House National Security Committee Chairman Rep. Floyd Spence (R-S.C.) has warned that President Clinton's decision to ease supercomputer export restrictions "will increase the cost of maintaining the U.S. military's technological edge" and will be reviewed by the committee to determine if a legislative response is necessary. A House NSC spokeswoman said the committee might hold hearings, depending on what the review shows.
The stalled House-Senate fiscal 1996 defense authorization conference could be "within striking distance" of a compromise agreement next week or within 10 days, a senior congressional aide said yesterday. In making the estimate, which seemed more upbeat than other assessments of the conference, the aide said that there "has not been an explicit veto threat" from the Clinton Administration.
The rate of defense industry consolidation will speed up in the next five years, but it will vary among sectors, according to the Electronic Industries Association's new 10-year forecast.
TRW says its participation on a team that won a contract for the validation phase of the U.S. Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program marks the company's entry into the launch vehicle business. TRW is part of an Alliant Techsystems team that won one of four 15-month $30 million EELV study contracts (DAILY, Aug. 25, page 297). TRW said it will be responsible for overall systems integration under the contract. Other members of the Alliant team were Aerojet, Allied Signal, Arianespace, Reynolds, Smith&Hills, and Systems Technology Inc.
GE CAPITAL SATELLITES has launched a European service that it is offering satellite communications services on the new Sirius 2 Ku-band satellite, which is scheduled for launch in 1997.
SOUTHWESTERN BELL TELEPHONE CO. has become the first regional Bell operating company to offer digital satellite system equipment to its customers. Under a deal reached with Hughes, Southwestern Bell will rent and sell the 18-inch satellite dishes and accompanying decoder equipment used to receive the DirecTV and United States Satellite Broadcasting direct broadcast satellite services. Southwestern Bell initially began offering the satellite equipment in Little Rock, Ark., and Enid, Okla.
October 6, 1995 Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Westinghouse Electronic Systems Division, Sykesville, Maryland, is being awarded an $8,629,211 modification to previously awarded contract N00024-92-C-6312 for the procurement of AN/SQS-89 design agent services. Work will be performed in Sykesville, Maryland, and is expected to be completed by May 1996. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity.
October 2, 1995 Hughes Missile Systems Company, Tucson, Arizona, is being awarded a $7,536,855 face value increase to a firm fixed price contract for a Value Engineering Effort to reduce the cost of the Digital Intermediate Frequency Receiver/Range Correlator for the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM). Contract is expected to be completed May 1998. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Aeronautical Systems Center, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida is the contracting activity (F08626- 94/C-0029, P00006).
APAC Telecommunications, Vancouver, British Columbia, has signed a letter of intent to acquire an interest in the upgrading and expansion of a satellite ground station of Apstar 1, a Chinese telecommunications satellite orbited in 1994. APAC said its proposed enhancement "would allow a five-fold increase in channel capacity which would then be leased to off- shore operators."
BALL AEROSPACE has awarded a research and development contract to Aware, Inc. of Bedford, Mass. The contract covers technology transfer, system trade studies and consulting in the area of wavelet transform based data compression. Wavelets are recently discovered mathematical functions "which have proven themselves remarkably effective at compressing digital imagery," Aware said.
Boeing won the smallest dollar amount of three recently awarded Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) contracts, but will have executive agent responsibility for the effort. Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas are also involved. Boeing received $1.9 million under the JAST Integrated Subsystem Technology (J/IST) project to assess the life-cycle cost of the effort and to ensure that proper documentation is provided throughout the program, a JAST program official said.
NASA has handed over primary control of the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) spacecraft to its European partners in an effort to save money on operations costs, and may turn the U.S. share of the satellite's operations over to specially trained college students in a further cost- cutting measure.
The U.S. Air Force announced in June that Raytheon was chosen to supply the Joint Primary Aircraft Training System, but because of protests to the General Accounting Office the JPATS contract isn't likely to be signed this year. Cessna and Rockwell, two of the losing competitors, filed protests in July on which the GAO had to rule by early Dec. But Cessna has since filed several additional protests, the most recent in September, the GAO says. The GAO now has until Jan. 30 to rule on the most recent supplemental protest.
Lockheed Martin and Fokker have signed a long term agreement for production and sale of Lockheed Martin-built electronic and missile systems in The Netherlands, the U.S. company reported. The agreement also settles some of the offset issues resulting from the Dutch decision to buy McDonnell Douglas AH-64D helicopters, a spokesman for Orlando-based Lockheed Martin Electronics and Missiles Systems said Thursday. But the agreement with Amsterdam-based Fokker, a subsidiary of Germany's Daimler-Benz Aerospace, goes beyond offsets, he said.
Sen. Trent Lott (Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee and the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, conceded last week that the stalled fiscal 1996 defense authorization conference made "a mistake" in letting the defense appropriations conference take the lead, but nevertheless expressed confidence that there would be an authorization bill.
B-52s have enough room for upgrades which can be easily integrated, such as real-time targeting, Katsufrakis notes. "I would like to see a real-time-in-the-cockpit capability," he says. "I need to know where things are when I get there to attack the target" and not be forced to rely on information obtained before the bomber leaves its base in the U.S.
HUGHES SPACE AND COMMUNICATIONS CO. said Friday it has finalized a deal announced in July under which it will build 12 spacecraft for the Inmarsat- P mobile satellite project. With launch services, the contract is worth more than $2 billion, the company said. In a separate deal, Hughes will invest $93.8 million to become a strategic partner in Inmarsat-P.
Overall U.S. defense spending will decline 18% over the coming decade, but procurement spending will actually rise because of needs for modernization and replacement of platforms, according to a new Electronic Industries Association (EIA) forecast. The 10-year forecast, scheduled to be unveiled this week at EIA's annual conference in Phoenix, is slightly more optimistic than last year's forecast because of the Republican takeover of Congress.
The Polish government wants to beef up its army's anti-armor capability. State's Davis says Poland has requested information from Russia on their equivalent of a Tube-launched Optically-tracked Wire-guided missile. Poland also has approached the U.S. about purchasing a variant of its TOW missile system through foreign military sales channels, a State Dept. official confirmed. State has cleared Poland to receive pricing and availability information on TOW, but has stressed that clearance doesn't imply an agreement to sell the system, he said.
When Tiger helicopter partner Aerospatiale and the French government argue that the anemic U.S. dollar tipped the balance in favor of AH-64 Apaches in recent British and Dutch attack helo competitions, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace's number two executive, Herb Lanese, has a ready reply: "If I were subsidized to the tune of two billion dollars a year, I'd make excuses too." Tiger has yet to win an order other than from the French and German governments that created the program.
Why do investors want such high returns? Demisch says one reason is that the ventures, which are in the construction phase, aren't generating cash yet. Increasing competition in the low-Earth orbit mobile satellite arena is also making investors wary. And while banks deal with the ventures' parent companies, such as Loral and Motorola, "as a bond holder all you have is an indenture," he says.
Machinists union members at Boeing, on strike as of midnight Thursday, have a considerably weaker hand than they did six years ago when the union last walked out, suggesting this labor dispute will last days rather than months, financial analysts and company executives said Friday. Officially, Boeing's stance is only that it "cannot speculate on the overall impact" of the strike by employees at Boeing plants in Washington, Oregon and Kansas represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
