The Air Force is laying the ground work for procurement of a new-start program called the Weather System Follow-On (WSF) with a Milestone A goal of fiscal year 2015.
Air Force Col. Heath Collins, deputy director of remote sensing at the service’s Space and Missile Systems Center (AFSMC), said Friday acquisition planning has begun and that strategy should land in the hands of AFSMC Commander Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves by the end of 2014. The announcement is noteworthy as it is one of the few true new start programs the Air Force has pursued in this era of sequestration-related budget cuts and an overall decline in defense spending post-Iraq and Afghanistan. 
Though it hasn’t yet been enacted by Congress, the Air Force requested $40 million in FY ’15 for WSF and, including FY ’15, is expected to request $507 million through FY ’19, according to the Air Force’s FY ’15 budget request.
WSF is the Defense Department’s follow-on system to the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) and other Pentagon environmental monitoring satellites. WSF will be comprised of a group of systems to provide timely, reliable and high-quality space-based remote sensing capabilities that will make global environmental observations of atmospheric, terrestrial, oceanographic, solar-geophysical and other requirements validated by the Joint Staff.
Other key milestones, according to the Air Force’s budget request from March, include a capabilities development document (CDD) by the beginning of FY ’16, a request for proposals (RFP) release decision in second quarter FY ’16, source selection in late FY ’16 through early FY ’17 and a contract award by the end of third quarter FY ’17.
“We’re looking forward to starting that acquisition and delivering that microwave ocean surface vector wind (measurement capability) absolutely as fast as we possibly can,” Collins told an audience at a Mitchell Institute think tank breakfast event on Capitol Hill.
Collins said the WSF announcement came on the heels of a Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) finding that three “capability gaps” needed a military utility requiring a materiel solution while the remaining nine could leverage NASA and international capability. These three gaps, Collins said, were ocean surface vector winds, tropical cyclone intensity and a space weather requirement.
Collins said the ocean surface vector winds capability is the ability to not only measure wind speed from space, but also the direction wind is blowing, crucial to both naval and air forces. The space weather requirement, Collins said, is a space situational awareness (SSA) capability, being able to tell if radiation occurring on a satellite is natural background or an adversary artificially interfering with your satellite.
Potential bidders for WSF include Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], both prime contractors on DMSP, Ball Aerospace [BLL] and Boeing [BA]. Raytheon [RTN] can be considered a potential bidder for the ground segment portion of the system. Ball spokeswoman Mary Engola said Friday the company is monitoring the program and will determine if it will bid once the RFP becomes available. Engola said Ball is prime contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (NPP) and the first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS-1) satellite.
Representatives from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing did not return requests for comment by press time. Boeing developed the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) for NOAA.