Government/Military

[Via Satellite 05-16-2016] GATR Technologies, a subsidiary of Cubic Corporation, has received an engineering services order valued in excess of $5 million to support the U.S. Army’s Transportable Tactical Command Communications (T2C2) program, under its Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR), Phase 3 Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. The T2C2 program provides voice and data...

[Via Satellite 05-11-2016] U.S. President Barack Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is proposing legislation that would provide a narrowly-tailored authorization process for newly-contemplated and pioneering commercial space activities. In an April 4 report to Congress, OSTP said this authorization process would only contain conditions necessary for compliance with the nation’s international obligations...

[Via Satellite 05-06-2016] Airbus Defence and Space has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build its next Earth Explorer mission, the Biomass satellite. Biomass is due to launch in 2021 and will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes for five years. The spacecraft will carry the first...

[Via Satellite 05-06-2016] The U.S. Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) has awarded Global Positioning System (GPS) 3 Space Vehicles (SVs) 11+ Phase 1 Production Readiness Feasibility Assessment contracts to defense primes Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The three contracts, issued May 5, use the current GPS 3 SV01 to SV08 requirements baseline...

[Via Satellite 05-06-2016] Harris Corporation has received $41 million in orders for production, spare parts, depot, and installation of advanced satellite communications terminals under the U.S. Army’s Modernization of Enterprise Terminals (MET) program. The company will provide fixed-site terminals and hardened transportable terminals, which enable dual X- and Ka-band access to the Wideband Global Satcom...

[Via Satellite 05-05-2016] Boeing, prime contractor for the U.S. Air Force’s Wideband Global Satcom (WGS) system, has been working on a series of improvements to make the government-operated system more effective. Originally launched as the Wideband Gapfiller Satellite series, WGS got a name-change when the program shifted to a worldwide network. WGS reached global coverage...

[Via Satellite 05-05-2016] The U.K. Space Agency and the National Center for Earth Observation (NCEO) are funding a project called the U.K. Climate Data from Space (CDS) computing zone to provide a seamless supply chain of climate data from space. The project is to provide data processing facilities, community tools and software to allow regular...

[Via Satellite 05-40-2016] Satellites will play a vital role in ensuring the agreements reached last year at the COP21 Paris Climate Conference are followed through, but more are needed, according to Jean Yves Le Gall, president of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency. Speaking April 29 at the Washington Space Business Roundtable,...

[Via Satellite 04-28-2016] Azercosmos is a rapidly evolving satellite operator, having not only brought significant business to its first telecommunications satellite, Azerspace 1, but also having teamed with Airbus Defence and Space to create an imaging capacity of 6 million square kilometers a day. Started as a vision of Azerbaijan president Ilham Aliyev, the company plays...

[Via Satellite 04-29-2016] A new international defense and intelligence customer has signed a letter of intent with DigitalGlobe to have direct access capacity on the operator’s WorldView 4 satellite. The three-year agreement increases the amount of annualized contracted revenue from international defense and intelligence customers to $43 million from $38 million, nearly all of which...