The Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday passed, in an 11-10 vote, legislation calling for deployment by 2003 of a National Missile Defense system (NMD) to protect all 50 states from limited deliberate or accidental ballistic missile attacks. Aides said the vote ran along party lines. Republicans on the panel wanted to mark up the legislation last week, but conceded to Democrats' request to put off a vote until President Clinton returned from Russia (DAILY, April 19).
NASA will be driven in future years by a quest for the answers to five basic questions which will shape programs the U.S. space agency tackles, Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said yesterday.
BELL HELICOPTER TEXTRON, Fort Worth, Tex., will fabricate and install upgrades to the communication and navigational equipment into the cockpit of the AH-1W helicopter under a $6.4 million contract awarded April 2 by U.S. Naval Air Systems Command.
Margins fattened and profits and backlog grew at Lockheed Martin in the first quarter, even as sales slipped 9% to $5.1 billion, the company reported yesterday. After excluding the effects of a $165 million writeoff in the year-ago quarter, net earnings were up 10% to $272 million, led by profit gains in the Space&Strategic Missiles, Information&Technology Services and Energy sectors.
Two joint U.S.-Israeli air defense programs will get high level attention on Sunday when U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry meets in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez. "As long as I am the Secretary of Defense for the United States, we will maintain the qualitative edge in Israel," Perry told the Anti Defamation League in a speech yesterday. The U.S. and Israel are developing systems "that will be able to knock rockets and missiles out of the air much closer to their launching point than previous systems," he said.
Despite help from the recent acquisition of a stake in Howmet, fatter Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor cost management fees, and lower taxes and interest rates, Thiokol Corp. wound up its third fiscal quarter with net income of only $9.5 million - a 33% slide from year-ago levels. At $228.9 million, sales for the quarter were about 2% off the last year's pace.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) has appointed Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John Warner (R-Va.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) to a six-member bipartisan task force to review the future of the next generation submarine program. The task force, comprised of three senators and three representatives, was called for in the fiscal year 1996 defense authorization act. The task force is to be briefed at least annually by the secretary of defense on the Navy's submarine modernization plans.
SANDERS, Nashua, N.H., a unit of Lockheed Martin, received a $5.9 million contract for an improved reliability/maintainability replacement for the AN/ASA-82 Tacco/Senso Multi-Purpose Display in support of the S-3B aircraft. The Defense Dept. said the contract contains options which, if exercised, will bring the cumulative value of the contract to $8.9 million. The work is being carried out by Sanders' Anti-submarine Warfare Directorate for the Naval Inventory Control Point, Philadelphia, Pa.
Senate Armed Services Committee member Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) is urging his colleagues on the committee as they draft their fiscal year 1997 defense bill to direct the Pentagon in early September to launch a new strategic review of force structure requirements. The review would replace the Bottom Up Review (BUR) conducted by former Defense Secretary Les Aspin. "There is agreement the Bottom Up Review will not be the blueprint we will follow in the future," Coats said yesterday at a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments conference in Washington.
Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch yesterday outlined key points of the White House's proposal for intelligence reform as follows. He made the presentation to a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. -- Establish a Committee on Foreign Intelligence. -- Establish a Consumers Committee. -- Establish a Global Crime Committee. -- Increase the number of deputy DCIs from one to three. Legislation to be submitted to Congress.
ROCKWELL INTERNATIONAL CORP., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, received a $9.5 million addition to an earlier contract for 420 Miniaturized Airborne Global Positioning System Receivers and 228 aircraft mounts for various aircraft. About 4% of this effort supports foreign military sales to The Netherlands, the Defense Dept. said. The contract was awarded March 29 by the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles.
A McDonnell Douglas Delta II rocket lifted the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) into a circular polar orbit yesterday after winds over Vandenberg AFB, Calif., forced delays last week. Liftoff of the Delta II with its $325 million payload came at 8:27 a.m. EDT, and the spacecraft entered its near sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 487.5 nautical miles about 58 minutes later, McDonnell Douglas reported.
U.S. launch industry representatives yesterday urged the Federal Aviation Administration to begin work immediately on the licensing and safety regulations that will govern commercial space launch operations in the coming century, particularly with reusable launch vehicles.
HONEYWELL, INC., Clearwater, Fla., got a $5.6 million contract April 1 from the U.S. Air Force's Aeronautical Systems Center for 83 Embedded Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System units for the U.S. Army AH- 64A helicopter.
Lack of management information systems with reliable cost data makes it difficult for the Defense Dept. to evaluate the overall effectiveness of alternate training methods and assess whether actions taken to reduce training infrastructure costs are achieving the expected results, the General Accounting Office reports.
Draft legislation establishing the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) would cause the Central Intelligence Agency to lose authority to the Pentagon, Sen. J. Robert Kerrey (D-Neb.) said yesterday.
RUSSIAN PROTON is scheduled to launch an Inmarsat-3 mobile communications satellite in August or September, following this month's successful launch of a European direct broadcast satellite (DAILY, April 10). Initially scheduled to be the first Western satellite launched on a Proton, delays by Lockheed Martin Astro Space in getting the platform ready for launch may wind up costing the Russians money on the $36 million launch services contract, Proton-builder Khrunichev tells Russia's Itar-Tass news agency.
Rockwell International's win Monday of the U.S. Air Force competition to build the next generation of Global Positioning System satellites will pay dividends in terms of other satellite business, said John McLucky, president and chief operating officer of Rockwell's aerospace and defense business.
The Pentagon has formally requested relief from legislation requiring live-fire testing of the Air Force's F-22 fighter, a move that would avoid having to buy a $250 million test asset that would then be destroyed.
The Pentagon will field the upgraded version of its B61 aircraft- delivered nuclear bomb this year, Harold Smith, the assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons defense programs, said yesterday.
To meet congressional demands for an accelerated deployment of the Space and Missile Tracking System (SMTS), the U.S. Air Force needs about $2 billion more than currently planned, service officials say. Congress added $135 million in fiscal 1996 to accommodate a speed-up of SMTS, and inserted language requiring first launch of a satellite in fiscal '02 and an initial operational capability a year later, almost five years ahead of the original Air Force schedule.
NASA is preparing a billion-dollar effort to push space launch technology beyond the level that will be achieved in the X-33 single-stage- to-orbit reusable launch vehicle (RLV) program, including air-boosted rocket engines and small reusable two-stage vehicles able to launch 100 kilograms for no more than $1 million, Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said yesterday.
With Loral's businesses now under the Lockheed Martin umbrella, top executives have created a special task force to study selling off non-core units, units that aren't market leaders, and even surplus real estate to help knock down huge post-acquisition debt that leaves the new company's debt-to-capital ratio at record-high levels.
The Pentagon has sent to Congress the first installment of a report on precision guided munitions required under the fiscal 1996 authorization act, but won't deliver the items of real interest until at least July following completion of its deep attack weapon mix study.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), chairman of the House National Security Committee's R&D subcommittee, said he expects the committee to increase the Administration's $2.8 billion fiscal 1997 request for ballistic missile defense (BMD) by $800 million to $1 billion. This would be about the same amount that the committee added last year in its markup of the fiscal 1996 defense authorization. The R&D subcommittee will mark up its portion of the fiscal '97 authorization on April 30, and the full committee is slated to act the following day.
