The Dept. of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency have signed off on a $1 billion commercial imagery initiative proposed by the National Reconnaissance Office, according to NRO Director Keith Hall.
The U.S. Navy, Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit and ITT Industries' Avionics Div. have completed the first flight test of the Integrated Defensive Electronics Countermeasures (IDECM) Radio Frequency Countermeasures (RFCM) system with an operational Fiber Optic Towed Decoy (FOTD). The system is planned for installation on F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, B-1B bombers and F-15 fighters.
NASA's Office of Space Science has picked two ambitious space probes as the newest missions in its Discovery program - a Mercury orbiter and an attempt to blast a huge chunk out of a comet so astronomers can analyze the resulting debris.
LITTON Guidance and Control Systems Div. has chosen Engineering Animation Inc., Ames Iowa, as its strategic partner for product design visualization. EAI said its solutions will allow Litton to view and interact with data in a common visual environment.
Lockheed Martin's Electronics Sector has formed a new Missiles and Fire Control organization, combining the operations of its Electronics&Missiles and Vought Systems businesses, Lockheed Martin reported yesterday. James Berry, president of Dallas-based Vought, will be the president of the new organization, which has 8,000 employees and sales of about $2 billion. Stanley Arthur, vice president of Washington operations for the Electronics sector, will be president of the Electronics&Missiles business in Orlando.
South Korea's Hyundai Space&Aircraft Co. filed suit against Boeing, seeking $750 million for what it said were bad-faith dealings in its contract to supply wings for the 717 airliner.
NASA is risking its $2.7 billion investment in the Chandra Advanced X- ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) on a Boeing Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) like the one that left a Defense Support Program early warning satellite stranded in the wrong orbit earlier this year. Despite the danger, Chandra Program Manager Fred Wojtalik says he is convinced changes NASA has made in the IUS that is scheduled to boost Chandra into a highly elliptical orbit once it is deployed from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle Columbia have eliminated any chance of a repeat failure.
The National Reconnaissance Office debuted several important capabilities during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, but is concerned that some of its techniques may have been exposed to potential adversaries, NRO Director Keith Hall said yesterday. "We have demonstrated capabilities in this [Operation Allied Force] that other [potentially hostile] militaries take into account in their planning," Hall said in a meeting with reporters at the Pentagon. "That makes our job harder. We have to be alert to counter activity."
The 24 F-117 Nighthawks that participated in Operation Allied Force borrowed a ground-based mission planning system from the B-2 fleet and used it to triple the amount of information needed to strike targets in Yugoslavia, according to U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command officials.
Monday's failure of a Russian Proton launch vehicle to orbit a military communications satellite has been traced to the rocket's second stage rather than the untried Briz-M upper stage, raising questions about upcoming commercial Proton launches.
General Motors has awarded three contracts to Lockheed Martin to provide information management services for three GM organizations. Lockheed Martin said it will provide elements of GM Service Parts Operations' data processing services, maintenance and support for 79 financial systems application programs and create a single shared marketing information source and decision support solution for the GM customer management system. The financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.
The U.K. Apache team has delivered the first Target Acquisition Designation Sight/Pilot Night Vision Sensor (TADS/PNVS) integrated in the U.K. to GKN Westland Helicopter Ltd., Lockheed Martin reported. The delivery marks the first time in the nearly 20-year production history of the TADS/PNVS system that an overseas facility has led the integration and assembly of the unit for the U.K. Apache helicopter. The Taunton Integration Facility (TIF) in Taunton, England, a team effort between Lockheed Martin and Avimo Ltd., was formally opened on June 24.
