TANKER CHARGE: The "continued delay and now likely re-competition" of the U.S. Air Force's tanker program prompted Boeing to announce a $275 million pretax charge, the company said Jan. 14. Another charge, related to ending 717 production, will boost that to $615 million. Boeing's first-quarter and full-year 2004 results will be released Feb. 2.
SENSOR CONTRACT: The U.S. Navy has awarded BAE Systems of Rockville, Md., a four-year, $12 million contract for the next phase of the Multi-Sensor Integration (MSI) Phase II Project. The project is developing real-time software to integrate the on-board and off-board sensor information available to the Navy's E-2C aircraft. The contract was awarded by the Naval Air Systems Command.
The Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) Milestone C review likely would get pushed back until September 2006 under current Defense Department spending plans, with a low-rate initial production (LRIP) decision a month later, said a Marine Corps official. EFV's Milestone C had been scheduled for September 2005, with the first vehicle delivery scheduled for May 2007.
TEETS LEAVING: U.S. Air Force Undersecretary Peter Teets, who also serves as the Defense Department's space acquisition executive, is expected to leave office in or close to March, joining an exodus of top Air Force officials as the Bush Administration gears up for a second term. Secretary James Roche and acquisition chief Marvin Sambur are stepping down Jan. 20. Before Teets departs, he is expected to handle Roche and Sambur's duties in addition to his own.
Advanced weapon and space systems company Alliant Techsystems (ATK) of Minneapolis is moving its fuze production operations from Janesville, Wis., to its Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in Rocket Center, W. Va., to improve manufacturing efficiencies, the company said Jan. 14.
Boeing has laid off 100 workers at its Delta rocket production plant in Decatur, Ala., a move Boeing said was necessitated by the Air Force's ongoing suspension of the company for ethical misconduct during the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) development phase.
HARD SELL: U.S. Navy officials likely will make a hard sell on their Sea Basing and Sea Shield concepts this year on Capitol Hill. Those concepts dominated the Surface Navy Association's symposium in Arlington, Va., last week. Top brass acknowledge they face budget realities but hope their "access-without-a-permission-slip" pitch will convince civilian leaders that the Navy can provide forward basing, which other countries may be less willing to support in the future.
HELP THE JPDO: The Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) that is developing the nation's next-generation air transportation system (DAILY, Jan. 11) soon will put in place a "mechanism" through which the aerospace industry can participate in the office's work, according to JPDO Deputy Director Robert Pearce. "The bottom line is, the government actually owns a very small part of the air transportation system," Pearce says. "The majority of it is owned by the private sector, so we have to have them in there as equal partners with us."
In a two-part Broad Area Announcement, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging industry to help develop a rapid prototype of explosives detection systems for vehicle bombs and to propose longer-range "novel" technologies to detect suitcase or package bombs.
Ideology, not strict analysis, seems to lie behind the Pentagon decision to cut the budget of the F/A-22 fighter, according to one analyst. Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said that the savings from an F/A-22 reduction wouldn't be that significant, but that the cut still is being proposed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
LONG-RANGE MUNITION: The U.S. Navy will hold an open competition for its future long-range projectile late this year or sometime next year, says Rear Adm. Charles Bush, program executive officer for Navy Integrated Warfare Systems. Key competitors will be Raytheon's Extended Range Guided Munitions (ERGM) and Alliant Techsystems' Extended Range Munition. "The system won't cost $100,000 ... it will probably cost half of that. The quantity will drive the cost," Bush says. He spoke last week at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium.
The European Space Agency's Huygens probe successfully touched down on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan on Jan. 14, marking humanity's first landing in the outer solar system. The probe began its descent at 5:13 a.m. Eastern time, sampling Titan's atmosphere and taking panoramic photos before touching down on an apparently solid surface at roughly 7:34 a.m. (DAILY, Jan. 13).
Despite the fact that Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne already has won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, several of the 25 other teams that registered for the competition are pressing on with plans to fly their own private suborbital space vehicles, according to X Prize Chairman Peter Diamandis. "We had 26 teams in seven countries, and amazingly, we had literally 26 different designs," Diamandis said at a Jan. 13 luncheon in Washington sponsored by the Washington Space Business Roundtable. "None of these looked like anything on the drawing board elsewhere."
RECON PODS: The U.S. Navy has awarded Raytheon Co. an $8 million contract to acquire parts for the F/A-18 Shared Reconnaissance Pod (SHARP) systems, the company said Jan. 13. Raytheon Technical Services Co. LLC will acquire and integrate key subsystems and components for six SHARP systems. The Navy will receive the systems in 2006. They will be made in Indianapolis. The Naval Air Systems Command awarded the contract. SHARP provides Navy carrier-based air wings with high-resolution, digital tactical air reconnaissance.
U.S. Air Force acquisition chief Marvin Sambur said Jan. 12 that he recently testified before the Government Accountability Office, which is weighing a protest over the service's Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) competition. Lockheed Martin Corp., which lost the competition to the Boeing Co., filed a protest with the GAO in November after former Air Force acquisition official Darleen Druyun admitted she had given preferential treatment to Boeing on several other contracts.
The release of a study on U.S. Air Force tanker modernization options has been delayed again, according to a congressional source. The Defense Department had planned to brief Capitol Hill in mid- to late-January on the results of the analysis of alternatives (AOA), which RAND Corp. conducted for DOD. But a congressional source told The DAILY Jan. 13 that the briefings have been moved to February because the Pentagon needs more time to determine whether the AOA is adequate.
The U.S. Army has awarded AAI Corp. a $71.9 million contract to produce eight Shadow Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (TUAV) systems, the company said Jan. 13. AAI Corp. is a subsidiary of Hunt Valley, Md.-based United Industrial Corp.
IMPACT TROUBLE: NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft entered a preprogrammed safe mode shortly after deployment from its launch vehicle Jan. 12, apparently in response to higher-than-expected temperatures resulting from a firing of the spacecraft's thrusters, according to a NASA spokesman. All attitude and trajectory maneuvers were successful and all other systems appear normal, the spokesman said.
The Navy's vision for its future sea basing concept, the Marine Maritime Prepositioning Force (Future), or MPF(F), is on schedule, although the first ship of the family is not scheduled for procurement until later in the Future Years Defense Plan, service officials said Jan. 13.
An enemy's relatively easy task of jamming and identifying friendly intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms flying at low and medium altitudes can be offset, but there's no single solution covering all situations and all vehicles, according to a new study from RAND Corp.
Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who heads the Corps' combat development command, said Jan. 12 that the Navy's Sea Basing concept must include protection of the deployed land forces as well as the naval staging area, meaning the Sea Shield concept must be equally developed. "The ashore piece has to be as protected as the afloat piece," he said.
EXTENDED: Thailand's air force has extended its contract with Environmental Tectonics Corp. for maintenance support of its three PC-9 aircraft simulators, the Southampton, Pa.-based company said Jan. 12. ETC provided the simulators to Thailand in the mid-1980s. The maintenance support work, which will be extended through calendar 2005 under the new contract extension, is being handled by ETC's International Logistics Support/Contracted Operations and Maintenance Service division.
