Prices for an Iridium satellite phone could drop by two - thirds or more and service should be both less expensive and easier to understand, according an announcement yesterday by John Richardson, Iridium's interim chief executive officer. Prices for phones should drop to under $1,000 from current as $3,000 or more, he said, making Iridium's phones the smallest and cheapest on the market.
DaimlerChrysler Aerospace may drop U.S. companies as suppliers because of concerns over problems caused by tighter export regulations. Tighter regulations may also increase insurance risk and affect companies' ability to raise capital.
U.S. Air Force leaders may ask Secretary of Defense William Cohen for up to six months to reconstitute their forces as airmen return home from Operation Allied Force, their first major theater war since Desert Storm in 1991. AF Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan and key leaders in the service's Expeditionary Aerospace Force (EAF) initiative are scheduled to meet tomorrow to plan implementation of the concept, under which major forces are regularly rotated.
In an interesting pirouette, U.S. Air Force Space&Missile Systems Center issued a Sources Sought Notice for a Milstar communications satellite - and then withdrew the request three days later.
NASA's QuikSCAT ocean scatterometer satellite has finally reached orbit, six months later than the engineers who built it in record time to fill a data gap had hoped. Built by Ball Aerospace as the first spacecraft procured from NASA's Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition "catalogue," the 2,140-pound satellite lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4 at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., at 10:15 p.m. EDT Saturday aboard a Lockheed Martin Titan II.
ELBIT SYSTEMS LTD., Haifa, Israel, is in negotiations with Elop Electro-Optics Industries Ltd., about a possible statutory merger, Elbit reported yesterday. Elbit's board of directors authorized the discussions Friday.
EG&G Optoelectronics, Miamisburg, Ohio, is being awarded a $15,930,400 firm-fixed-price contract, with options, for Mk. 21 Mod 1 initiators in support of the Standard missile program. Work will be performed in Miamisburg, Ohio, and is expected to be completed by September 2003. Approximately 50% of the funding will be under Foreign Military Sales. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was competitively procured through a Commerce Business Daily announcement, and three offers were received.
A new international protocol is in the works that could enable space firms to finance their endeavors by borrowing against their hardware as security, much the same way that homeowners borrow to finance a house.
AlliedSignal, Inc., Tempe, Ariz., is being awarded a $5,118,430 firm-fixed-price contract for 42 turbine to be used on the T55 engine for the CH47 helicopter. Work will be performed in Tempe, Ariz., and is expected to be completed by Nov. 30, 2001. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This is a sole source contract initiated on March 16, 1999. The contracting activity is the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal, Ala. (N00383-95-G-M120).
Boeing Co., St. Louis, Mo., is being awarded a $9,825,003 firm-fixed-priced contract for 190 component parts for F/A-18E/F aircraft. The 52 types of spares purchased will include aircraft fuel tanks, ailerons, and uplock assembly doors. Work will be performed in St. Louis, Mo. (55%); Lincoln, Neb. (20%); El Segundo, Calif. (16%); Mesa, Ariz. (7%); Euless, Texas (1%); and Ontario, Canada (1%), and is expected to be completed by February 2002. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year.
Airplane orders hoarded by both Airbus and Boeing for announcement at the Paris Air Show found Airbus as the winner in the number of orders, but Boeing as the winner in the value sweepstakes.
Maintaining the low-observable materials that keep the U.S. fleet of B-2A stealth bombers stealthy remains a problem for ground crews assigned to the $2 billion airplanes, limiting flying time for training and missions and restricting the 21-plane force to operations from its primary base at Whiteman AFB, Mo.
COTS FOR SALE: Military leaders are actively seeking commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products to fill their bandwidth and connectivity challenges, Donahue says. COTS systems "reduce airlift and force protection requirements," he affirms. "If you have solutions, you'll find the U.S. Dept. of Defense and U.S. Air Force are very willing customers."
Europe's new military helicopter was given the green light Thursday when France and Germany signed a production go-ahead for 80 each. Fears that Germany might seek to reduce the total or extend the delivery timetable still further proved unfounded. Germany will take the multirole (anti-tank /attack) version of Tiger, while France is opting initially for an armed escort model, called Tigre. Deliveries from this, Europe's largest helicopter program, will begin in 2001.
