Lockheed Martin announced May 8 that it is one of the four contractors on the U.S. Air Force's Hybrid Launch Vehicle (HLV) Studies and Analysis program, which is laying the groundwork for a quick-turnaround rocket with a reusable first stage that the service hopes to introduce by 2018.
ARMY Critical Solutions International Inc., Dallas, was awarded on April 26, 2006, a $14,684,966 firm-fixed-price contract for interim vehicle mounted mine detectors. The work will be performed in Gauteng, South Africa, and is expected to be completed by May 31, 2007. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This was a sole source contract initiated on March 9, 2006. The Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-06-C-0306). AIR FORCE
DOD DRAGGING: President Bush may express full confidence in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but the White House Office of Management and Budget has issued worsening grades for the Pentagon's management. In the latest OMB "scorecard," the DOD's grade for meeting the Bush administration's e-government initiative dropped from "mixed results" to "unsatisfactory." In the OMB's five graded Presidential Management Agenda objectives, the DOD now ranks unsatisfactory in three (including e-gov) and shows just mixed results in the other two.
While authorizing President Bush's fiscal 2007 budget request of $9.3 billion for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the Senate Armed Services Committee has nonetheless cut funding for some longer-term developmental efforts to instead go to testing and speed up fielding of near-term missile defense capabilities.
The House Appropriations Committee has set fiscal 2007 defense funding at $374.4 billion, almost entirely what the Bush administration requested for regular annual funds excluding supplemental money. The administration already has asked for $50 billion extra in its request for next fiscal year, which Congress is likely to fully fund if not beef up.
Senate defense authorizers are trying to boost the U.S. Navy's shipbuilding by adding $1.5 billion to the Bush administration's request to accelerate the LPD-25 expeditionary warship, advance procurement for the new classes of CVN-21 aircraft carrier and LHA-Replacement amphibious assault ship, and to drive down costs in Virginia-class attack submarine design.
Raytheon has taken 25 orders so far in 2006 for the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Integration Backbone, which the company says is laying the foundation for future Web-based information sharing among the services.
The program manager for the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) has taken issue with congressional investigators' allegation of problems with the EFV's hull electronic unit (HEU), bow flap and system hydraulics, but acknowledged that the Marines' No. 1 priority ground system acquisition program has grown in cost and schedule.
The Senate Armed Services Committee late May 4 called on the Defense Department to develop a DOD-wide unmanned systems policy and to give preference to unmanned vehicles and devices in development of new defense systems.
SUTER ABSENT: Hints of secret activities the Pentagon thinks will improve its warfighting skills are usually provided at the annual Joint Expeditionary Force Experiment at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. Focused on networking, the just-completed 2006 edition was also notable for what was not there. The "Suter 1, 2 and 3" series of communications network invasion and exploitation capabilities, initially associated with the EC-130 Compass Call electronic attack aircraft, were absent.
Lockheed Martin has reached an agreement to acquire Savi Technology Inc., a privately held radio frequency identification (RFID) logistics company in Silicon Valley. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But JSA Research analyst Peter J. Arment, citing sources close to the deal, estimated the purchase price at about $400 million.
BANK OF DEFENSE: Washington lawmakers in both parties and both chambers appear increasingly willing to look at proposed defense budgets to offset domestic spending wishes. House GOP leaders could move $4 billion out of the fiscal 2007 request, while senators last week voted to cut $2 billion from the latest supplemental request. While small slices compared to the large defense accounts, the moves are a response to tightening budgets and President Bush's freeze on most nondefense discretionary spending.
Takao Doi, the first Japanese astronaut to perform a spacewalk, may get a chance for a repeat performance on the space shuttle mission that will launch the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module to the International Space Station.
TRAVEL PLANS: NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is off to India this week to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Space Research Organization covering U.S. plans to mount two instruments on India's upcoming Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter. Griffin will tour ISRO space facilities in Bangalore, Thiruvananthapuram and on Sriharikota Island, which should get him in shape for his trip to China this fall. NASA, through the State Department, is still working out details of the visit, including the exact dates.
Three micro-satellites in the Space Technology 5 (ST5) constellation have started being maneuvered by controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center into their operational "string-of-pearls" formation after a checkout period lasting less than a month found everything nominal. Following their March 22 Pegasus launch, checkout of the three orbiting technology test beds was originally scheduled to take three months.
ORBIT RAISED: Russian controllers raised the International Space Station's orbit by 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) on May 4, using thrusters on the docked Progress supply vehicle. The 6 minute, 31 second thruster burn changed the station's velocity by 1.55 miles/second, slightly off the predicted 1.6 miles/second but still considered nominal. The maneuver set up orbit phasing for the planned June 18 launch of the next Progress to the station, which will be reboosted again on June 8.
NASA and Boeing Phantom Works soon will be wrapping up wind tunnel testing of a 21-foot blended wing body (BWB) aircraft at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in anticipation of beginning flight-testing at Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., later this year.
DEFENSE OUTLAYS: Federal outlays for both defense and nondefense spending, excluding net interest, increased by about 6 percent through April, after adjusting for timing shifts, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO said May 4 that outlays last month were unusually low, at least $24 billion compared to a year earlier, because the first day of the month fell on a weekend, shifting roughly $17 billion in payments to the end of March. Defense outlays for April 2005 were $273 billion, compared with a preliminary count of $86 billion last month.
BAMS DAY: The U.S. Navy's Program Executive Office for Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation will hold an industry day for the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) program on May 17 at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center in California, Md., near Naval Air Station Patuxent River. The Navy will brief attendees on the BAMS unmanned aerial vehicle program's requirements, concept of operations, competition timeline and technology maturity requirements. Speakers will include Vice Adm. Walter Massenburg, commander of Naval Air Systems Command.
SHUTTLE TARGET DOABLE: Space shuttle operators will have to meet their 25-year average flight rate to make the 16 flights that will be needed to finish the International Space Station before the fleet is retired in 2010. Given post-Columbia safety constraints, flying at that rate - and making a 17th flight to service the Hubble Space Telescope - will be difficult. But Boeing's shuttle program manager is optimistic it can be done, drawing on the lessons of the 1986 Challenger accident.