A staring infrared seeker assembly manufactured by Lockheed Martin provided the eyes for the June 10 missile intercept performed by the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) weapon system, the company said. The missile seeker includes an indium-antimonide focal plane, dewar and cooler assembly, signal processing electronics, telescope and two-axis gimbal assembly. Lockheed Martin Infrared Imaging Systems, Lexington, Mass., is under contract to deliver 25 units by November 1999.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization has pushed back the next test of the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile until later this month. It had been slated for this week. The delay is due to "internal government programmatic issues" and a "review of the program," BMDO spokeswoman Jennifer Canaff told The DAILY yesterday. BMDO Director Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish wants to "review some issues in the program," she said, adding the delay "has nothing to do with the hardware."
WESLEY T. HUNTRESS JR., former associate NASA administrator for space science, has joined the board of directors of SpaceDev, as has Paul J. Coleman Jr., president and CEO of Universities Space Research Association (USRA). Huntress left NASA last year after five years as space science chief to become director of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory (DAILY, May 27, 1998). SpaceDev is a commercial startup that hopes to sell data from a private asteroid rendezvous mission, and ultimately to mine asteroids (DAILY, Sept. 10, 1997; Aug. 26, 1998).
Litton Industries said the Federal Trade Commission on July 2 granted early termination of the pre-merger waiting period under the Hart-Scott- Rodino Act related to the company's agreement to acquire Avondale Industries. The deal is subject to approval of Avondale shareholders, who will hold a special meeting on the subject July 27. Litton expected the approval, and said the merger should close shortly thereafter.
Boeing delivered 313 jetliners in the first half of 1999, a pace that it said yesterday puts it on track to deliver a record 620 commercial aircraft for the full year. Last year, it delivered 563 commercial aircraft. Boeing said it delivered 165 aircraft in the second quarter, an 11.5% increase over the first quarter, and a 20.4% increase over the 1998 second quarter.
Boeing chose a derivative of General Electric's GE90 engine over competing designs from Pratt&Whitney and Rolls-Royce as the exclusive powerplant for longer-range 777X aircraft. Boeing hopes to build 500 of the 777-200X and -300X twinjets using an 115,000 poound-thrust growth version of the GE90, the GE90-115B.
ITT Industries won a $46.5 million contract from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a small unit operations situational awareness system for next-generation tactical communication, geolocation and information systems. The contract includes development and field testing of several advanced systems with technology to bring multi-media communications to early entry forces on the battlefield.
FRANK C. MEYER has been appointed president of Lockheed Martin Electronics Sector's Electronics Platform Integration segment. Lockheed Martin said Meyer, 55, also was named president of the Lockheed Martin Federal Systems- Owego business, one of four elements comprising the Electronics Platform Integration segment. Meyer succeeds John Sponyoe, who last August was named to lead Lockheed Martin's new global telecommunications initiative. Meyer has held both positions in an interim capacity in the intervening months, Lockheed Martin said.
The U.S. Dept. of Defense plans to focus efforts on precision munitions that make air and land platforms more formidable, rather than building new platforms like bombers and tanks, Jacques Gansler, under secretary of defense for acquisition and technology, said yesterday. "Clearly the emphasis [after Kosovo] is on killing moving platforms, not just finding them," he told reporters at a breakfast in Washington, indicating that smart munitions will be expected to seek out targets and not just fly to a set GPS location.
Debris from an International Space Station launch threatened Russia's Mir orbital station on Monday, but while NASA relayed a U.S. Air Force warning to the Russian Space Agency, no evasive action was deemed necessary. A spokesman for the U.S. Space Command said yesterday USAF trackers at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs issued four "orbital conjunction messages" on Monday after their computers projected debris would enter a 50-by-10-kilometer "alert box" around Mir, which is occupied by two Russian cosmonauts and a French researcher.
Raytheon won a five-year, $62 million contract to operate, maintain and provide logistics support to two sensor systems aboard the USNS Observation Island and the USNS Invincible for the U.S. Air Force Air Intelligence Agency, San Antonio, Tex., Raytheon reported yesterday. Raytheon Systems Co. will provide operations and maintenance, to include organization and depot-level maintenance of the mobile sensor systems and support facilities.
