The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be squarely on track, but still faces its share of questions and obstacles related to cost and foreign participation, says a recent report by Teal Group. "The F-35 offers a lot of promise," reported Richard Aboulafia, Teal Group vice president in his March "World Civil & Military Aircraft Briefing" on the JSF. "But it's also a skeptic's playground."
COLORADO SPRINGS -- U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright says the Chinese made two unsuccessful attempts at an anti-satellite intercept before the successful test in January. During those earlier tests, at least one of which took place last year, the Chinese interceptor boosted into space but missed the target. The re-entry vehicles later fell back to Earth, an intelligence official says.
TECH TRANSFER: The Heritage Foundation is preparing a policy study on technology transfer regulations in the post-Cold War world. Baker Spring, a defense spending expert at the conservative Washington think tank, says he's talking to representatives of industry, foreign governments, other think tanks and policymakers in both the legislative and executive branches. The study seeks to come up with proposals for making export controls more effective to meet current U.S. security needs, including the war on terrorism.
Costs in the U.S. Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program have increased by 12 percent as of December 2006, according to recently issued Pentagon Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) figures, and the rise is drawing scrutiny by military space and budget analysts. "That 12 percent is a big deal," said John Edwards of Forecast International. "It's going to have an effect for missile procurement."
The Pentagon's dedication to network-centric transformation is helping it deploy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) information technology (IT) faster than ever to solve urgent wartime problems, according to one of the Defense Department's senior IT officials. David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defense and deputy chief information officer (CIO), says all of the military services, and even U.S. allies, are collaborating in unprecedented ways to create IT systems that can share data across boundaries.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced April 11 that they plan to restore the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Limb sensor to the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) spacecraft and share the costs of the reinstatement equally. NASA and NOAA are giving NPOESS prime Northrop Grumman "conditional authority" to begin work on OMPS, they said, but final authorization will be contingent on negotiating an acceptable price for the work with the company. 'Small but important step'
SMART-T AWARD: Raytheon said April 12 that it has received an $84.6 million contract to produce upgrade kits for its Secure Mobile Anti-jam Reliable Tactical Terminal, or SMART-T, for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, as well as Canada and The Netherlands. The Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) kits expand by a factor of four times the data rate of existing SMART-T systems. The Army's SMART-T is the first AEHF system to go into production to communicate with the next generation of AEHF communications satellites.
LCS 3 KILLED: U.S. Navy Secretary Donald Winter announced late April 12 that the service was terminating construction of the third Littoral Combat Ship (LCS 3). The Navy and Lockheed Martin could not reach agreement on the terms of a modified contract to shift more risk toward the contractor, according to a Pentagon statement. The Navy remains committed to completing construction of LCS 1 under the current contract with Lockheed Martin.
The Senate on April 12 mulled an intelligence policy bill that would, among numerous Democratic-backed provisions, affect space efforts and force more oversight in the federal reporting process - the latter of which the White House said was unacceptable. "If S. 372 were presented to the president, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill," the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced the same day.
Planning is under way for unprecedented observations at Venus using two different spacecraft simultaneously - the European Space Agency's Venus Express, now in elliptical polar orbit around the next planet in toward the sun - and NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (Messenger), which will train its instruments on Venus during a June 5 flyby en route to Mercury.
Playing off the Northrop Grumman tanker team's competition refrain that "bigger is better," Boeing officials draped their offer this week for the U.S. Air Force's KC-135 replacement concept with this question: how much is too much? The company's smaller KC-767, compared to Northrop's KC-30, would be more economical and flexible, said Mark McGraw, vice president, Boeing tanker programs and precision engagement and mobility systems.
PHANTOM DRONES: BAE Systems said April 12 that it has received a $26.5 million contract to convert 20 F-4 Phantom fighter jets to full-scale aerial targets for the U.S. Air Force. The deal is the third of five such contract options and follows a similar contract last summer (DAILY, June 8, 2006). BAE Systems has converted 217 F-4s to the QF-4 configuration so far.
United Space Alliance (USA) the Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint venture formed to operate NASA's space shuttle fleet, is developing a set of software packages designed to support human exploration of the moon. First up for the company's independent research and development (IRAD) "Questus" set of software tools is a data-management package called Integrated Lunar Information Architecture for Decision Support ("Iliads"), produced in partnership with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
New Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Mike McConnell plans to create an IARPA - an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency - like the Pentagon's DARPA, according to an intelligence community reform plan announced April 11.
The Pentagon has decided not to send a Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to the Pacific this summer for a long-awaited demonstration of the high-flying intelligence collection aircraft's abilities, instead delaying the flights to the spring of 2008. The Northrop Grumman-built UAV was to conduct exercises this June showcasing its abilities in the maritime domain. Several Pacific nations are interested in either buying the UAV - as is the case with Australia - or partaking of its intelligence via cooperative agreements.
A Defense Department project to test Internet routing in space (IRIS) will be managed by Intelsat General, and the payload will convert to commercial use once testing has been completed, the company said April 11.
COLORADO SPRINGS - Raytheon is studying concepts to fill a gap in the midcourse-tracking leg of the Pentagon's layered missile defense system, says Lt. Gen. Brian Arnold (USAF Ret.), the company's space systems vice president.
After hearing testimony from National Guard leaders on Capitol Hill April 11, senior Senate Appropriations Committee member Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) called the guard's equipment situation "a national crisis."
In an effort to gain a foothold in the Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) market, Northrop Grumman and Israeli Aerospace Industries are teaming to offer quick-response surveillance satellites that they say could be delivering capabilities to users 28 months after getting the go-ahead, the companies announced April 11.
Federal contracting arbiters have rejected a contract award protest by Northrop Grumman against the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command's (CECOM) potentially $1.6 billion award to Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems & Sensors for the Enhanced AN/TPQ-36 (EQ-36) Target Acquisition Counter Fire Radar System. Northrop Grumman challenged CECOM's evaluation of proposals and asserted that Lockheed's proposal failed to satisfy a mandatory solicitation requirement.
CANADIAN UAVS: Several Canadian defense companies, the Canadian government and academia have formed a national trade organization to promote advancement and use of Canadian expertise in unmanned vehicle systems. The new organization, known as AUVSI-Canada, is affiliated with the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and will be headquartered in Ottawa. It will try to establish regional chapters.
