Aug 24, 2010, post by Artur Nowak
Boeing announced it has received a contract from Intelsat S.A. to provide a second ultra-high frequency ( UHF ) hosted payload on another of the four commercial communications satellites that Intelsat ordered from Boeing last year. Financial details were not disclosed.
The second UHF hosted payload will be installed on the IS-27 satellite. The payload will offer 20 25-KHz UHF channels capable of serving the U.S. government and other Intelsat General clients around the world. The second payload will be identical to the UHF payload for the Australian Defence Force that will be hosted on the IS-22 satellite and launched in 2012.
“Providing a second military hosted payload for Intelsat demonstrates our ability to rapidly respond to provide capability to augment government customers’ needs,” said Craig Cooning, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems. “Boeing has been a leading government payload provider for more than 40 years, and we are well qualified to equip commercial satellites with operationally responsive space solutions for military customers around the world.”
The modular design of the Boeing 702MP satellites in the Intelsat series allows the UHF and other hosted payloads to be accommodated easily, with no impact to the assembly or delivery schedules.
Boeing is a long-time provider of UHF payloads to the U.S. Navy. The company built 11 satellites for the Navy’s UHF Follow-On system, which provides secure global communications for the U.S. military worldwide. Boeing also is under contract to deliver three UHF payloads to prime contractor Lockheed Martin for the Navy’s Mobile User Objective System ( MUOS ) communications system.
Boeing is building the four Intelsat satellites and the two hosted payloads at its satellite factory in El Segundo. IS-27 is planned to operate over the Atlantic Ocean region at 55 degrees west longitude and will provide simultaneous operation of 39 C- and Ku-band transponders that deliver optimized video, network and voice services to the Americas and Europe.
Aug 23, 2010, post by Artur Nowak
Boeing Co. will compete for the first time to keep its U.S. missile defense work as Lockheed Martin Corp. seeks to wrest away an order for as much as $10 billion.
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency is preparing to take bids on a contract that Boeing has held since 1998 to design, build and operate the arsenal of satellites, radar and high- speed interceptors intended to shoot down enemy intercontinental ballistic missiles in space. The new order will be for management and maintenance.
The contest gives the companies a shot at a decade-long program as the Pentagon reins in spending increases. Riding on the outcome is Boeing’s future as a so-called systems integrator directing projects through suppliers, said Philip Finnegan, an analyst at consultant Teal Group in Fairfax, Virginia.
“For Boeing, what’s at stake in the missile defense program is not just the revenue, although that’s important,” Finnegan said. “It’s also one of the contracts Boeing based its reputation on.”
Bid requests may be issued by the Pentagon as soon as next month, allowing the companies to submit their proposals ahead of a decision next year. The rivals showed off their technology and announced new partners last week in Huntsville, Alabama, at the U.S. Army’s annual Space & Missile Defense Conference.
Boeing’s current missile-defense contract is worth as much as $18 billion for the 10 years ending in 2011, Jim Schlueter, a spokesman for the Chicago-based company, said by e-mail.
“We brought the system into existence,” Greg Hyslop, a Boeing vice president, said in an interview. “We know the ground-based midcourse system better than anybody, how it works and the different pieces that come together to make it work.”
‘Traditional Rivalry’
Orders to manage programs that pull in other contractors are prized in the industry because they offer higher profit margins and the technology risks are spread across several companies. Boeing and Lockheed have a “traditional rivalry” in that business, Finnegan said.
Four of the top five U.S. defense contractors are part of the fray. Boeing, second only to Lockheed in size, has signed up No. 3 Northrop Grumman Corp. Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed is teamed with Raytheon Co., the fifth biggest in the U.S.
“Cost is a major factor,” Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters on Aug. 18 in Huntsville. “But before we get to cost, bidders have got to demonstrate they’ve the capacity and capability, and also an ability to do upgrades.”
The contract will be for $5 billion in the first five years, followed by an equal amount for the next five, he said.
Line of Defense
The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense project is “our only line of defense” against intercontinental ballistic missiles, O’Reilly said.
When completed by the end of this year, the system will include 30 ground-based interceptor missiles, of which 26 will be in Alaska and 4 in California; satellites; a sea-based radar platform and a command and control center that coordinates all the elements.
The interceptors can strike enemy missiles as much as 200 miles (322 kilometers) above Earth at a speed of 15,000 miles an hour, the Pentagon said.
In the 12 years that Boeing has had the contract, it has overseen testing and development of interceptors made by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Virginia; warheads by Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon; and command and control software made by Los Angeles-based Northrop.
More Competition
A Pentagon-wide effort to end no-bid contracts drove the decision to open up the contract for competition, Richard Lehner, a Missile Defense Agency spokesman, said by e-mail.
That opened the door for Lockheed and its team as Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s push to save $100 billion from Pentagon budgets over five years sharpens competition for contracts and spurs new alliances to win major weapons orders.