DOD AND CYBERWAR: The U.S. came through its first cyberwar unscathed, according to Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre. He tells the GovTechNet International conference in Washington that Serbian sympathizers "spammed" the Pentagon e-mail system in an "unsophisticated" attempt to disrupt the military information network. "[The Pentagon] has already faced cyber attacks; industry has not faced it yet, but they are threatened by it," he says. "We [the military] do not want this mission. We have enough missions, but the department is way out in front on this area."
Northrop Grumman outlined plans at the Paris Air Show for continued modernization of the radar for the Lockheed Martin F-16. Thomas Lupica, director of the APG-66/68 radar programs at Northrop Grumman, said the company hopes to deploy by 2003 the APG-68(V)X. It will feature enhanced air/surface modes, including synthetic aperture radar, that will be integrated with GPS-guided weapons. Lupica said the B-1B bomber's APG-164 radar already has these features, and that it is in line for system upgrades based on the APG-68(V)X.
...BUTTON DOWN, BOYS: Lt. Gen. William J. Donahue, U.S. Air Force director of communications and information, describes recent attacks on Dept. of Defense networks as "virus du jour." He instructs his employees "to button down your networks before you leave for the weekend so you have something to work with when you come in the office Monday."
The U.S. Navy has an operational hyperspectral imagery system for countermine operations and anti-submarine warfare in the littoral battlespace and is developing ultra-low imagery technology for such missions, said Rear Adm. Richard Mayo, deputy director of Space Information Warfare, command and control. "There are air applications [of the latter] being flown right now," Mayo told The DAILY Wednesday in an interview after he spoke to the GovTechNet Conference International in Washington. He declined to elaborate.
...PROWLER RETENTION: Despite being on call or deployed almost non-stop in recent months, the EA-6B fleet is not experiencing a retention problem, says the aircraft's requirements officer. The Dept. of Defense had looked into keeping Prowler pilots from leaving the service during the NATO air campaign but found such a measure unnecessary.
BOEING completed mating the single-piece wing of its Joint Strike Fighter X-32 concept demonstrator to the fuselage. A team of mechanics in Palmdale, Calif., mated all the attach points within six hours. The wing design, which includes one-piece upper and lower composite skins, reduces weight by eliminating attachments at the side of the fuselage. Laser tracking devices on the factory floor use 3-D design data to align the parts for assembly.
Airbus announced has received the new JAR 21-G production approval from the French and German airworthiness authorities, allowing the European consortium to request a certificate of airworthiness for aircraft coming off the production lines without additional controls by the certification authorities. The new approval is part of the harmonization of European rules as JAA regulations are adopted.
LOCKHEED MARTIN won a $125 million cost share deal from Naval Sea Systems Command to develop, manufacture and test a High Power Discrimination (HPD) radar prototype. The HPD radar will search, detect, track and perform exo-atmospheric discrimination. The contract runs through December 2004.
SIKORSKY has launched a fractional owneership program called Sikorsky Shares, which it calls the first such program offered directly by a major helicopter manufacturer. Sikorsky Shares makes the S-76 helicopter available for "as little as $2 million a quarter," the company says. This entitles the share owner to 290 trips or flight units per year in the eastern U.S.
NETWORK CENTRIC NAVY: The U.S. Navy movement to "network centric warfare" will enhance identification of friend and foe on the battlefield, says Rear Adm. Richard Mayo, deputy director of Space Information Warfare, command and control. "We are still too locked into visual ID," he says. The Navy budget calls for almost $1 billion to link every battlegroup with IT-21, an information network that includes access to the classified Internet. The Navy is already using Web pages for turnovers at sea and to plan missions for the Tomahawk cruise missiles.
The Gripen fighter program will not be affected by Sweden's new Defense Materiel Plan, and funding has been guaranteed for three specific areas of development, Hans Kruger, managing director the program for Saab, said at the Paris Air Show.
