July 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
By THERESA HITCHENSon July 15, 2020 at 6:14 PM
WASHINGTON: Airbus is angling for a bigger share of the US space and intelligence market with a reorganization of its US operations and an independent board of directors — with its eye squarely on NRO's upcoming contest for commercial remote sensing providers.
The new entity, called Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, is based near the Pentagon in Rosslyn, Va. It brings all of Airbus's US operations under one corporate hat.
While Airbus, which is headquartered in the Netherlands, has long had a Special Security Agreement that allows it to sell products in the US, the move to appoint an independent board of US citizens to manage the business will give it increased opportunities to break into highly-classified programs, explained Chris Emerson, the newly appointed CEO, in a roll-out brief with reporters today.
“The foundation to do business with the US is hinged around what we call a Special Security Agreement, because Airbus is based in in Europe. In order for us to establish the trust and bona fides to be able to work at every security level with the US government, we needed to set up an independent board of directors,” he said.
James Darcey, an Airbus spokesperson, clarified in an email to Breaking D that while Airbus has had SSA agreements in the past, as U.S. Space & Defense is a new corporate entity, a new one was required.
“So, while Airbus U.S. Space & Defense is not the first SSA company – and we've been selling to the U.S. government under SSA for some time – the new company is structured under a new board of directors, and is moving in new directions than previously,” he said.
The independent board of directors is loaded with household names in the defense community: former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director Letitia Long; former Bush DoD exec Frank Miller; retired Gen. Willy Shelton, former head of Air Force Space Command; DoD Defense Innovation Board member Mark Sirangelo; and retired Rear Adm. Kevin Sweeney, former chief of staff to DoD Secretary Jim Mattis.
Further, the company just received a license from the Commerce Department that will allow it to sell high-resolution imagery and data analytics to the US government, as well as commercial customers, he said. (Commerce, via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, licenses all US commercial remote sensing operators.)
While Emerson said the firm's primary focus is commercial users hungry for imagery, he said the firm also intends to respond to the NRO's request for proposals (RFP) to expand its pool of commercial suppliers of imagery, including advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that has been traditionally supplied by the NRO's own highly-classified satellites. As Breaking D readers know, that RFP is expected to be released by the end of the year.
It also is eyeing sales of data analyses to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA); not to mention technologies to NASA for its space exploration efforts.
“As you know, from Airbus we have a pedigree — we're probably the leader in commercial SAR capabilities,” Emerson said.
Airbus operates three X-band radar satellites, as well as two Pleiades and two Spot electro-optical satellites that utilize bandwidth into the near-infrared spectrum. Further, the company's UK unit won a design study contract from the British Ministry of Defense for an ultra-high resolution SAR constellation, under a program called Oberon.
Airbus also is a 50 percent partner in OneWeb Satellite, based in Florida, that has been building satellites for OneWeb's planned mega-constellation of 650 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites for Internet connectivity. The fate of that operation has been up in the air because of OneWeb's March bankruptcy.
But Emerson said that production for OneWeb is restarting, following the July 3 bid by the UK government, in partnership with Indian firm Bharti Global Ltd, to acquire the firm — with each partner contributing $500 million in investment. Further, U.S. Airbus Space & Defense is working to bring third-party US customers for the broadband communications satellites by modifying them at the Florida plant, he said.
“That is a critical asset for us that we are only going to continue to grow in the United States. You'll see more than just one product coming from our capabilities in the US and, we're committed and excited about the business that we have with with OneWeb Satellites,” he added.
Under Emerson, the new company will have three sub-units: Airbus U.S. Connected Intelligence led by Didier Cormary; Airbus U.S. Space, led by Debra Facktor; and Airbus US Military Aircraft, led by Jose Antonio de la Fuente.
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/airbus-targets-nro-imagery-sales-with-new-us-corporate-entity
May 26, 2021 | International, Aerospace
South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD) announced on 25 May that it has developed a laser-power enhancing technology for use in future weapon systems, with the most immediate application being a laser-based air-defence system. The...