A victory for Lockheed would give the world’s largest defense contractor a role in every U.S. anti-missile system. The company builds land-based interceptors to destroy short- and medium-range missiles, and the Aegis radar mounted on U.S. Navy ships that can track missiles as well as aircraft.
“We can improve the existing system and we have some very strong concepts,” Mathew Joyce, a Lockheed vice president, said in an interview in Huntsville.
Spending Cuts
Boeing and Lockheed both were stung by Gates’s 2009 move to cap output of the F-22 fighter, for which Lockheed is the prime contractor and Boeing is a supplier.
While Gates has said he wants to prune Pentagon bureaucracy and health spending without chopping into weapons, those savings may not be enough to meet his goals, said Cai Von Rumohr, a Cowen & Co. analyst in Boston.
“In every other defense spending downturn, if you’re looking to save money, they almost always look at the weapons account,” Von Rumohr said in an Aug. 19 Bloomberg Television interview. He rates Boeing as “outperform” and Lockheed as “neutral.”
Boeing, whose defense operations accounted for almost half of its 2009 sales, surged 19 percent to $64.60 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading this year through Aug. 20, compared with Lockheed’s drop of 2.9 percent to $73.20.
Northrop is responsible for computer software that controls the interceptor missiles.
Northrop, Boeing
After expressing interest in challenging Boeing on the missile-defense contract, Northrop “decided that our probability of a win increased if we partnered with Boeing,” Karen Williams, a vice president, said in an interview.
Lockheed announced last week new teammates including Minneapolis-based Alliant Techsystems Inc., Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Florida, and closely held Oregon Iron Works Inc.
It also faced a setback. Missile defense chief O’Reilly said last week that a $400 million contract for a medium-range interceptor missile is being withheld until Lockheed fixes a flawed safety device. Lockheed must show in its bid for the new work that corrective steps are being taken, he said.
Losing the missile-defense contract may be a bigger blow to Boeing, with its weaker defense portfolio, than to Lockheed, the developer behind the $382 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, said Finnegan, the Teal Group consultant.
In 2009, the Pentagon curtailed the $159 billion U.S. Army Future Combat Systems program managed by Boeing that Defense Secretary Gates said had grown unwieldy. New U.S. orders for Boeing military aircraft are mostly drying up, with the exception of F/A-18 jets for the Navy and the aerial-refueling tanker for which Boeing’s chief competitor is Airbus SAS.
With Boeing depending on international contracts for C-17 military transports and F-15 fighters to keep factories humming now that the Pentagon isn’t buying those aircraft, holding onto the missile-defense program is pivotal, Finnegan said.
“In the long term, Boeing needs to have advanced systems work,” he said.
www.bloomberg.com
Aug 16, 2010, post by Artur Nowak
A satellite designed to keep the president and top military commanders in contact even if nuclear war breaks out is safely in orbit after launching Saturday atop an Atlas V rocket.
The spacecraft is the first in a series intended to upgrade and replace an aging constellation reserved for transmitting the most protected military satellite communications around the world under any conditions.
Technical problems and changes in the scope of the $6.5 billion Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite program, or AEHF, delayed its first launch by almost two years.
But Saturday’s countdown proceeded without a hitch.
The United Launch Alliance Atlas V blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 41 at 7:07 a.m., rising into a clear sky with the sun low on the horizon.
As the rocket arced east over the Atlantic Ocean, sunlight illuminated the top of its plume of smoke and steam in a brilliant white and cast a long shadow behind it.
Three solid rocket motors fell away almost two minutes into the flight, followed soon by the payload’s protective cover and then the first stage booster.
Launch controllers applauded when the Lockheed Martin Corp.-built spacecraft separated from the rocket’s Centaur upper stage less than an hour after liftoff.
The spacecraft called AEHF-1 will take several months to settle into its final orbit 22,300 miles above the planet. There it will undergo months more of testing before being moved to an operational location.
The satellite — the size of a small school bus and weighing 13,500 pounds at launch — joins five that make up the aging Milstar constellation, offering more capacity than all five combined. The system covers the area between latitudes 65 degrees north and 65 degrees south of the equator.
The first Milstar satellite launched in 1994; two are functioning well beyond their designed lifetime of 10 years.
The replacement constellation of at least four AEHF satellites will provide 10 times the total capacity and data rates at least five times faster.
In addition to helping top leaders respond to a nuclear crisis, the satellites will serve armed forces in the field. Lockheed Martin said the improved technology would allow faster transmission of higher-quality video, maps and targeting data.
The company has built three of the new satellites and expects a contract to add a fourth later this year. Parts of the system were designed in partnership with Canada, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The second satellite in the advanced series could launch early next year, followed by the third in early 2012.
Saturday’s launch was the 22nd Atlas V mission since 2002, and ULA’s fifth successful launch this year in as many attempts.
