ARMY BAE Systems, Tactical Vehicle Systems Limited Partnership, Sealy, Texas, was awarded on May 30, 2008, a $1,656,794,781 firm-fixed price and cost-reimbursement contract for 10,000 medium tactical vehicles, program support and federal retail excise tax. The work will be performed in Sealy, Texas, and is expected to be completed by Dec. 31, 2010. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. One bid was solicited on Nov. 5, 2007. U.S. Army TACOM, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-08-C-0460).
Boeing again has to delay delivery of the first 737 Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C) Wedgetail aircraft to the Royal Australian Air Force. Earlier this month, Boeing officials were still hoping to hold a March 2009 delivery date for the first Wedgetail, but that’s now slipped to July, according to Chris Chadwick, who heads Boeing’s precision engagement and mobility unit. “We’ve been having technical challenges,” he concedes.
Rolls-Royce has completed the preliminary design review (PDR) on its variable-cycle engine for the U.S. Air Force’s Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology (ADVENT) demonstrator program. The project aims to demonstrate an unreheated, 25,000-30,000 pound-thrust-class engine that varies its cycle from low bypass-ratio for high thrust to high bypass-ratio for low fuel burn, enabling aircraft that can combine high speed with long endurance.
The U.S. Army in August is expected to award rival Northrop Grumman and Raytheon teams development contracts worth as much as $15 million over 11 months under the service’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS). The program is a first step toward a potentially five-year, $1 billion-plus integrated air and missile defense capability for the Army, and possibly a joint system with the Navy and others in later iterations. About a year after the August award, the Army should choose a winning contract team. Tying together
VANDENBERG AFB, Calif. – The Pentagon’s only designated space-based sensor collecting intelligence on other spacecraft in orbit ceased operations last week.
Boeing hopes to finalize a contract to sell two C-17s to Qatar soon, including options for two more of the airlifters. Qatar wants the aircraft as soon as possible, says Dan Page, Boeing’s director of C-17 business development, and currently the first two production slots not spoken for are aircraft 208 and 209, with delivery projected for Aug. 5 and Aug. 27 next year.
Honeywell has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Poway, Calif.-based Intelligent Automation Corp. (IAC), an on-board diagnostic systems supplier for military and commercial aircraft. The terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed. While adding significantly to its military offerings with IAC, Honeywell also recently announced that Zing, its remote diagnostics service for TFE731 aircraft engines, is on track to complete field test evaluations this month and should be available for Hawker-equipped TFE engine platforms in July.
Orbital Sciences Corp. has picked the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia as the base of operations for its new Taurus II rocket, it was announced June 9. Orbital plans to invest about $45 million to assemble, test and launch the Taurus II from MARS, located at NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility, said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), chair of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.
U.S. government spending on information technology (IT) systems and services will grow at a slower rate by 2013 compared with recent decades, reaching just $87.7 billion in five years from $71.9 billion in 2008 – a 3.9 percent annual increase.
The Phoenix lander has run into trouble getting samples of the clumpy Martian soil at its north polar landing site into its ovens for analysis. Mission controllers discovered the problem over the weekend when a large sample dumped by the lander’s robotic arm onto a sifting screen on the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) failed to yield enough particles for analysis.
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER – The combined crews of the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station (ISS) are putting the finishing touches on Japan’s big new Kibo laboratory module, after a final spacewalk and some robotics work over the weekend to get Kibo’s exterior ready for operations.
SEATTLE – Boeing is working to make key radar and systems decisions for the U.S. Navy’s upcoming EPX signals-intelligence contest, and plans to finalize its team by year’s end. The Boeing bid is founded on the 737-800-based P-8A maritime patrol aircraft under development for the Navy. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman also are competing for EPX, which is expected to be a $6 billion - $9 billion contest covering up to 26 aircraft.
TUCSON, Ariz – The Phoenix Mars lander’s robotic arm was poised with a load of soil above the spacecraft’s organic chemistry ovens on June 6, ready to drop the sample into instruments to initiate formal science operations at the arctic landing site. The lander is to complete the baking of this sample at up to 1,800 deg. F about June 10 in an initial search for organic clues to possible Martian life.
SOLAR WIN: Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., and a national and international team of co-investigators have been selected by NASA to undertake a $750,000 six-month study to design a new NASA Small Explorer Mission called the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). In the recent announcement, NASA selected six missions for study (Aerospace DAILY, May 30). Two of them will eventually be chosen to move forward to development, with each mission capped at $105 million.
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER - Crews inspecting post-launch damage to Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center were forced to don hazmat gear after asbestos padding was found behind masonry in the Apollo-vintage flame trench under the pad, but space shuttle managers don’t expect a delay in their launch schedule as a result of the incident.
HELO RESUPPLY: The U.S. Army and Marine Corps could one day use unmanned helicopters to re-supply troops in-theater, if Lockheed Martin and Kaman Aerospace have anything to say about it. The companies demonstrated to the services the feasibility of transporting supplies via unmanned K-Max helicopter during a 45-minute operation at Ft. Eustis, Virginia, in April. The K-Max took off, landed and picked up and delivered a 3,000-pound sling load. A single ground operator used both spoken and data commands to control the aircraft through a data link.
NO TANKER LANGUAGE: Northrop Grumman does not expect any U.S. Air Force aerial tanker language – so far – during the full Senate’s consideration of the fiscal 2009 defense authorization bill, a spokesman says. Senators – possibly including both presumptive major presidential candidates – are expected to debate the bill later this month. Randy Belote, Northrop vice president of corporate and international communications, says he sensed little appetite in that chamber to pre-empt a report by congressional investigators on Boeing’s bid protest. That report is due by June 19.
A senior Pentagon official said June 6 that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is strongly considering Michael Donley to replace Michael Wynne as Secretary of the U.S. Air Force. Donley is director of Administration and Management with DOD’s Washington Headquarters Services (WHS), an operations and program management office within the Pentagon. He was named to the position by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2005.
FINE FELLOWS: DOD has announced the selection of six university and faculty scientists and engineers comprising the first class of its new National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows (NSSEFF) program. The Fellows program provides grants to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct long-term, unclassified, basic research of strategic importance to DOD.
BUDGET STRIKE: The U.S. Air Force is considering “dramatic and disproportionate cuts” of the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve budgets under fiscal 2010 budget-writing, according to Mackenzie Eaglen, the Heritage Foundation’s senior policy analyst for national security. The conservative think tank analyst is calling for senior uniformed and civilian defense leaders to lobby White House budget chiefs to avoid a purported one-eighth cut. Eaglen argues that the air guard and reserves are the two “most cost-effective organizations in the U.S.
MANNED TUG: Momentum appears to be building to start work on an alternative European human spaceflight capability if talks on joining Russia’s Crew Space Transportation System are not successful. A major factor driving the new European initiative was the flawless launch and docking of the first Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) space tug, which would serve as a basis for the proposed system.
