Based Radar (SBR) program, whose funding was recently slashed by congressional appropriators. "We think it is absolutely necessary to have a Space Based Radar," Gen. John Jumper said late Oct. 6. "I firmly believe that we need to continue this."
ISC2 CONTRACT: The Department of Defense has awarded Lockheed Martin Mission Systems of Colorado Springs, Colo., a $54.1 million contract modification for the Integrated Space Command and Control (ISC2), the DOD said Oct. 6. ISC2 will modernize the command and control (C2) system of the U.S. Strategic Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command into an interoperable, integrated, state-of-the-art capability to support the Canadian Chief of Defence Staff and the National Command Authority, the DOD said.
IT CONTRACT: Anteon International Corp., an information technology and systems engineering and integration company based in Fairfax, Va., has won a five-year, $150 million contract to support the Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System (CENTRIXS) and Linked Operations Intelligence Center Europe (LOCE) programs, the company said Oct. 5. The contract to support these two multinational information-sharing programs was awarded by the Department of Army Research, Development and Engineering Command Acquisition Center, Aberdeen, Md.
NASA is testing the ability of artificial intelligence software to find and analyze errors in a spacecraft's systems instead of having such analysis done on the ground, the aerospace agency said Oct. 7. NASA radioed Livingstone Version 2 software to the Earth Observing One (E-1) satellite, a testbed spacecraft launched in 2000. The satellite is controlled by software that is part of the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE). Livingstone Version 2 monitors the ASE software to detect errors, make diagnoses and transmit them to the ground.
The House of Representatives began consideration of its version of intelligence reform legislation, the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act (HR 10), on Oct. 7. The Senate passed its measure, the National Intelligence Reform Act (S 2845), by a vote of 96-2 the previous day. Both measures provide for wide-ranging reform of the U.S. intelligence community along the lines laid out by the 9/11 Commission.
Team US101 for the first time flew the US101 medium-lift helicopter it is bidding for the VXX Presidential Helicopter Replacement program, the Lockheed Martin-led team said Oct. 6.
