$92.2M to Support USAF’s Legacy Comsats

DSCS Satellite

Lockheed Martin Corp. in Sunnyvale, CA recently received a $92.2 million cost-plus-award-fee contract to continue service under the 5-year,sole source MILSATCOM Orbital Operations and Logistics Support contract. Work will be performed in Sunnyvale, CA, and the contract will run to Nov 30/12. The SMC/PKL at Peterson Air Force Base, CO (FA8808-10-C-0002, PO 0029).

That contract support operations and sustainment for older Milstar and Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) satellites. New secure AEHF broadband satellites are just beginning to come on station to supplement the older Milstar birds, and the 1st block of broadband WGS satellites is operational as the successors to DSCS, but maintaining older systems is also important to the US military. See December 2009 coverage for more details.

Rapid Fire 2011-12-07: FYDP Not Sequestered

• It’s not just the pending US FY13 President Budget that won’t reflect sequestration, the 5-year Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) projection won’t either, based on an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) document seen by Bloomberg. OMB states this is still “pre-decisional material” though, but this matches our expectation that budgets made of a relatively flat DoD baseline and a reduced OCO (i.e. war spending) line item are the mostly likely outcome in the next few years. But because of that cloud of uncertainty some firms plan to increase the share of their revenue coming from civilian customers.

• The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) sent a letter to US SecDef Leon Panetta to push back against the Pentagon’s attempt to shift more project risk on contractors. The latest F-35 contract negotiations are no doubt prominently in their mind.

• US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is using predictive modeling to “compare manpower to flight rate [and recommend] employee workloads and tracks daily activity to proactively identify bottlenecks or constraints” on the CH-53K program.