Northrop Grumman Corp., Bethpage, New York, is being awarded a $14,535,761 modification to previously awarded N00019-00-C-0268 contract to exercise an option for the upgrade of 6 EA-6B Block 82 aircraft to the Block 89A configuration and 4 EA-6B Block 89 aircraft to the Block 89A configuration. In addition, this option provides for the concurrent scheduled depot level maintenance of the two of the reconfigured EA-6B Block 82 aircraft. Work will be performed in St. Augustine, Fla. (40%); Bethpage, N.Y. (33%); and Melbourne, Fla.
L-3 Communications has signed an agreement to buy Honeywell Inc.'s Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) product line for about $255 million in cash. The deal, announced yesterday, is the result of a U.S. government requirement that Honeywell and AlliedSignal sell some of their assets before merging.
Raytheon Co., Tucson, Ariz., is being awarded a $36,187,024 firm-fixed-price production contract to produce 90 Block 1 Rolling Airframe Missiles and 190 related active optical target detectors. Work will be performed in Tucson, Ariz. (59%), and Ottobrunn, Germany (41%), and is expected to be completed by February 2002. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Arlington, Va., is the contracting activity (N00024-00-C-5487).
TRW ICBM Systems, Clearfield, Utah, is being awarded a $19,334,507 modification to a cost-plus-award-fee-contract, F42610-98-C-0001-P00351, to provide for assembly and test of replacement battery systems for the Minuteman missile system and for the Arming and Fusing Assembly on the Minuteman. Expected contract completion date is Feb. 28, 2003. Negotiation completion date was March 7, 2000. Ogden Air Logistics Center, Hill AFB, Utah, is the contracting activity.
Harris Corp., Government Communications Systems Div., Melbourne, Fla., is being awarded a $111,298,000 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to fulfill the Navy's AN/WSC-6(V)X (C/X) multi-band terminal system requirements for the Arleigh Burke DDG-51 class destroyers.
Technical and Management Services, Calverton, Md., is being awarded a $6,300,000 firm-fixed-price contract to provide for development of procedures and local sources for spares and repair in support of the F-15 aircraft. This effort supports foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia. There was one firm solicited and one proposal received. Expected contract completion date is Feb. 28, 2001. Solicitation issue date was Dec. 13, 1999. Negotiation completion date was Jan. 14, 2000.
ICO Global Communications, freshly rescued from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, sees "no significant adverse impact" on its business from Sunday's failure of a Sea Launch Zenit rocket carrying its first satellite.
Problems with a Hughes/National Reconnaissance Office data relay satellite have forced removal of its Atlas-Centaur booster from the pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., and a launch postponement. The satellite is being returned to the Hughes plant for modification.
The Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser (WCMD) kit, designed to turn existing cluster munitions into all-weather precision-guided weapons, is surpassing accuracy requirements in testing, a Lockheed Martin official said. Dick Caime, vice president for Strike Weapons at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Orlando, Fla., said, "We have a CEP [circular error probable] requirement of 85 feet....Right now our testing has gotten us in the 50 foot range -- so it is even more accurate than has been specified."
STATION DELAYS: A top-level conference on International Space Station utilization has been delayed by delays in the Station itself. Set for Berlin in mid-June, the "International Space Station Forum 2000" was to have featured the heads of all the space agencies participating in the project, telling a "global audience" about their hardware and plans for its use.
'NEAR-PEER': The U.S. probably won't have a "near-peer" in the next 10 years, but may in the next 20 years, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael E. Ryan tells Congress. He believes the next decade will bring small-scale contingency challenges, like Bosnia and Kosovo, and requirements to blunt humanitarian disasters such as famines. This, he says, will require flexibility and rapid response to prevent crises from becoming conflicts. Action will be necessary "because the U.S.
The Boeing/Sikorsky team developing the U.S. Army's RAH-66 Comanche helicopter said it is expecting a Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) Milestone II review decision in early April. A favorable decision would give an immediate go-ahead to the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase, because the Army and Boeing/Sikorsky have already settled on terms of the EMD contract, valued at $3.1 billion, the team said.
BAE Systems' Airbus unit has invested $7 million in knowledge-based technology, created by Knowledge Technologies International (KTI) of Lexington, Mass., to accelerate and streamline the aircraft design process. Using the knowledge-based organization (KBO) environment with ICAD built-in, KTI said, two BAE Systems employees designed a set of wing ribs in six weeks, a task that normally calls for about 26 people and six months to complete. In terms of man-hours and other resources, KTI said, this amounts to 2.5% of the traditional cost.
