Hughes Aircraft Co. capped off a successful week in the international marketplace Friday with an announcement that it has received a contract to build two satellites and related ground stations for Afro-Asian Satellite Communications Ltd. (ASC).
The House VA, HUD and independent agencies appropriations subcommittee, which funds NASA, is slated to hold its first hearing tomorrow. The hearing will focus on restructuring government.
HARRIS CORP., Melbourne, Fla., said it has received a five-year, $49.5 million U.S. Air Force contract for consolidated system support services for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.
Industry is finally coming around to accept that affordability is an imperative in the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program, says JAST program manager Brig. Gen. George Muellner. "It's been very positive how industry is really thinking about affordability," he says. "That wasn't the case necessarily when we started this process a year ago. But I guarantee you, they've all got religion now. They're all really aggressively working that."
Aspin says the commission won't shroud itself in secrecy and then issue a report when its done. The public has to be brought in on what's going on, he says, but he also acknowledges that a process on how to do that-such as public hearings-has yet to be determined.
Kasich tells The DAILY later that he has no plans to put his proposal into the budget resolution his committee is drafting, since the idea is too sweeping to be worked out in six weeks-the time he has left before reporting a budget resolution. He says the committee can make suggestions as to the direction it wants to go. The Defense Dept., he says, can do "significant off-the-shelf buying and leasing." He mentions computers as an area for leasing.
Shana L. Dale, the Republican assistant legislative director and counsel to the House Science Committee's space subcommittee, will be appointed staff director of the space panel, sources said Friday. An official announcement could be made as early as today. Dale, reached for comment Friday, said she couldn't confirm her appointment "at this point."
While Republicans are pushing for a stabilized defense budget, actual increases aren't in the cards, Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) tells senior Pentagon officials. "We do not feel, as much as we believe added funds are needed for defense, that they are there or forthcoming," he says at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP., Hawthorne, Calif., has received a $72.4 million contract from the U.S. Army for the second phase of a pre-planned product improvement program for BAT, the "brilliant" anti-tank submunition. The company said the new contract covers advanced seeker technologies that will increase effectiveness against launchers of the missiles like the Scud, as well as other stationary vehicles. The current configuration uses acoustic and IR seekers to attack tanks and other armored vehicles.
U.S. industry and government officials are scratching their heads over last week's moves by French Transport Minister Bernard Bosson to pledge 2 billion francs in research funds for enginemaker SNECMA and airframer Aerospatiale, telling The DAILY that both the implications and intentions of the plan aren't clear.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) says there is "huge support" in Congress for restoring the budget firewalls, which were in effect from fiscal 1991 to 1993, and prohibited transfer of defense funds to domestic spending. Domenici plans to write a fiscal '96 budget resolution in committee with the walls included, and have it on the Senate floor by mid-March. The last time the Senate took up the issue was in 1993, when it voted 53-45 to restore the walls-a majority, but short of the three-fifths vote required in the Senate.
If the Air Force wants to buy more B-2 bombers, it should stop thinking of paying for them by getting cutting down on Navy carriers, says Rear Adm. Thomas Lynch, the Navy's roles and missions director: "How do they pay for it? The Air Force says that's easy, take it out of carriers. I say, okay, delay the F-22." He adds that he doesn't "know a hell of a lot about what the Army and Air Force do," and that the services should discuss issues as they come onto the table instead of "bash" each other over them.
Rockwell International put the finishing touches on its $1.6 billion acquisition of Reliance Electric Co. Friday as it finished buying all of its target's Class C common stock for $440 million. "With this latest, very important strategic move, Rockwell solidifies its position as a first-tier global industrial automation enterprise," said Rockwell Chairman Donald R. Beall. It also means Rockwell's combined industrial automation businesses will generate some $3.5 billion in sales each year.
