Government/Military

Long-Term Contract To Be Decided In Impending Obama Administration The Missile Defense Agency gave The Boeing Co. [BA] a cost-plus-award-fee contract worth up to $397.9 million to continue the Ground-base Midcourse Defense (GMD) program for six months, leaving to the Obama administration a decision on a larger long-term GMD contract. While the agency has said...

Systems Upgrading Work Will Proceed On Navy Destroyers , Cruisers The Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied Raytheon Co. [RTN] protests against several sole-source, non-competitive contracts that the Navy earmarked for Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] for modernization of Aegis weapon-control systems on Ticonderoga cruisers and Arleigh Burke Class destroyers. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems had requested that...

A Non Line-of-Sight-Launch System’s Precision Attack Missile completed the third guided test flight for the weapon class. NetFires LLC, a joint venture between Raytheon Co. [RTN] and Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] unit Missiles and Fire Control, completed the third guided test flight. "The PAM missile, launched from a container launch unit, used the fire-and-forget uncooled...

The Army gave Raytheon Co. [RTN] a not-to-exceed $3.3 billion order for advanced Patriot air and missile defense capability, whole life support and training for the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Raytheon and teammate Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] worked with the U.S. and UAE governments during the past year on the agreement. The U.S. government approved...

NASA denied a news report that the White House killed a U.S.-China space cooperation deal. Contrary to a news report, NASA never asked the White House for a cooperative mission such as the one described in the article, according to NASA. The fact is that the White House has been very supportive of a deliberate...

The Mars rovers, which NASA designed to send spectacular pictures of the red planet back to Earth, are still going some five years after landing in the alien world. That is 20 times longer than their intended lifespans. Of the hundreds of engineers and scientists who cheered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena,...

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has advanced modeling and simulation for missile defense testing, the agency announced. MDA oversaw successful execution of Flight Support Ground Test 03b (GTF-03b). The GTF-03b test event was a path-finding System-level Post-Flight Reconstruction (SPFR) of the Flight Test Other (FTX)-03 Flight Test to provide data in support of the validation...

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, completed thermal vacuum testing, NASA announced. Those tests simulate extreme hot, cold and airless conditions of space that LRO will experience after launch. This milestone concludes the orbiter’s environmental test program at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The orbiter will carry seven instruments to provide scientists with...

Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] delivered the spacecraft bus subsystems for the emergent Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite, Lockheed announced. It will be the second geosynchronous orbit (GEO-2) satellite in the system. The GEO-2 spacecraft core structure and propulsion subsystem was recently completed and the high-performance communications subsystem for the spacecraft was delivered in early December....

January marks the inauguration of President Barack Obama and offers a good moment to review what the space policy of the new administration likely will be. Clearly, any incoming president would be constrained by the massive deficit created during the Bush administration. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the bailout of the financial services industry (and...