BURIED BY BERRY: "The implementation of the Berry Amendment is killing us," says Charles Riechers, principal deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisition and management. He told the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association's Northern Virginia Chapter that one Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile verification case cost more than $600,000 to audit for $1,400 worth of parts.
AEHF TESTS: The U.S. Air Force announced May 11 that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have completed the first system-level requirements verification intersegment test to ensure that the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) system will be able to communicate with legacy Milstar terminals used by the various military services. The first AEHF satellite will be launched in the spring of 2008.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says he agrees with a recent report's finding that national intelligence estimates should include data on the threat of global climate change. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) says consideration of climate change should also be given in defense strategies and the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review. "We know the threat. Our plans must reflect it," Biden said May 9 at the start of a committee hearing on the report about the national security threat posed by climate change.
The U.S. Air Force will continue to use award-fee contracts for its acquisition efforts rather than move substantially more toward fixed-price arrangements, but will try to be smarter about linking the contentious incentive payments to contractor performance, according to a leading service acquisition official.
FUTURE GUNSHIP: U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) is looking at an "exotic weapons suite" for its future gunship, according to AFSOC chief Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley. "The gunship of the future will not have any big guns on it," he says. "Rather, it would have directed energy, lasers, lethal and non-lethal capabilities." The gunship will fly higher, up to 30,000 feet or a little more, and will have round-the-clock, all-weather fight capability.
BRANCHING OUT: Spirit Aerosystem's contract to build the cabin and main fuselage for the Sikorsky CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter for the U.S. Marines is its first on a rotorcraft. Until 2005 when the company was spun off by Boeing, Spirit's work was naturally restricted to that airframer's fixed-wing products. Besides the 737 airframe, it also makes nose sections, pylons and nacelles for the 747, 767 and 777. Since becoming independent, it's gone on to win component work, mainly for wings, on the Hawker 800XP and Airbus A320, A330, A340 and A380.
SYNCHRONICITY: NASA's Constellation program plans to "update and synchronize" all of its baseline requirements by the end of May, following completion of project-level reviews across the back-to-the-moon hardware-development effort. The ground operations system requirements review wrapped up last week following a meeting at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) May 5.
URBAN CHALLENGE: Next month the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to travel around the country visiting 53 of the initial 89 registered teams in its Urban Challenge robotic vehicle competition to assess their vehicles and winnow the field down to 30 semi-finalists. Vehicles will have to run a test course including a four-way intersection with moving traffic. The semi-finalists, who will be announced Aug. 10, will participate in a National Qualification Event in October where the finalists will be chosen. The Urban Challenge will take place Nov.
Following the Hubble Space Telescope's final scheduled space shuttle servicing next year, scientists probably will opt to ditch the observatory in the Pacific Ocean sometime in the coming decade, rather than mount another mission to service it with an Orion capsule or other piloted spacecraft still on the drawing board. Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute that manages use of the Hubble, told a Capitol Hill breakfast May 11 that one more servicing mission may be all scientists will want to give Hubble.
Space shuttle managers expressed unanimous confidence in repairs made to Atlantis' external tank during a review May 11, clearing the orbiter to roll out to its launch pad at Kennedy Space Center as early as May 15 for a scheduled June liftoff.
TURF WARS: House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) is pushing legislative language under the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill that would require the Defense Department to reassess its roles and missions - namely what its constituent agencies and armed services do. "We haven't taken a real hard look at what the department and services do and asked why they do those things in a long time," he says, pointing to the 1947 National Security Act.
DHS CHALLENGES: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may need to hire a chief management official with sufficient authority to sort out the agency's continuing problems with performance metrics, milestones, financial management and delays in providing Congress information on programs and operations, a new study says. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says it's keeping DHS on its list of high-risk government operations as the department struggles to transform and integrate 22 federal agencies into a cohesive unit.
FLANKING NUNN-MCCURDY: The U.S. Air Force is looking to bust up major acquisitions into more manageable chunks to get a better grasp on them when, and if, they breach Nunn-McCurdy cost and schedule caps, says Charles Riechers, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition and management. The KC-X program's initial 179-aircraft purchase is one example: it's obvious that the service will need more aerial refueling tankers this century but the service is looking to go in more manageable waves of acquisition.
To list an event, send information in calendar format to Donna Thomas at [email protected] May 14 - 15 -- Harmonizing Aviation: A Global Challenge Doubletree Hotel Crystal City, Arlington, Va. For more information go to www.aiaa.org/events/insideaerospace. May 14 - 17 -- Global Demilitarization Symposium & Exhibition, Reno, Nev. For more information call (703) 522-1820, fax: (703) 522-1885 or go to www.ndia.org.
DEMOCRATIC DEEP POCKETS: "Judging from action taken so far on most weapons programs, bipartisan support for big military investments has returned to Capitol Hill," says Lexington Institute analyst Loren Thompson. He says recent legislation decisions by the House Armed Services Committee - now controlled by Democrats like the rest of Congress - for fiscal 2008 show that most of the funding pressure being exerted on the budget is positive regarding the Bush administration's requests, and Democrats seem more than happy to go along.
DOD CMO: The Pentagon increasingly is facing the prospect of a chief management officer (CMO), a new high-level bureaucrat that defense leaders have resisted over recent years even as they repeatedly failed to make significant gains in reining in the Defense Department's spending duplicities, waste and territorial culture. The House Armed Services Committee is pushing language in the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill that would establish the CMO, long recommended by the congressional Government Accountability Office and the U.S. comptroller general.
U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) is going through a growth spurt with manpower at 13,000 and expected to grow another 2,000 over the next five years. Equally important, there's a lot of new technology on the way as well as consideration of what next-generation capabilities will be, says AFSOC's chief, Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley. The command has formed a Predator squadron, the 3rd Special Operations Squadron. Nevertheless, "There is a great need for more unmanned sensor capability," Wooley says.
The U.K. Defense Ministry is working to define its concept of operations with the Predator B unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), including how the system will exploit satellite infrastructure. The U.K. is initially acquiring three Predator Bs. Defense Ministry officials say work is underway to identify how the U.K. will operate the UAVs, and the extent to which the platforms will use the British Skynet network of communications satellites. The UAVs are due to be operated in Afghanistan by the end of 2007.
FIRST AWARD: Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) has won a contract to manufacture a spacecraft for SES New Skies, the companies announced May 10. Scheduled for completion in 2009, the NSS-12 satellite will provide communications services for broadcasters, corporations and governments in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and other parts of Asia. NSS-12 is the first satellite contract that SES New Skies has awarded to SS/L. The spacecraft will be based on SS/L's 1300 satellite bus and will be equipped with 40 C-band and 48 Ku-band transponders.
TRAINING DEALS: InterSense said it will deliver its hybrid IS-900 inertial-acoustic helmet tracking systems to support various L-3 Link flight simulator programs, including the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard F-16 Aircrew Training Device Program and the Navy's programs for F/A-18 C through F model trainers. The company said its IS-900 motion tracking system also has been installed in BAE Systems' Active Cockpit Rig for the Typhoon fighter aircraft.
European Space Agency (ESA) managers are working toward a mid-November launch date for the first flight of the new Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) to the International Space Station (ISS), following a meeting between ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain and NASA Administrator Mike Griffin late last month.
