Defense Procurement News

Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGIA) to provide training to its employees and other intelligence analysts across DoD. See a press release here. The contract has a value of $32 M and is an option on an existing contract. Lockheed Martin is responsible for running the in-house training for the agency. NGIA is what used to be called the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) and provides maps, charts and other information to the US defense services and other agencies.

Boeing won a contract to develop the bankrupt Iridium communication satellites for DoD. See an article here. Iridium is a network of low earth orbit satellites that were to be used to provide telephonic communication. Motorola had led the original consortium that put the satellites in orbit, but they company went bankrupt. The Navy Research Lab awarded Boeing a contract to exploit the Iridium satellites to support the GPS network already deployed. DoD has been using the satellites for communications purposes, along with commercial customers.

General Dynamics as part of the Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite base communication network installed the antennas for the first of four groundstations. See a press release here. MUOS will provide a cell phone like communication system through satellites. It will eventually have four ground stations with the first being in Hawaii. This system continues the US focus on upgrading communications through more use of satellites.

Alliant Techsystems was awarded a contract by the US Air Force to provide sounding rockets for it and NASA’s use. See a press release here. Sounding rockets tend to be small, single stage rockets that stay suborbital. They can be used to simulate targets for ballistic missile defense tests and experiments, and also support NASA activities and experiments. One common use before the Test Ban Treaty was to collect data from nuclear tests in the Pacific and the American West.

Lockheed was awarded the GPS III contract. See a story here. The contract is for two satellites with 10 options. It is worth $1.46 B. Boeing loses another major contract. Boeing is building some GPS II satellites with the first planned for launch this year. Lockheed has also built GPS satellites in the past.

According to this article the Air Force is expected to award the GPS III contract this week following a successful DAB a few weeks ago. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are in the running, and some are inevitably expecting a protest by the loser. Lockheed Martin won most of the GPS II work and Boeing did some of the original satellites. One hopes that the USAF acquisition people have their ducks in a row on this one as there last two major awards have been protested, and one, CSAR-X, successfully.

The GPS III satellite had a successful DAB recently which allowed Mr. Young, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OSD(AT&L) to allow the contract award. See an article here. As part of this authorization, though, he directed that the requirements be frozen as to what was presented at the DAB. The contract could be worth $1.8 B, and will go to either Boeing or Lockheed Martin. The award could come early next week.

Orbital Systems won a contract from DARPA for research with the F6 satellite program. See the press release here. DARPA is trying to develop, through this program, a more flexible way of linking modules of space craft to allow greater flexibility in their configuration.

The Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) gave Ducommun subsidiary Miltec a $69 M contract to conduct research and development on space vehicles. See Bizjournals.com, here, for more on the story. This will support the Operationally Responsive Space program.

The Air Force today announced that they gave Boeing a $288 M modification to an existing contract. They also gave Lockheed Martin one for $210 M. See the announcement here at DefenseLink.mil. These modifications extended the contracts to support Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) for FOUR months, but almost doubled the costs to $1,170 M. There must be some story there?

United Launch Alliance, a joint effort between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, was awarded a contract by the NRO to launch three satellites. See Bizjournal.com here. NRO runs spy satellites, so one would assume the launches support that.

Boeing and Lockheed were awarded a $75 M dollar extension to the Transformational Communication Satellite (TSAT) Risk Reduction and System Development contract. The contract was extended 6 months. See DefenseLink.com here for more. This can be interpeted as a six-month slip in the program. See more on the TSAT here.