3 août 2021 | International, Aérospatial
Bell Textron Unveils High Speed VTOL Military Aircraft Design Concepts
Bell Textron Unveils High Speed VTOL Military Aircraft Design Concepts
10 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre
Polaris Awarded 7-Year Contract To Build U.S. Special Operations Newest Vehicle
Minneapolis, June 4, 2020 – Following a competitive bid process, Government Services Administration (GSA), in support of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), awarded Polaris Government and Defense a follow-on contract for the Polaris MRZR Alpha, a new light tactical vehicle. Polaris Government and Defense is a division of global powersports leader Polaris Inc. (NYSE: PII). The seven-year contract has a value of up to $109 million and was awarded on May 29, 2020.
“Winning this LTATV award is well-deserved recognition for the dedication of our Polaris Defense team and the performance of our vehicles, but our real victory is the opportunity to continue serving our military customers. They demand – and deserve – the best engineering and technology, and we consider it an honor to leverage our experience as the world's largest Powersports company to design and build the vehicles our warfighters need,” said Scott Wine, chairman and CEO, Polaris.
Polaris is the largest ultralight tactical vehicle provider for the U.S. military, with the MRZR Alpha being Polaris' 11th military vehicle produced in 12 years. Their light weight and off-road capabilities make them ideal for transport via helicopter and operation in terrain that would otherwise be traversed on foot.
“Polaris has had the privilege of providing vehicles to USSOCOM since 2005 and we take a great deal of pride in delivering and supporting the current LTATV,” said Jed Leonard, vice president, Polaris Government and Defense. “The Polaris MRZR Alpha supports USSOCOM's requirements for durability, performance, payload profile and internal air transportability.”
Designed, engineered and produced in Minnesota, the MRZR platform incorporates technology and innovations from across Polaris' broad product portfolio. The MRZR Alpha represents millions in internal technology research and development investments that keep Polaris in front of the highly competitive off-road vehicle market. Defense engineers leveraged learnings from snowmobile chassis design, redesigned sport RZR changes and off-road race team modifications. Vehicle systems were also designed with near-future innovation in mind, with an architecture ready to accept new technologies and capabilities available within Polaris. Combining new and recently proven technologies, delivers a vehicle that has more power, increased payload, ground clearance and durability.
The MRZR Alpha will be assembled in Roseau, Minn., one of Polaris' manufacturing plants and R&D centers. A key part of its strong North American manufacturing footprint, Roseau is the birthplace of Polaris, where the company has maintained operations for more than 65 years and currently employs nearly 1500 employees.
The MRZR Alpha's versatility is further enhanced by improved exportable power and increased payload. Polaris first introduced the MRZR platform in 2012 and has continued to enhance the vehicle to meet the mission demands of the U.S. military, and over 40 allied forces worldwide. Since their introduction, MRZRs have been outfitted with counter unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), weapons and high-energy laser systems, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems, expeditionary command and control systems, autonomy packages, litters for medical and casualty evacuation and communication equipment.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the United States military's rising demand for Polaris off-road vehicles led to Polaris being the first ATV OEM to produce militarized vehicles for U.S. Special Operations Forces and the United States Army. To better serve its military customers, Polaris established Polaris Defense in 2005. Today, Polaris designs, engineers and produces its MV850 ATV, MRZR and DAGOR military vehicles in the U.S.
View source version on Polaris Government and Defense: https://www.polaris.com/en-us/news/product/polaris-awarded-7-year-contract-to-build-us-special-operations-newest-vehicle/
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26 mai 2021 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
Special Operations Command issues $373 million contract for geospatial intelligence support
CACI will continue providing personnel to analyze geospatial and imagery intelligence for USSOCOM under the new contract.
