Lockheed Martin T-X. Lockheed Martin insists it is sticking with Korea Aerospace (KAI) after foreign news outlets reported Lockheed Martin was considering dropping KAI and its T-50 as part of its bid for the Air Force’s coveted T-X trainer program. Lockheed Martin spokesman John Losinger says in an email that the company is committed to the T-50 as its offering for T-X and is wedded to KAI as its partner. Losinger says Lockheed Martin routinely conducts trade studies to better understand the competitive landscape and that these studies show that the clean sheet approach takes too long to develop and certify and is a high risk approach. “The most capable, low-cost, low-risk approach is the T-50,” Losinger says. Contractor teams, including Lockheed Martin-KAI, Boeing-Saab AB, CAE USA, and General Dynamics and Alenia Aermacchi, are positioning themselves for the reported $8.8 billion program.
DigitalGlobe. DigitalGlobe makes available 30cm resolution satellite imagery from its WorldView-3 satellite, which was previously barred by the federal government. DigitalGlobe says in a statement its WorldView-3 satellite is the first and only commercial imaging satellite capable of collecting imagery with a 30cm ground sample distance–five times the detail of the company’s nearest competitor. This means from nearly 612 km into space the satellite can resolve objects on the ground 30 square cm and larger. The satellite also features unique shortwave infrared (SWIR) capabilities that will enable new applications such as seeing through smoke and haze, identifying minerals and man-made materials and assessing the health of crops and vegetation.
Aerojet Green Propellant. DoD’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program awards Aerojet Rocketdyne a three-year contract to research and develop environmentally-sustainable monopropellants and gas generators for rocket and missile propulsion and Divert Attitude Control Systems (DACS). The company says in a statement it is working with the Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development and Engineering Center; Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Army Medical Command. Aerojet will lead an effort to conduct small-scale testing of potential monopropellant candidates in the laboratory, scaling up likely candidates before performing subscale thruster testing to select the most promising candidates for future research. Aerojet Rocketdyne is a division of GenCorp.
Hellfire Contract. The Army awards Hellfire Systems LLC a $144 million modification to a foreign military sales (FMS) contract, according to a DoD statement. The modification is to contract W31P4Q-11-C-0242 for customers Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and Australia. The modification also exercises an option for a fiscal year 2014 requirement of 2,060 Hellfire II tactical missiles in containers and air-to-ground (AGM) missiles in models AGM-114R, AGM-114R-3, AGM-114P-4A, ATM-114Q-6 and AGM-114R-5. Estimated completion date is Nov. 30, 2016.
Rolls-Royce T56 Contract. The Air Force awards Rolls-Royce a $40 million indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract for the T56 component improvement program, according to a DoD statement. The program establishes a prioritized list of projects each calendar year, including developing engineering changes to the engines, developing organizational, intermediate and depot level repairs as needed and designing modifications. This contract involves FMS and is the result of a sole-source acquisition. The T56 is a turboprop engine that the company says operates in 70 countries with more than 200 million operating hours.
Keel Laying for USS Omaha. Austral and the Navy held a keel-laying ceremony for the USS Omaha, the fourth Independence-variant LCS class ship being built at Austral under a 10-ship, $3.5 billion contract awarded in 2010. Capt. Tom Anderson, Littoral Combat Ship Program Manager, authenticated the keel in place of Susan Buffet, the ship’s sponsor. Keel-laying is the first significant milestone in ship construction. Due to Austral’s modular manufacturing, all 37 modules used to form the ship are already being fabricated. Thirty-two modules have been erected in the final assembly bay in a pre-launch position. The final five modules are to follow in the next several months. Two LCS class ships have been delivered and six are under construction.
Aegis Test FTX-19. The Missile Defense Agency completed Flight Test Other-19, a test for the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) weapon system. Three short-range ballistic missile targets were launched near-simultaneously from the Wallops Flight Facility, Va. Two Aegis BMD destroyers acquired and tracked the targets as another assisted. Using the data, the ships conducted simulated Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IB guided missile engagements with the Distributed Weighted Engagement Scheme (DWES) capability. DWES provides an engagement coordination scheme between the ships, determining the preferred shooter. There was no attempted intercept. This was the first test to use the DWES with live targets and the first test to assess the ability of the BMD 4.0 weapon system to simulate a raid engagement with multiple targets.
Cyber Page from DoD. The Coast Guard’s acquisition division says it is using the Defense Department’s Risk Management Framework to strengthen the cyber security of its C4ISR systems on the service’s National Security Cutters and the planned Offshore Patrol Cutter. The RMF process addresses cyber security as an integral part of the acquisition process, the Coast Guard says. “The increased cyber and insider threat requires the ability to monitor, track, search for and respond to attacks by adversaries within the environment,” says Cmdr. Warren Judge, C4ISR technical director and core technologies manager for the Coast Guard.
Cyber Security at Speed. Currently most “real-time” sharing of information about cyber security threats occurs through people creating and disseminating reports although more of this reporting is being done at “machine speed,” says Phyllis Schneck, deputy under secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is currently sharing cyber threat indicators with federal agencies and the private sector “with people and machines using people and machines,” she tells the House Homeland Security Committee. Using machines to detect and share cyber threat indicators with each other is occurring in “pockets” of the private sector protecting against botnets, she says. Machine speed is at the “speed of the adversary,” Schneck says.