LITTON DATA SYSTEMS DIV., Agoura Hills, Calif., has received a contract from TRW Inc. with an initial value of about $15 million for up to 1,200 hand-held computers, associated equipment and system integration services for the U.S. Army's expanding program to digitize its battlefield information and communications operations.
Orbital Sciences Corp. said yesterday it has partially restored communications with its first on-orbit Orbcomm satellite after correcting an apparent software problem. The spacecraft, one of two Orbcomms launched April 3, had experienced a malfunction in its gateway receiver which prevented it from responding to uplinked transmissions (DAILY, April 17, page 87). Orbital said it restored the Orbcomm's ability to receive transmissions from ground-based "subscriber communicators" by sending commands that corrected an apparent "software blockage."
A NASA flight surgeon may have saved astronaut Bonnie Dunbar's life when she suffered a severe allergic reaction during a kidney-function experiment at Houston's Johnson Space Center last fall-yet even after Dunbar was rushed by ambulance to a hospital, JSC technicians continued the experiment with two other human subjects, at least one of them a Russian cosmonaut.
Massive networking makes the U.S. "the world's most vulnerable target for information warfare," Adm. William O. Studeman, deputy director of central intelligence, tells a National Security Industrial Association symposium in Washington. "As an essentially open information giant, we have much more to lose in information warfare than most of our enemies-and anyone can be the target of an attack," he says. U.S.
The U.S. Air Force still has no preference on whether its Joint Primary Aircraft Training System (JPATS) aircraft is turboprop- or turbofan-powered, says acting AF acquisition chief Darleen A. Druyun, and will make its choice from among six competitors around June 21 based on "best-value." Druyun insists before the House Appropriations National Security subcommittee that a single airplane characteristic won't drive the service's decision. The Beechcraft/Pilatus and Northrop/Embraer entries are turboprop powered, while the other four have turbofans.
Raytheon Co. has received a $35.9 million U.S. Army contract for the Enhanced Fiber Optic Guided Missile (EFOG-M) demonstration program. The company said Friday that the contract includes options for an additional $100 million. The total value of the program could ultimately exceed hundreds of millions of dollars, Raytheon said.
Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations national security subcommittee, says he doesn't see the funds to keep the B-2 bomber line open and also upgrade the B-1 bomber force. The answer for the time being is to go with the B-1, he says. "I'd like to see the B-2 continue, and I'm saying in the short run the B-1 has to be fixed up," he says at a subcommittee hearing.
The Republican majority on the House National Security Committee would like to add $1 billion to the Administration's $2.739 billion Ballistic Missile Defense request in its markup of the fiscal 1996 defense budget beginning tomorrow, but to avoid a potential rejection by the House will probably settle for an increase of $800 million to $900 million. This conclusion emerged from discussions with committee members and staff, and from a review of the hearing record so far this year.
One more industry executive has joined the growing chorus of aerospace leaders annoyed at the continued role of military depots. The U.S. needs to "stop the de facto nationalization of the defense industry as a byproduct of shifting depot and maintenance work to the armed services at the expense of the private sector," urges Tom Corcoran, president of Lockheed Martin's electronics business.
The U.S. Air Force is firming up plans for its Reliability, Maintainability&Availability Evaluation of McDonnell Douglas' C-17 airlifter in July, shaping up as a crucial test of whether the C-17 program has recovered enough for the Pentagon to authorize buying more planes beyond the present 40-aircraft cap. The service says twelve C-17s based at Charleston AFB, S.C., will fly more than 2,100 hours and transit seven airfields during RM&A, which begins July 7.
FAA's new philosophy of relying on integrated product teams (IPTs) to focus the agency's resources on product development and delivery has some "rather significant gaps," the General Accounting Office told the House Science technology subcommittee. The agency has established 14 IPTs for various elements of air traffic control.
In a quest to broaden the market for its F-117 stealth fighter, Lockheed Martin has begun looking abroad for potential customers. Talks between the manufacturer and the U.K. government about their acquisition of a number of F-117s is ongoing, an industry source tells The DAILY. The talks are being conducted with the approval of the Defense Dept., the source said, but they are still in their early stages. It's not clear which F-117 variant Lockheed Martin is pitching to Britain-the standard F-117A or the F-117X version it has been trying to sell to the U.S. Navy.
Chairman John Duncan (R-Tenn.) said his House Transportation aviation subcommittee will hold a hearing June 8 on a just-released GAO report questioning FAA's ability to meet its schedule for the Global Positioning System. An FAA spokesman said the agency "continues to maintain that the system will be deployed in 1997. We remain confident that the deadline for deployment is still on target."
Republican Senator John McCain (Ariz.) expects the defense budget to be increased around $15 billion, but says modernization should focus on maintaining capabilities and not on B-2 bombers and Seawolf submarines. Congress will "end up with something significantly lower than the House number but more than the Senate number," McCain said. The final number will be slightly more than $15 billion, he told a group of defense writers Thursday in Washington.
"If you want to see what warfare will look like in the 21st Century, look at Panama," Sullivan tells the NSIA gathering. "What you saw in Panama in December 1989 was the simultaneous application of complementary capabilities," he explains. "I think that is where America will find its power in the 21st century."
Bob Watson, who keeps track of environmental issues for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says the Republicans' proposed $2.7 billion cut out of NASA's Earth Observing System program (DAILY, May 12, page 233) would cause "a major dislocation to that program." Watson, who worked on the program at NASA before joining the White House staff, said a cut of that magnitude would rob the Mission to Planet Earth activity of the ability to gather the type of information needed to manage human interaction with global climate.
ROLLOUT OF TIER III MINUS unmanned aerial vehicle is planned for June 1 at Palmdale, Calif., the Dept. of Defense said Friday. The low observable, tactical reconnaissance UAV, called DarkStar, "will operate within the current military force structure and with existing command, control, communications, computer and intelligence (C4I) equipment," DOD said. "The DarkStar UAV will provide affordable, near real time, continuous, all weather, wide area surveillance in support of tactical commanders." Lockheed Martin Corp. is the DarkStar team leader.
Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, the U.S. Army's departing chief of staff, says that any additional funds Congress appropriates for the service should go into modernization and infrastructure. "If I were to receive money...I would split it half," he tells a National Security Industrial Association conference in Arlington Va. Sullivan says his successor, Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, currently commanding U.S. Army Forces Command, advocates the same break down.
Proposed realignments and job impacts by NASA center Proposed realignments for each NASA center, and the estimated job impacts by fiscal 2000, are listed below. Designed to save $5 billion overhead and redundancy, the shifts reflect primary roles assigned each center in the "zero-base review" just completed at the space agency (DAILY, May 19, page 273). Job estimates are accurate to within 15%, according to Administrator Daniel S. Goldin.
Industry's calls on the Pentagon to privatize its depot infrastructure have found support with one of the Army's top leaders. Gilbert Decker, Army assistant secretary for research development and acquisition, tells NSIA there are "enough qualified industry that can do damn good depot work," and "huge savings" could be achieved by contracting out depot work to industry.
Senate Armed Services Committee ranking Democrat Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) said the Defense Dept.'s failure to buy sufficient quantities of precision guided munitions indicates that the base force is not adequate.