September 20, 2018 | International, Naval, C4ISR
By: Amber Corrin The Navy released a long-awaited final request for proposals Sept. 18 for the re-compete of its Next Generation Enterprise Network contract. But it's part one of two, covering only the hardware side of things as the service looks to overhaul its Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. According to analysts at Deltek, each piece of the NGEN-R request is valued at roughly $250 million over a three-year period, per estimates from Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. That's significantly lower than NGEN's original $3.5 billion price tag. Specifically, the RFP seeks hardware devices for use on the Department of Defense's classified and unclassified networks, including desktops, laptops, two-in-one detachable devices, tablets, ultra-small desktop computers, as well as thin- or zero-client devices. A single device could serve multiple users and associated accounts, according to the RFP. But for the roughly 400,000 devices NGEN-R looks to replace, the service in particular is looking at an end-user hardware-as-a-service arrangement. “It's breaking out the services that are being provided in a way that allows us to gain most effective advantage of how industry does business today,” Capt. Don Harder, deputy program executive officer for Navy enterprise information systems, told Federal Times in a recent interview. “The end user of hardware and devices as its own separate contract, there are those suppliers out there that that's what they specialize in. By breaking that out into its own contractual component within the NGEN-R construct ... we believe will allow us to get more effective advantage to pricing on those components.” The language in the RFP solidifies Harder's thoughts as part of the statement of work. “In acquiring EUHWaaS, the Government is only acquiring the service of using an EUHW device. This is not a purchase, and titles for all EUHWaaS devices remain with the Contractor,” the RFP states. “EUHWaaS includes the provisioning, storage of spares, configuration, testing, integration, installation, operation, maintenance, [end-of-life] disposal of NIPRNet and SIPRNet EUHW, and internal storage device removal and destruction requirements.” Bids for the hardware piece of NGEN-R are due Nov. 19. The second part of the NGEN-R RFP, service management integration and transport or SMIT, is expected in the next 30 days, according to a Navy spokesman. SMIT will cover much of NMCI's backbone and functionality, including services ranging from help desk to productivity suites to network defense — and how they're technically provided. Splitting NGEN-R into two separate contracts was an intentional move designed, at least in part, to give the Navy greater flexibility in the capabilities available to users, and the options for buying them, as technology evolves. “We are modifying how the services are broken out in a way that it allows us to sever some of those services as new mechanisms [and] provide [them as they are] brought into play or brought to our attention,” Harder said, using cloud capabilities as an example. “We may allow a mechanism to pull some of those into either a hybrid cloud or a cloud solution in the future. If so, it may go on a separate contractual vehicle at which point in time we would sever those services away from the SMIT vehicle. So, we're looking at how we take those services and how we manage them contractually, which would allow us, again additional flexibility later on down the road.” Harder said that throughout the development of NGEN-R, he's been eyeing not just the Navy, but also the broader government to benefit from the new approach. “We're building in that flexibility that allows the government the ability in the future even to find components of services that can be done in a more effective or efficient way [and] either sever them or modify them separately as opposed to having to break apart the entire contract to do something,” he said. The hardware piece of NGEN-R was released less than two weeks after Navy officials announced a one-year, $787 million extension to the incumbent provider, Perspecta. Harder declined to put a dollar figure on the NGEN-R contract, as did other Navy officials. The RFP comes after several delays — officials previously had said the contract would be up for bidding this summer. According to Harder, prior to release the RFP had to be approved by leadership at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, as well as the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy office. Harder said the Navy has taken extra time to shore up “the education piece” — ensuring the contracting process meets leaders' expectations, particularly with the new strategy. And IT modernization also has come into play, with officials from the broader DoD looking to NGEN as a possible model or even contract vehicle for defense networks down the line, he said. “We need to ensure that what we have placed in the contract and how we're going about the contract meets leadership expectations. And because we are doing things in a different way, that's taking a little bit of time,” Harder said. The Navy's approach to running NMCI today is “one of the more cost-effective ways of managing networks. And there is a desire as part of one of the many IT reform efforts [for possible] integration of networks in the future to mimic or, potentially, even ride on our contracts.” https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/09/19/ngen-r-what-is-the-navy-thinking
October 30, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security
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