General Dynamics has completed its tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Force Protection, Inc., for $5.52 per share in cash, GD announced Dec. 19. The two companies announced back on Nov. 7 that they had reached agreement on the terms of a merger under which Force Protection would become a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics, being slotted in as part of General Dynamics Land Systems.
The Littoral Combat Ship’s (LCS) remote minehunting system recently completed the first phase of reliability testing, U.S. Navy and contractor Lockheed Martin announced. The RMS is a critical component of the ship’s mine countermeasures mission package, providing an off-board mine reconnaissance capability. The system completed more than 500 hr. of offshore, in-water testing, including line-of-sight and over-the-horizon communications checks and full exercise of vehicle control, mobility, maneuvering, and sonar towing capability.
With the final F-22 rolling off Lockheed Martin’s assembly line, the Marietta, Ga., facility is now focusing its efforts on making its C-130J and C‑5M operations more efficient. The Raptor business is not dead, though. A massive program, once estimated to cost as much as $8 billion to modify the twin-engine stealthy fighters, is under way and delivering through the next several years.
On the heels of the announcement of Stratolaunch, which will air-launch a SpaceX falcon rocket from a six-engine, 385-ft.-span mothership, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is looking at the other end of the scale with its new Airborne Launch Assist Space Access (Alasa) program. Alasa aims to air-launch 100-lb. satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO) from an essentially unmodified aircraft, such as a business jet.
With last month’s keel-laying and the anticipated U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on recent U.S. Navy destroyer fleet decisions expected to be released in January, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class is receiving greater attention.
AEHF ACTIVATION: U.S. Air Force officials plan to turn the new Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) jam-proof communications satellite over for operational use in early 2012 after a protracted journey into orbit and subsequent testing period. The Lockheed Martin satellite, worth more than $1 billion and launched Aug. 14, 2010, experienced an onboard liquid apogee engine failure, forcing operators to employ other thrusters for a 14-month journey 22,000 mi. into geosynchronous orbit.
GMD AWARD: U.S. Missile Defense Agency officials expect to announce by year-end the winner of a contract worth at least $600 million annually to maintain and upgrade the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) ballistic missile shield. Boeing/Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin/Raytheon are dueling for the work, which initially spans seven years. Boeing is the incumbent, but fell out of favor with MDA off and on owing to problems managing the massive system of sensors and interceptors, based in Alaska and California.
You wouldn’t know it from reading the headlines, but the aerospace and defense industry turned in a strong performance in 2011. A new forecast released Dec. 14 by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) projects that sales will end the year at $218 billion, up 3.5% from 2010.
After bringing the nation to the brink of another government shutdown—the fourth this year—the House passed a raft of spending bills Dec. 16, including one to provide $518 billion for the Department of Defense that largely protects its largest weapons program, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
MOSCOW — Russia’s national satellite navigation system, Glonass, finally has regained its full operational capability to provide global coverage. The Glonass operational fleet now includes 24 satellites: eight on each of the three orbital planes. The last, the 24th Glonass-M spacecraft, entered into service on Dec. 8. It is from the last batch of the three satellites orbited on Nov. 4 aboard a Proton-M launch vehicle. Three more satellites—two this year and another early next—will be introduced into operations.
The U.S. Marine Corps has taken a huge step toward attaining an unmanned cargo lift capability in Afghanistan. On Dec. 15 and 16, the Corps flew two unmanned K-MAX helicopter test flights “out to one of the forward operating bases without a load,” Lockheed Martin’s Jeffrey Brown tells Aviation Week. “These flights were test flights in preparation for sustained operations.”
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected]. (Bold type indicates new calendar listing.) JAN. 9 - 12, 2012 — American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics 51th Aerospace Sciences Meeting & Exhibit, Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, Nashville, Tenn. For more information call (703) 264-7622 or go to www.aoaa.org/events
Iranian claims that its electronic warfare specialists were able to hack into a stealthy RQ-170 UAV are still being refuted by those with insight into the world of black and clandestine operations. U.S. analysts say the story has holes in it since it took days for the Iranians to discover the downed UAV. In fact, intelligence officials at one point thought the Iranians might simply never stumble across the crash site because it was in such a remote and uninhabited part of northeastern Iran.
LONDON — Airbus now projects the type certification for the A400M military airlifter will be delayed until the second quarter of 2012. A few weeks ago Airbus Military officials still thought a 2011 certification might be possible, although there were already indications the milestone could be delayed until 2012. One of the issues has been finding the right weather conditions to complete the anti-icing trials. Another was a delay in some flight trials because of problems with the TP400D turboprop.
While Japan expects to receive its first F-X fighters for training in 2016, flight test leaders in the U.S. and U.K. are concerned that the F-35 will not meet its 2015 target for starting initial operational test and evaluation, which would delay the completion of certificated training plans and syllabi.
Faced with a deep cut in its budget request for commercial crew development in fiscal 2012, NASA will continue to use Space Act Agreements (SAAs) to seed work on the private spacecraft it needs to carry U.S., European, Japanese and Canadian astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
PARIS — Commercial Earth observation was all but invented in France, yet companies here that pioneered the high-resolution optical imagery market a decade ago have been edged out in recent years by tough competition in the U.S. That could change, however, with the planned launch of France’s first Pleiades high-resolution Earth-observation satellite this month, one of two next-generation optical-imaging spacecraft designed to serve military and civil users while reserving capacity for commercial customers.
Japan’s expected order for the Lockheed Martin F-35 is likely to result in sales of more than just the 42 fighters that industry officials anticipate Tokyo will buy. South Korea closely watches Japanese defense procurements. A Japanese order for F-35s, especially if followed promptly by one from South Korea, would bolster early demand for the stealth fighter, potentially offsetting reductions in purchases by other customers, such as the U.S. and cash-strapped European countries.
Battles over how to reduce the federal deficit are far from over. To offset a $600 billion reduction scheduled to fall on defense spending, congressional Republicans are pledging that they can pull together a package of items early next year — such as the sale of wireless spectrum, freezing the pay of government workers and reducing the federal workforce (Aerospace DAILY, Dec. 15). The plan is going over like a lead balloon among Democrats, who argue that Republicans helped craft the plan they are now trying to run away from.
INDUSTRIAL ARRANGEMENTS: French aerospace and defense company Thales has exercised an option to increase its shareholding in French shipyard DCNS to 35% from the 25% acquired in 2007. At the same time, the company is committing to working more closely with French land armaments company Nexter Systems; Thales CEO Luc Vigneron previously ran Nexter. The goal is to have the munitions business of the two companies, with Thales also taking a stake in Nexter.
The defense authorization bill, providing $662.4 billion for national defense programs along with plans to continue funding Lockheed Martin’s Medium Extended Air Defense System (Meads), passed in the Senate Dec. 15 by a vote of 86-13. The bill also takes Lockheed’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter to task for problems with development while in production. But it pushes out by one year an effort by Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, to have Lockheed pick up the tab for cost overruns exceeding a certain amount.
HOUSTON — NASA’s Johnson Space Center resumed normal operations at midday on Dec. 15, 24 hr. after a power outage linked to an off-site traffic accident in which a motorist careened into a power line transmission tower. Throughout the outage, the Mission Control Center, the primary ground communications link with the three-man U.S. and Russian crew aboard the International Space Station, operated on the same backup generators used to provide electricity during storms.
