By Emelie Rutherford

The Navy plans to reach out to industry this year for ideas on tackling the technology-maturation segment of its effort to develop unmanned strike aircraft that operate off aircraft carriers, a service official said.

The technology-maturing portion of the service’s Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) effort is distinct from the UCAS demonstration program–intended to show if the drone aircraft can operate off of carriers–for which Northrop Grumman received a contract last year.

The UCAS technology-maturation piece does not yet have an acquisition strategy, and the Navy just requested initial funding for it in its fiscal year 2009 budget proposal sent to Congress in February.

Initial feelers for UCAS technology-maturation work will be put out to industry this year in the form of a Request for Information (RFI), Capt. Martin Deppe, program manager for Navy UCAS, said in an interview with Defense Daily last Friday.

The RFI will say “if we are looking at this kind of a system operationally, what does your company think in the way of its capabilities or its ideas in answering the mail on these types of capabilities that the Navy might need in that 2024 timeframe,” Deppe said.

The scope of the planned UCAS technology-maturation work will include transformational communications; integrated propulsion; low-observable sensors and apertures; sense-and- avoid functionality for operating in a low-observable environment; software algorithms and interfaces related to autonomous operations; and computer-resource data storage and access systems, according to Navy budget documents.

After the service submits a RFI on UCAS technology-maturation this year, it will likely engage industry next year with Broad Agency Announcement-type contracts, Deppe said.

“We would put out perhaps a solicitation that gets responses back from three, four, five industry partners,” he said. “And then we’ll figure out–based on the responses that we get there–how many we can afford to put on contract and get certain tasks on the table for discussions on requirements, discussions on architectures, discussions on–based on your architecture–what technologies would we need to mature with your system.

“Then [we would] start getting an idea in place for, well, company A needs to work on these areas, company B needs to work on these areas, and company C needs to work on these areas,” he said. “And [then we would] put plans in place that would approach a milestone B in the 2016 timeframe, with at least two competitors that have a technology maturation or a readiness level sufficient to go through a milestone B.”

While specifics on the UCAS technology-maturation effort aren’t known yet, Deppe said it may include work on giving the aircraft extended range, determining how far the airplanes can operate without being refueled.

“That would then drive not only the shape of airplane but also the propulsion plant that is integrated into that airframe,” he said. “Do we have the propulsion plant ready to go off the shelf right now? Depends on what that range requirement is, or that endurance requirement to stay airborne for X amount of hours unrefueled. Is there a propulsion plant that marries up to this shape of an airplane that can give me that kind of performance? So when we understand what those requirements are, we can then trace backwards and say, well our propulsion plant needs to have this kind of specification performance parameters on it. And we’ll have to either go develop some technologies that go into a propulsion plant that already exists, or we may have to resize something that’s already out there.”

For UCAS, the Navy envisions a long-range, long-endurance, deep-magazine craft with very high stealth and no vertical tail.

The Navy last August awarded Northrop Grumman a $635.8 million contract for the Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier demonstration (UCAS-D) program. This shipboard demonstration effort is slated to end in 2013 and does not include the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase.

Northrop Grumman will have the ability to compete to work on the technology-maturation effort for UCAS, as other companies will, Deppe said.

“The piece that Northrop Grumman has given us right now is flying that aircraft shape aboard the carrier, and proving to the Navy that it can be done safely and effectively,” he said. “There’s lots of other technologies out there that have to be matured outside of just that scope of work.”

Service officials project UCAS will reach milestone A in 2012 and milestone B in 2016, but those dates may change after the Navy learns more from industry, Deppe said.

The Navy’s FY ’09 budget request unveiled in February asks for $293.7 million in research and development funds for UCAS technology maturation from FY ’09 to FY ’13.

Deppe said the current funding profile is not enough to get UCAS to milestone B–SDD–in 2016. As part of the process of building the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) 10, service officials at OPNAV N88 are “taking a look at what additional technologies they want to mature, and what additional dollars they might want to put into the budget in order to go forward,” Deppe said.