The arrival on Jan. 16 of a Boeing 737-700 aircraft in Australia marked what the company and the Australian government called the beginning of the next phase of the $450 million, six-plane Wedgetail airborne early warning and control program.
ARMY Simula Aerospace and Defense Group Inc., Phoenix, Ariz., was awarded on Jan. 9, 2006, a $22,799,403 modification to a firm-fixed-price contract for M915 Crew Protection Kits for the M915 series of trucks. The work will be performed in Phoenix, Ariz. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This was a sole source contract initiated on Dec. 16, 2004. The U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-04-C-0259).
The Army's total expenditure on the aborted Aerial Common Sensor spy plane program is expected to be roughly $200 million, including money already paid to prime contractor Lockheed Martin as well as tens of millions of dollars in termination costs.
NASA's Stardust mission successfully returned a capsule containing comet and interstellar dust samples on Jan. 15, marking the end of a 2.88 billion round trip since the spacecraft's launch in 1999. Stardust collected dust samples from the nucleus of comet Wild 2 in 2004, as well as samples of interstellar dust, which scientists believe can help answer questions about the origin of the solar system (DAILY, Dec. 22, 2005).
Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr. (USAF Ret.) will give up his post as head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in June instead of September, when he would have completed an initial three-year stint and two extensions. He was rumored to have clashed with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the need for more Pentagon control of NGA. Long-time associates of Clapper said that he had indeed become very independent in his thinking after retiring from the Air Force.
The Pentagon is investigating why three U.S. helicopters have crashed in Iraq within the past two weeks, a Defense Department spokesman told Pentagon reporters Jan. 17.
A Northrop Grumman Corp.-U.S. Navy team has successfully completed nine autonomous shipboard takeoffs and landings of the RQ-8A Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle, a company representative told The DAILY Jan. 17. The tests, three on Jan. 16 and six on Jan. 17, are to be announced Jan. 18. The tests aboard the amphibious transport dock ship USS Nashville (LPD-13) involved idling, taking off, hovering 30 feet up and landing, he said.
RESEARCH CONTRACT: A unit of Boeing Missile Defense Systems has been awarded a contract worth up to $413 million to continue support for a pair of U.S. Air Force laboratories conducting research on satellite tracking and high energy laser technologies, the company said Jan. 17.
Congress has appropriated about $159 billion for fiscal 2006 for programs and activities whose authorizations it has let expire, including about $8 billion for the U.S. Coast Guard, the Congressional Budget Office reported Jan. 13.
The Naval Sea Systems Command has selected a Northrop Grumman Corp.-led team to design a 40-megawatt, high-temperature superconductor generator that is supposed to provide a smaller, lighter and quieter main power source for future surface combatants, the company said Jan. 13. Northrop Grumman Marine Systems and American Superconductor Corp. will complete a concept design and explore different configurations of the generator while assessing the impact on generator characteristics associated with voltage, phase-count, pole-count and cooling selection.
BOMBOT: Innovative Response Technologies Inc. said Jan. 17 that it has been awarded a $9.6 million contract by the U.S. Navy's Explosive Ordinance Disposal Technology Division to manufacture robots designed to disable and dispose of improvised explosive devices. The BomBot places explosive charges on or near IEDs. IRT is a wholly owned subsidiary of the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation.
A blue-ribbon panel of naval researchers in Washington is casting doubt on the U.S. Navy's expected 313-ship fleet plan, saying the proposal depends on a confluence of unrealistically optimistic factors and nothing bad happening over the next three decades. "The plan is extremely fiscally optimistic, it counts on everything breaking right," said Robert Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