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19 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
Trio of prototyping contracts brings new approach for collecting military weather data
Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force hopes its prototype low-Earth orbit weather satellites will entice commercial businesses and allied nations to partner up on the project, reducing the cost of delivering critical weather data to the war fighter. The U.S. Air Force has been trying to replace the aging Defense Meteorological Satellite Program for years, ever since Congress opted to can it in 2015. Two capabilities in particular have proven a challenge for replacement: cloud characterization and theater weather imagery. But now the Space Force thinks it has the answer. By leveraging the increasingly popular low-Earth orbit architecture demonstrated by SpaceX's Starlink constellation and other experiments, the military believes it can lower the cost of individual satellites, increase the resiliency of the systems and attract new partnerships. In a recent interview with SpaceNews, Space and Missile Systems Center Portfolio Architect Col. Russell Teehan explained the thinking behind the new approach. The Air Force previously struggled to attract partners due to the sheer cost of the systems, he said. After all, when a single satellite costs more than $700 million, it's difficult to find someone to share the load. That price point forced the Air Force to build exquisite systems, comprised of just a handful of satellites operating in higher orbits. As the Pentagon has come to understand with its other exquisite systems, in wartime this leaves the military's space-based capabilities dependent on just a few satellites that are difficult to defend. A proliferation low-Earth orbit, or P-LEO, constellation may solve both of those problems. Smaller LEO satellites can deliver the same capabilities at a fraction of the cost per satellite, while the sheer number of targets in the constellation means that the loss of a single satellite isn't crippling. “The goal is in doing that, that ideally the commercial and allied sector would increase their desire to partner on those activities,” Treehan said. “[T]he activities in the past were generally $700 million-plus individual systems, which forced us into architectures that were [made up of less than five satellites] that were significantly vulnerable if we were in a time of conflict.” The Space Force is targeting satellites in the $30-50 million range, Treehan added. The Space Force has issued a trio of prototype contracts this summer for new space-based sensors that can collect cloud characterization and theater weather imagery from low Earth orbit. Raytheon Technologies, General Atomics and Astra are leading separate prototyping efforts after receiving contracts from the Space Enterprise Consortium. The Space Force is asking for $131 million to continue these efforts in fiscal 2021. The decision to settle on LEO for this critical weather data follows years of disarray as the Pentagon has worked to find a replacement for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, or DMSP. For decades, the military has relied almost entirely on that program for weather data. The first satellite was launched in the 1960s, with the constellation being replenished with updated generations of weather satellites over the years. Today, there are just four DMSP satellites in operation. But no satellite is built to last forever, and there are no new DMSP satellites coming. As those satellites reach the end of their service life, they leave the two vital gaps of cloud characterization and theater weather imagery. Foreseeing this problem, Congress in 2015 directed the Air Force to launch a new weather satellite program to replace DMSP. The Air Force began working on a new constellation to launch in 2024, but there was a problem: a four-year gap between the projected end of DMSP's service life in 2020 and the launch of the new satellites. To fill that gap, the Air Force collaborated with NASA on ORS-8, a satellite to be launched just before DMSP expired. While a contract was awarded to Sierra Nevada Corp. to build that gap-filling satellite, it was protested, rescinded and ultimately canceled by the Air Force after the service determined DMSP's end-of-life date would extend beyond 2024. In 2019, the Air Force proposed a new solution: a free-flying space vehicle that would operate in low Earth orbit. The Pentagon asked for $101 million to begin the effort in fiscal 2020, with plans to launch it in 2024. But that plan didn't last the year. In September, the Air Force told Congress it wanted to scrap the free-flying space vehicle in favor of a new approach. Based on a space-based environmental monitoring capability assessment and strategy review completed in April 2019, the Air Force found it best to switch to an LEO architecture for scalability and increased resilience. Though skeptical, Congress ultimately swapped the funding for the free-flyer space vehicle to the new program. “Across the board in our weather strategies ... we're looking at multilayers of an architecture, how to most cost-effectively move forward in capability. They can be incrementally delivered over time. So that becomes a mix of large satellites that do missions and smaller satellites that we can launch in order to grow capability over time,” Col. Dennis Bythewood, program executive officer for space development at the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center, said in September 2019. “We're finding much more capable sensors being delivered in small packages that we think we can grow mission sets over time. Those are the types of things that we are looking at within our strategy.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/08/17/trio-of-prototyping-contracts-brings-new-approach-for-collecting-military-weather-data/