After months of delays, a bidding competition is set to begin in early September to design an air-to-ground missile need to replace the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' aging Hellfire inventory. The Army's Aviation and Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., plans to issue next month a solicitation for industry to bid on the Joint Common Missile (JCM) contract, although ongoing budget drills continue to reshape the project's original scope and cost, said Col. Jody Maxwell, JCM project manager.
Starting Sept. 4 and going through mid-October, the House Science Committee expects to hold a hearing every week on the findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), according to a committee spokeswoman. The first hearing will feature CAIB Chairman Adm. Hal Gehman as the sole witness. Subsequent hearings on Sept. 10 and afterwards will feature testimony from other board members and investigators, according to CAIB spokeswoman Laura Brown.
San Diego-based defense contractor Cubic Corp. will acquire ECC International Corp. of Orlando, Fla., in a deal the company said would broaden its training businesses to include virtual simulation. Cubic will offer to buy all outstanding shares of ECC common stock for $5.25 a share, in a deal expected to reach $42.3 million. ECC's board of directors unanimously approved the deal and is recommending stockholders tender their shares, Cubic said. ECC designs and builds simulators and training programs for crew, operator and maintenance training.
BOMB RELEASES: EDO Corp. will produce additional BRU-46 and -47 bomb release units for the F/A-22 Raptor under a $2.6 million contract modification from the U.S. Air Force, the company said Aug. 21. The modification increases the contract's value to $6.7 million and extends the work to August 2004, EDO said.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - The U.S. Army expects to get additional fiscal 2003 funding to replace the 22 Patriot missiles it used in the Iraq war, a service official said Aug. 21. The new missiles will be the Lockheed Martin-built Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) version and will replace PAC-3s and older Raytheon PAC-2s used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said Army Col. Tommie Newberry, the Army's Lower Tier project manager. Newberry spoke at the Sixth Annual Space and Missile Defense Conference here.
Northrop Grumman Corp. has agreed to pay $80 million to settle two lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. The settlements stem from lawsuits filed in January 1998 and February 2003 under the False Claims Act. The first lawsuit alleges that Newport News Shipbuilding improperly charged the Navy more than $72 million for research and development work on two commercial double-hulled tankers. Newport News was acquired by Northrop Grumman in November 2001 (DAILY, Nov. 9, 2001).
Northrop Grumman's RQ-8A Fire Scout vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle completed its first three flights under the control of Raytheon's Tactical Control System software, Northrop Grumman said Aug. 21. The tests will kick off a series of flights to verify the TCS' ability to control the Fire Scout air vehicle and payload, provide operator displays and disseminate data to the command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) architecture.
Space Systems/Loral, the satellite manufacturing division of Loral Space & Communications Ltd., likely would be sold or shut down if EchoStar Communications Corp. acquires all of the company's assets, according to some analysts. It's unlikely EchoStar would want to enter the satellite manufacturing market given the downturn affecting the U.S. telecommunications industry, analysts said. EchoStar, based in Littleton, Colo., provides direct broadcast satellite (DBS) television products and services to customers worldwide via its Dish network.
The Department of Defense's (DOD) multi-billion dollar effort to solve its bandwidth problems is heating up as competing contractors await several critical awards and requests for proposals (RFPs).
The U.S. Air Force is preparing a $350 million proposal for a contractor to design and install a "dramatically improved" maintenance depot system for KC-135s and at least five jet engines. The Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center (ALC) at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., is in the early stages of developing the plan. Dozens of interested contractors are expected to attend an Aug. 28 industry day at the center for an early glimpse of the program.
In the second major organizational change announced in as many days, four U.S. Air Force test and evaluation centers are being merged into a new organization for a one-year trial period. The Air Force Development Test and Evaluation Center (DTEC) opens on Oct. 1 to manage the Tennessee-based Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) and the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. In addition, landing gear and live-fire test facilities based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, will report to the new center.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - The head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) said Aug. 21 that he wants to improve the "convergence" of NIMA's geospatial intelligence with the signals intelligence (SIGINT) produced by the National Security Agency (NSA). The interaction of geospatial intelligence and SIGINT "helped kill a lot of bad people" during recent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but "it needs to be a lot more pervasive," NIMA Director James Clapper said here at the Sixth Annual Space and Missile Defense Conference.
Investigation of an Aug. 7 explosion at Pratt & Whitney's rocket plant near San Jose, Calif., is continuing at a deliberate pace, with officials "collecting all the data that could in any way pertain to the incident," said Webb Harwell, head of business development for the operation.
NORTHROP GRUMMAN has received the first test terminal for the U.S. Defense Department's next-generation Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite system from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory. The company's Space Technology division is developing satellite communications payloads for the system, which is intended to replace the military's Milstar satellite communications system.
New reports indicate the Textron-made CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon's (SFW) combat debut in Operation Iraqi Freedom pleased U.S. Air Force munitions developers. A military news report described the first SFW strike as a two-bomb packaged dropped by a B-52 at high altitude on an Iraqi tank column advancing on a Marine Corps unit.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) will publicly release its final report on the Feb. 1 shuttle disaster on Aug. 26. The multi-volume report will be made available on the board's website (www.caib.us) at 10 a.m. EDT. At 11 a.m., CAIB Chairman Adm. Hal Gehman and other board members will review the contents of the report and answer questions during a press conference in Washington. The briefing will be open to press only.
The U.S. Air Force is reshuffling authority for nearly all non-space acquisition programs, centralizing management mostly within the three product centers. The actions, unveiled in an announcement issued late Aug. 20, consolidate the duties of program executive officers (PEOs) with the heads of the Air Armament Center (AAC), Aeronautical Services Center (ASC) and the Electronic Systems Center (ESC). The new policy takes effect Oct. 1, an Air Force spokeswoman said.
With the ultimate goal of enabling an automated aerial refueling (AAR) demonstration in 2005, NASA is gathering data on U.S. Navy-style hose/drogue refueling, a process whose physics are not well understood, according to AAR Project Manager Gerard Schkolnik. "The state of the art right now for Navy-style refueling ... hasn't changed in 50 years," Schkolnik told The DAILY. "The system that flies today, in large part, has evolved by trial and error with no real understanding of the physics or the science.
The Missile Defense Agency's Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD) system failed to shoot down its target in a June test because a valve became stuck in a newly upgraded portion of the interceptor missile's warhead, according to U.S. Defense Department officials. The kinetic warhead on the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptor separated from its booster and tracked the target missile as planned. But the warhead later began spinning and lost sight of the target, DOD said in a statement released late Aug. 19.
BUYBACK: Northrop Grumman Corp. will repurchase up to $700 million worth of its outstanding common stock over the next 18 months, the company said Aug. 20. CEO and President Ronald D. Sugar said the move "reflects our high degree of confidence in the company's operations, financial performance and outlook." The buyback will be financed mostly with cash from operations.
LOCKHEED MARTIN said its first F-16 Fighting Falcon was delivered 25 years ago this week. Since the first production delivery in 1978, 4,092 F-16s have been produced in factories in five countries, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and Korea. There is a backlog of 325 aircraft on order that are expected to be delivered by 2008, the company said.
