RF MICROSYSTEMS, San Diego, has received two five-year U.S. Navy contracts for engineering, design, development and support services worth a total of $57.2 million. The first contract, for $49.1 million, is with the Naval Air Warfare Center-Aircraft Div. in Maryland. The second contract, valued at $8.1 million, is with the Research and Development Division of the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center in San Diego. Award of the contracts "represents a significant step in RFM's strategic plan to be a major provider to U.S.
TRW Inc. yesterday reported record first quarter results, with earnings up 79% and sales up more than 20%. Space and defense sales were up for the second quarter-to-quarter comparison, the Cleveland-based company said.
The Navy will hold an industry day tomorrow in Ridgecrest, Calif., for contractors who can build an advanced precision-guided cruise missile based on existing weapons and off-the-shelf avionics. Is this the Navy's follow-on to the canceled AGM-137 Tri-Service Stand-off Attack Missile (TSSAM)? "If it turns into a program, it is," a high-ranking Navy official told The DAILY yesterday.
With B-2 testing still less than half done and due to finish in two years, U.S. Air Force programmers have no lack of challenges ahead of them, said AF long-range power projection acquisition director Brig. Gen. James Richards III. "We still have a lot to do," he said.
U.S. NAVY on April 8 christened the eighth ship in a series of Aegis guided missile destroyers being built by Litton's Ingalls Shipbuilding Div. in Pascagoula, Miss.
The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization could "productively use" a fiscal 1996 addition of $1.2 billion over the Administration's $2.91 billion budget request, the organization's deputy director told The DAILY in an interview.
The U.S. Air Force received the twentieth C-17 airlifter Friday, McDonnell Douglas said. It was delivered to the 437th Airlift Wing at Charleston AFB, S.C. The aircraft, the fifteenth C-17 to go to the 437th, was flown from McDonnell Douglas' Long Beach, Calif., plant to Charleston by Air Mobility Command Inspector General Brig. Gen. Antonio Ramos. It will join the wing's 14th Airlift Squadron, which next year is slated to become the second operational C-17 squadron.
Defense Secretary William Perry will recommend to President Clinton that John White, chairman of the Pentagon's roles and missions commission, take the No. 2 spot at the Defense Dept., DOD sources said yesterday. Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch is expected to leave the department to become the director of central intelligence, replacing R. James Woolsey who resigned. Confirmation hearings for Deutch are expected to begin next week.
NASA plans to use the Space Shuttle Atlantis to deliver 1,300 pounds of water to Russia's Mir space station on both the third and fourth Shuttle/Mir docking missions next year, as well as 1,900 pounds of supplies on each trip.
NORTHROP GRUMMAN will develop and demonstrate the JAST Affordable Weapons Delivery System (JAWS) avionics concept under a $3.5 million, 31- month contract. The company described JAWS as a target detection and weapon delivery sensor suite concept, and said results of the contract will be provided to all companies that won concept development contracts in December for the Joint Advanced Strike Technology program. In the JAWS concept, it said, wide area search, target nomination and strike system assignment would be performed by offboard systems.
PanAmSat announced a preferred stock offering aimed at raising $275 million toward the development, launch and construction of its PAS-5 and PAS-6 satellites. The company said Thursday that it plans to use the satellites for Galavision, a direct-to-home (DTH) venture to provide satellite-based programing to specific markets in Latin America, the Caribbean and the southwestern U.S.
The U.S. Navy is ahead of its sister services in the use of information technology for joint operations, a fact that could translate to budget savings, according to Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch. Deutch, in an address to the Navy League convention in Washington last Thursday, said he "was amazed" on a recent trip aboard the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off San Diego "to see the amount of awareness there is on what's going on under the water, on what's going on on top of the water, and what's going on in the air."
Europe may pay its share of the common operating costs of the International Space Station with an annual Ariane V launch to refuel the orbiting laboratory. In March NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin agreed to a cap on common Station operating costs after Jean-Marie Luton, director general of the European Space Agency, complained that otherwise Europe's tight space budget would be at the mercy of decisions taken at the Station program office in Houston (DAILY, March 13, page 375).
LUCAS AEROSPACE Power Systems, Aurora, Ohio, will produce components for the Patriot missile launcher under a $1.9 million contract from Martin Marietta Electronics and Missiles, Orlando, Fla. Delivery of azimuth and elevation actuators and motor controllers will begin in October. Lucas said that since production began in 1980, Power Systems has delivered more than $70 million worth of Patriot actuation system components.
Both the Lockheed and Martin Marietta political action committees, separate entities during last year's congressional elections, followed the trend of most major business PACs and gave heavily to Republicans in the post-election period from Nov. 9 to Dec. 31. It was also a time for both PACs to make amends for picking the wrong horses in some of the congressional races.
Orbital Sciences Corp. was working Friday to correct a malfunctioning gateway receiver in one of its on-orbit Orbcomm satellites, but the company was saying little beyond that. The malfunction in the satellite, one of two Orbcomms launched April 3, is preventing it from receiving standard commands from ground controllers. But Orbital is declining to say how bad the problem is or what measures it is taking to try and correct it.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology will review commercial and government radar cross-section ranges as part of an overall effort to improve the accuracy and consistency of RCS measurements in the antenna industry. NIST's Electromagnetic Fields Div. at the Boulder Laboratories in Colorado will do the reviews on request and at cost. For more information, contact Lorant Muth, Div. 813, NIST, Boulder, Colo., 80303-3328 or via Internet at [email protected].
DCX INC., Franktown, Colo., has received a contract worth about $225,000 from Lockheed Fort Worth Co. to provide ground support interface test adapters for the F-16 aircraft.
AERO LLOYD, the German charter carrier, has signed a series of agreements to acquire 16 Airbus A320s and A321s to replace its fleet of MD- 80s, Airbus Industrie said Wednesday. Aero Lloyd will purchase two A320s and four A321s from Airbus and lease four A320s and six A321s from International Lease Finance Corp. (ILFC). In addition to the firm commitments, Aero Lloyd holds options to take four more of either type aircraft from Airbus and two more from ILFC. Delivery of the aircraft is scheduled during a five-year period beginning early next year.
U.S. Air Force F-22 program managers are keeping a close eye on two key performance parameters of the next-generation fighter: its specific fuel consumption and its energy maneuverability, sources say. The Lockheed-designed aircraft, which doesn't meet its fuel consumption requirements for all parts of the flight envelope (DAILY, April 11, page 50), does meet its energy maneuverability requirement, which specifies how many Gs the plane must be able to pull at specific altitudes without losing altitude.
Russia is preparing to sell the newest modification of the S- 300V air and missile defense system, known in the West as the SA-12, to the U.S. government in a move criticized here as a "sell-out of the Motherland."
During the JAST program, managers have "on and off" explored the Air Force need to replace the F-15E Strike Eagle and the stealthy F-117, Steidle says. The Navy believes that the first-day attack plane that it hopes to get out of JAST can fill the requirements to replace these two, "but that's an Air Force decision," Steidle says. He is adamant that the Navy will make sure to fill its own needs, remarking, "We need a 117-current type capability in the 2010 time frame and we're going to get that."