For about a year, McDonnell Douglas engineers have been testing what they call the "Diamond"-an unmanned aircraft with a 10-foot-by-10-foot planform like a hollowed-out diamond that weighs about 33 pounds and can fly 80-90 knots. Right now, the experimental vehicle, painted black and white and built from off-the-shelf materials, has no customer and no defined application. So why has the company invested its own money-admittedly only about $5,000 on capital costs and extra dollars for labor-to build an engineer's dream?
LITTON DATA SYSTEMS DIV., Agoura Hills, Calif., is working under a $27.8 million U.S. Air Force contract to continue pre-planned product improvement on the Modular Control Element (MCE), a command and control system. MCE and its Marine Corps counterpart, the Tactical Air Operations Module (TAOM), control the employment of friendly aircraft in tactical missions. Litton said the newest upgrade will further improve MCE integration into the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS).
Congress has already filled the eight commission appointments it was allotted. They are: Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), who drew up legislation last year that mandated the panel; Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.); Reps. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) and Porter Goss (R-Fla.); former Sens. Wyche Fowler and Tony Coehlo; Texas businessman David Dewhurst, and Robert Pursley of Connecticut.
Block 50 F-16 fighters began returning to service late Friday after a three-day stand-down prompted by a crash on Jan. 13 involving a U.S. Air Forces-Europe F-16D with an F110-GE-129 engine, officials told The DAILY. They said the accident appeared to stem from foreign object damage, or FOD.
REFLECTONE INC., Tampa, Fla., said it anticipates a contract early this year from Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Co. worth some $70 million over the next three years. Under the contract, Reflectone would provide two C-130J full-flight simulators and other related training devices and services.
McDonnell Douglas is moving more slowly than it had hoped it would on launching the MD-95 jetliner program, admits Chief Financial Officer Herb Lanese, but it's not any slower than the aircraft market generally. "We're talking with at least four interested parties who would be the drivers in launching the airplane," he says, but there's "nothing really new." Originally the DC-9 revival was supposed to be launched late last year, and then sometime in the first quarter of this year.
Aspin says the commission's "first order of questions" will deal with three areas: targets, organization and cost. It will also examine the possibility of dividing more responsibility for intelligence activities with U.S. allies, he says.
House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio), in an exchange with Martin Marietta Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Norman R. Augustine at a House National Security Committee hearing, suggests shrinking the procurement process by buying off-the-shelf equipment or leasing the equipment, and mentions helicopters as a candidate. Augustine agrees that "for some types of equipment, you could do exactly what you said."
A list of appointees to round out the membership on the commission that will review the post-Cold War roles and missions of U.S. intelligence is awaiting President Clinton's approval, former Defense Secretary Les Aspin, the commission's chairman, tells an American Bar Association audience in Washington. Aspin says he isn't worried over the amount of time it has taken Clinton to fill the final eight slots on the 17-member bipartisan commission. "This is not a problem," he says.
NASA television producers reject, after serious discussion, a suggestion that they play Johann Strauss' "On The Beautiful Blue Danube" as background music when the agency's internal network broadcasts the upcoming Space Shuttle Atlantis docking mission to Russia's Mir. Film maker Stanley Kubrick used the familiar waltz as the soundtrack for a famous animated docking sequence in his 1968 classic "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Some Russians are raising similar questions. A front page article in Izvestia last week asked why the Khrunichev works is selling the FGB "space tug" that will form the core of the International Station for roughly half its real cost, particularly when Russia is expending far more space launch vehicles than it is building. A month of fighting in Chechnya costs more than Russia's 610 billion-ruble space budget, the independent newspaper notes, and almost 70% of Russia's assets in space have surpassed their design lives.
DIAGNOSTIC/RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS INC., Oakland, Calif., said its Precision Echo subsidiary has received two multi-year contracts worth over $25 million. U.S. Naval Air Systems Command chose Precision Echo's video tape recorder for deployment on the F/A-18 aircraft, a contract initially worth $3.1 million but potentially valued at $13 million. In addition, the company was authorized to spend $5 million under a $12.5 million award from Lockheed for engineering services and modified AN/USH-42 Mission Recording Systems for the S-3B aircraft. Stuart F.
