A plan to outfit U.S. Army helicopters in Afghanistan and Iraq with the best possible electronic countermeasures to deflect heat-seeking missiles has been completed and is funded at $28 million, an Army spokesman said Feb. 2. The plan, sparked in November by a memo from acting Army Secretary R.L. Brownlee, "is finished," Maj. Gary Tallman said in response to a question from The DAILY. He said the plan was "being treated as very sensitive information" and the details were "sketchy."
NEW DELHI - India has begun development work on a reusable, two-stage space vehicle, named Avatar, that would be able to take off and land like an aircraft, according to an official with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). Avatar would be the size of a MiG-25 fighter aircraft would be able to put a 1,000-kilogram (2,204-pound) payload into low-earth orbit, the official said.
The U.S. Air Force plans to brief House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) on its future plans for long-range strike, according to a senior Air Force budget official speaking at the Pentagon Jan. 30. A major topic of the briefing will be the future of the B-1 bomber fleet. The Air Force had planned to cut roughly a third of its B-1 fleet and use the savings to modernize the remaining aircraft, although it repeatedly has clashed with Congress over the plan.
Two contractor teams, led by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, are turning in proposals Feb. 17 for the final downselect for the Navy's Mobile User Objective System (MUOS). MUOS is the Department of Defense's next-generation, advanced narrow band communications satellite constellation. The system will "increase support to 'communications on the move' to disadvantaged platforms in stressed environments [such as Navy SEALS and other special forces]," the Navy said in its fiscal 2005 budget briefing.
The Defense Department's fiscal 2005 budget request for space programs contains a significant funding increase compared with the previous year, according to senior defense officials. The request, which the Bush Administration sent to Congress Feb. 2, includes $12.4 billion for unclassified military space programs, up $1 billion from the FY '04 request, the officials told reporters Jan. 30. The FY '04 request was slightly higher than FY '04 enacted funding, though the exact amount of the difference was not immediately available.
LAUNCH READY: The AMC-10 telecommunications satellite, built for SES Americom by Lockheed Martin, is ready for its Feb. 5 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the company said Feb. 2. AMC-10 will carry 24 C-band transponders to provide cable TV services to the U.S. Mexico and the Caribbean.
Boeing has selected Hamilton Sundstrand and Rockwell Collins as partners for selected portions of the systems for the new Boeing 7E7 Dreamliner passenger jet, the company announced Feb. 2. Boeing has entered into the final stages of negotiations to define work statements and pricing with these companies. Additional 7E7 systems partners will be announced in coming weeks ahead, the company said.
The U.S. Department of Defense budget for fiscal 2005 likely will gain congressional support, according to a member of the House Armed Services Committee, but some portions of it, such as a proposed $1.5 billion increase in funding for the Missile Defense Agency, won't get "carte blanche." Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., (D-S.C.) told The DAILY Feb. 2 that the DOD budget request signals spending at full speed ahead without regard to the deficit.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency plans to award development contracts in fiscal 2005 to promote what it hopes will be a sizable foreign role for its new Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) program.
NASA's fiscal year 2005 budget spells out the agency's strategy for reprogramming $11.6 billion in funding over the next five years to support its new space exploration program. Before the loss of the shuttle Columbia, NASA planned to spend roughly $86 billion total over the five-year period starting in 2005. The FY '05 budget proposes redirecting approximately $11.6 billion of that funding, as well as adding $1 billion, to implement the president's space exploration goals (DAILY, Jan. 15).
The Budget continues to focus on improving program performance. Three DOD programs were assessed using the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART), which evaluated the programs' design and purpose, strategic planning efforts, how well they aremanaged, and whether they are generating positive results for taxpayers. Below are some of the highlights and recommendations from the PART evaluations. For further details on DOD's performance assessments, see the White House budget website at www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/.
F/A-22 SCHEDULE: A Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) meeting that will confirm whether the F/A-22 Raptor is ready for its initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) has been delayed from Feb. 29 to March 22 due to a scheduling conflict, according to the Air Force. The new DAB date is not expected to delay IOT&E, which is scheduled to start March 31, the Air Force says.
The Navy's total budget request for fiscal 2005 is $119.4 billion, a $3.9 billion increase from fiscal 2004 if the 2004 supplemental isn't factored in, a senior Department of the Navy budget official said Jan. 30 in a Pentagon press briefing. Including $5.3 billion in supplemental funding, the fiscal 2004 budget is $120.8 billion. DoD doesn't plan to ask for more supplemental funding until 2005, said a senior DoD budget official.
RENEWED SPIRIT: NASA's Mars Exploration Rover "Spirit" is regaining functionality and NASA is confident it will be able to conduct scientific investigations even as NASA engineers continue nursing it back to health. "We know we still have some engineering work to do, but we think we understand the problem well enough to do science in parallel with that work," says Jennifer Trosper, mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. On Jan. 28, Spirit took and transmitted its first picture since succumbing to a computer failure on Jan. 21 (DAILY, Jan.
PILOT TRAINING: In the wake of a deal for India's acquisition of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov (DAILY, Jan. 21), India and aircraft maker RAC MiG have agreed on the training of pilots for the MiG-29Ks that will be deployed on the ship. An Indian navy official said 12 Indian pilots will begin 32 months of training in Lukhovitsy, near Moscow. The $30 million training program was included in the deal for the 16 aircraft to be used on the carrier, which sources said is worth about $700 million.
Opportunities to compete for defense contracts are increasing due the U.S. Department of Defense's newly adopted evolutionary acquisition (EA) processes, industry executives said last week. "Let's say the Navy wants to have a long-term partnership with industry, but doesn't want a sole-source environment," Graham Alderson, program manager for submarine combat systems at Gaithersburg, Md.,-based EG&G Technical Services, said as an example.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Some of the American military systems being developed and used overseas in the war on terrorism should be adapted for use in the homeland, according to Gen. Ralph "Ed" Eberhart, commander of Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command. The list, he said in response to a question at a conference here, would include "almost everything that we've used for the away game - how could we use it in the home game?" Future Imagery Architecture
Cost growth of more than 50 percent has put the Air Force's Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program in violation of the Nunn-McCurdy act, according to Air Force budget officials. Lockheed Martin's Atlas V and Boeing's Delta IV rocket families originally were envisioned as serving both commercial and government customers. In the absence of a strong commercial market, however, Air Force officials have warned that EELV costs to the government will increase (DAILY, Nov. 19, 2003).
The U.S. Air Force says it is well on its way toward fixing various glitches that have afflicted the C-130J, the newest version of the C-130 Hercules. The service's problems with the Lockheed Martin-built aircraft prompted Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E), to label the C-130J "not operationally effective" and "not operationally suitable" in his recently released fiscal 2003 annual report on military acquisition programs. Christie said problem areas include software and aircrew workload.