Two NASA deep-space probes may get a chance to work together studying the magnetic environment at Jupiter in December, when the Cassini spacecraft swings through the neighborhood that the Galileo platform has been exploring since 1995. Planners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have extended Galileo's mission through the end of the year to allow two more flybys of Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, and to set up a coordinated observation with Cassini of the way the solar wind interacts with Jupiter's magnetic field.
MARS WEEK: Top NASA managers are hunkering down for the bad news in TomYoung's upcoming report on last year's Mars-probe failures, which have been blamed on tight budgets and schedules dictated from agency headquarters. Young, a respected former Lockheed Martin executive vice president, was originally set to release his panel's report on Wednesday. But Administrator Daniel S.
Continuing the recent trend of merger and acquisition activity in Japan's aerospace sector, NEC and Toshiba are planning to join forces in a satellite manufacturing venture. The 50/50 partnership between Japan's second and third largest satellite and ground-system manufacturers, after Mitsubishi Electric Corp. (MELCO), is expected to employ 400-500 workers. While NEC and Toshiba will not physically merge plants, they will collaborate on design and development initiatives and have mutual interchanges between the facilities.
NOTWITHSTANDING: While Goldin seems reluctant to face the lawmakers who hold NASA's purse strings until the dust from Young's report settles, the congressional panel that is normally most critical (and interested) in how NASA runs has sent him a bouquet. Most of the members of the House Science Committee have endorsed the agency's "faster-better-cheaper" approach to robotic space exploration, even without hearing what the various study panels have to say on the matter.
BROKEN BLADE: Japanese experts examining the wreckage of the LE-7 rocket engine fished from the bottom of the ocean after last fall's H-2 launch failure (DAILY, Nov. 16, 1999) have identified a broken turbine blade as the probable cause of the failure, and not a crack in a welded hydrogen fuel line as originally thought. The outer edge of the eight-inch titanium blade from the hydrogen turbopump was broken, and specialists believe it failed as a result of vibrations set up by bubbles in the fuel rather than because of a machining or assembly error.
The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) is expected to be up and running by July 1, 2000, the chairman and CEO of Aerospatiale Matra, Philippe Camus, told reporters Friday in Washington. EADS recently finished stocking management ranks (DAILY, Feb. 15) and all that remains is for the company to clear regulatory hurdles. Camus said that EADS has offered BAE Systems a 20% stake in the venture, and that he expects negotiations to be "favorably concluded" in the near term.
The House Appropriations Committee passed a $9 billion supplemental spending bill to cover the fiscal year 2000 operations in Kosovo and other Dept. of Defense and disaster relief activities. The supplemental, an increase from the Administration's $5.5 billion request, passed Thursday in a 33-13 vote.
The strike by Boeing engineers and technical workers could have a "material" effect on the company's first quarter performance and hit second quarter results as well, according to Boeing's annual Form 10-K filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The strike by 17,000 members of the Society of Professional Engineers and Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) began Feb. 9. It has hobbled production and affected commercial aircraft delivery schedules.
The U.S. Navy's Standoff Land Attack Missile Expanded Response (SLAM-ER) was declared "operationally suitable and operationally effective" in a final report last week. Testing, completed on Jan. 2, was conducted by an independent test team from Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Nine (VX-9) at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., the Navy said. In this round of testing, which began in November, SLAM-ER scored direct hits in four out of four flight tests.
Greece and the U.S. signed a letter of offer and acceptance on Friday for Greece's purchase of 50 new Lockheed Martin F-16s. Deliveries of the Block 50+ aircraft under the $2.1 billion deal will begin in about 30 months, the company said. Lockheed Martin has provided the F-16 aircraft to Greece twice before, in 1986 and 1992, though the Block 50+ variant is one of the most advanced versions, including extended range fuel tanks and the APG-68(V)XM radar. The contract has an option for 10 additional jets.
DISAGREEMENT ON ABL: Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters says the reason the service cut $92 million from its fiscal 2001 budget for the Airborne Laser program is that within the service, "some think it will work, some think it won't work." The FY '01 budget includes a proposal to cut up to $800 million from the program over the next five years. "There is a substantial disagreement inside the program about this issue," Peters tells the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.
