Government/Military

Military May Lose Laser Capability In Killing Enemy Missiles; Industrial Base Is Threatened By Budget Moves Legislators Write Letter To Gates A bipartisan group of legislators told Secretary of Defense Robert Gates they are dismayed that the Airborne Laser (ABL) program faces drastic funding reductions, or the program may be killed outright. "The ABL program...

Whether This Means Brighter Outlook For Missile Defense Programs Isn’t Yet Clear The leading congressional critic of missile defense systems will leave the powerful post where she was able to push for drastic cuts in authorizations for some missile shield programs. Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Calif.) will leave her seat in Congress, where she is...

[Satellite Today 03-23-09] Harris Corp. received a $30 million contract from the U.S. Navy First Construction Division — the Seabees — to provide multiband satellite reachback capabilities from around the globe to command centers in the United States, Harris announced March 20.     Harris will deploy rugged deployable satellite communications terminals capable of communicating with...

Charles Simonyi will launch Thursday on a Soyuz space vehicle, becoming the first space tourist to visit the International Space Station twice. He is the seventh tourist whose voyage was arranged by Space Adventures, Ltd., the space travel company. Simonyi will launch to the station aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in...

The Navy gave Raytheon Co. [RTN] a $106 million contract to produce Joint Standoff Weapon C-1 missiles for the Navy and key allies. The new C-1 variant will be network-enabled, able to engage time-sensitive targets. JSOW is a family of low-cost air-to-ground weapons that employs an integrated GPS/Inertial Navigation System that guides the weapon to...

GMD System Operations And Sustainment At Stake; Missile Defense Agency Contract Sought Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] will take on The Boeing Co. [BA] in a fight for an operations and sustainment contract for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which is installed in Alaska and California to take down incoming missiles launched by North Korea....

Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] is opening its Altair lunar lander program office in Houston. The company is vying for a NASA contract to design and build the human lander that would work with the Orion space capsule that NASA earlier chose Lockheed to design and build. That Orion capsule, or crew exploration vehicle, looks something...

The NOAA-N Prime spacecraft completed its 45-day on-orbit verification, Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] announced. NOAA-N is the final Polar Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) that was launched Feb. 6. Lockheed built the bird at its Sunnyvale, Calif., facility. The new satellite, designated NOAA-19 when it reached orbit, is the final spacecraft in the TIROS series. All...

[Satellite Today 03-19-09] The Civil and Commercial Applications Project (CCAP) group within the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) asid the geolocation accuracy and performance of Infoterra’s TerraSAR-X data product exceeds the product description’s own standards, according to a report released March 17.     Thomas Ager, author of the report titled “Geometric Precision in Space Radar...

[Satellite News 03-19-09] While there will be plenty of launch opportunities within India, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) also hopes to make inroads internationally in the next five years, G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of ISRO, told Satellite News     “I cannot say we have taken a large part of this market. We hope in...