THE NETHERLANDS wants to buy 200 AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air- to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, for their F-16 Falcon fighters, the Dept. of Defense said yesterday. The total cost would be about $110 million. Hughes and Raytheon build the missile.
The Clinton Administration yesterday proposed spinning off a commercial subsidiary from Intelsat that could sell a variety of satellite- based telecommunications services already being offered by private ventures.
LITTON INDUSTRIES has acquired Intevac Industries Electro-Optical Sensors division in Palo Alto, Calif. Terms of the purchase were not disclosed. The unit develops and manufactures advanced night vision equipment for the domestic and international defense market. Current annual sales are about $15 million.
June 5, 1995 Lockheed Martin Corporation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is being awarded a $12,600,000 face value increase to a Firm Fixed Price contract for an Operations Support System for on-orbit support of the NavStar Global Positioning System Replacement Satellite system. Contract is expected to be completed June 1996. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles, California is the contracting activity (F04701-89/C-0073, P00099).
House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio), who has taken the lead in a campaign to sidetrack the National Security Committee's $553 million add-on for long-lead money for additional B-2 bombers, yesterday circulated a second "Dear Colleague" letter seeking support for his position. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, in a report yesterday to Kasich on the Pentagon's plan to modernize its bomber force, put the cost of adding 20 B-2s at nearly $27 billion. The number was in fiscal '96 dollars through the year 2020.
NASA's planned Earth Observing System (EOS) of satellites and massive ground-based computer networks to gather and analyze long-term global data on climate change will cost an estimated $33 billion through fiscal 2022, the congressional General Accounting Office reported. In "NASA's Earth Observing System: Estimated Funding Requirement" (GAO/NSIAD-95-175), GAO said NASA managers already realize that "in today's environment of declining budgets for the civil space program, the baseline program...is unaffordable."
"Technologies that were developed for national security have now been expanded and are being used by the commercial market. And if the commercial market further refines them, the national security infrastructure takes them back and finds them a very cost-effective way to provide capability. Breakthroughs in communications are clearly a good example....There continue to remain a handful of technologies associated with the very unique and specific work associated with intelligence collection.
Bombardier would like to be involved in a new 100-passenger airliner project but has no desire to lead it, Bob Brown, president of the Canadian manufacturer's Aerospace Group-North America, declared at the Paris Air Show. "We've always competed in a niche where we can be a leader," Brown told McGraw-Hill's Show News on the eve of the Le Bourget show. "All our products except the Global Express long-range high speed business jet are derivatives. We have nothing we can derive into a 100-seater."
The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing Wednesday on the nomination of a White House official to be deputy director of central intelligence.
The regional airliner joint venture of France's Aerospatiale, Italy's Alenia, and British Aerospace will officially launch operations January 1 as Aero International Regional, or AIR, but each company will keep making their own core products-at least initially. In an announcement short on specifics on Saturday, Aerospatiale director general Louis Gallois said two representatives from each company will sit on the joint venture's board of directors, and certain functions will merge from day one.
A press conference at the Paris Air Show by Boeing Commercial President Ron Woodard and Boeing Defense President Jerry King prompted numerous questions for Woodard-none for King.
June 7, 1995 Texas Instruments Inc., Defense Systems and Electronics Group, Texas, is being awarded a $7,900,000 cost plus fixed fee order for Block V software upgrades to the AGM-88C-1 HARM missile. Work will be performed in Lewisville, Texas, and is expected to be completed by May 1999. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Air Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00019-93-G-0179).
The U.S. Navy is looking for help in developing various technologies that could increase surface ships' defenses against anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) in the 2005-2025 time frame, a May 31 Commerce Business Daily notice says.
"I can't answer the question that says 'Are there enough pairs of belts and suspenders.' We've taken a look at failure modes and we're quite comfortable. Clearly, as you go to fewer numbers of on-orbit satellites, the failure of any one has a more significant impact because it's a larger percentage of the total number of satellites, and that's something we pay close attention to."
"We have gone from, in the early days of Corona, for example, satellites that we had hoped to last for 17 revolutions around the Earth [to] satellites that last for numerous years, and some of the satellites...can approach a decade in length."
FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY Les Aspin will be remembered in a memorial service today, June 13, in Washington, D.C. The 2 p.m. service will be held at St. John's Episcopal Church at 16th and H streets, N.W.
ALLIEDSIGNAL AEROSPACE'S Government Electronic Systems has completed the first phase of the U.S. Air Force's C-130/C-141 avionics upgrade program, the company said at Le Bourget. Engineers have completed the design phase and are proceeding with safety-of-flight testing. The automatic flight control system is being retrofitted into about 100 C-141s and 650 C-130s in a program worth between $200 million and $300 million to AlliedSignal, depending on whether the Air Force exercises contract options.
"If satellites are more capable, which requires fewer satellites [because] they last a lot longer, the industrial capacity needs to be adjusted if you're not expanding into a lot of new mission areas....We look, as we build fewer and fewer satellites, [for] the subcontractors [to] have an opportunity to potentially have, for example, a spacecraft computer that might be able to work across several satellite systems. A GPS receiver might be a generic tool that we can use across satellite systems.
McDonnell Douglas' DC-X subscale single-stage-to-orbit prototype completed its seventh flight test yesterday morning at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. The two-minute, 12-second test included successful firing of the DC- X's four gaseous oxygen-hydrogen thrusters. The reaction control thrusters, which are designed to give additional control over the vehicle, have always been a part of the DC-X but had never before been flight tested, a McDonnell Douglas spokeswoman said.
The consolidation of U.S. intelligence satellite constellations will take another five to seven years, according to the chief of the agency that procures the satellites. But the end result will be an overall satellite architecture for collection, processing and distribution that is more cost effective and "significantly more capable," said National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) director Jeffrey Harris.
June 9, 1995 Lockheed Fort Worth Company, Fort Worth, Texas, is being awarded a $8,279,405 Firm Fixed Price contract for technical orders for maintenance of the F-16 aircraft. Contract is expected to be completed December 1995. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. One proposal was received. Solicitation was begun January 1995 and negotiations were complete May 1995. This effort supports foreign military sales to Israel. Ogden Air Logistics Center, Hill Air Force Base, Utah is the contracting activity (F42620-95/D-0178).
