UK - Multi-billion-pound deal for early warning radar aircraft

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  20 novembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  B-21 Program Hits Schedule Pressure Even On ‘Conventional Trajectory’

  Steve Trimble As the first B-21 enters final assembly in Palmdale, California, the Northrop Grumman-led program is on track to hit a first-flight target in two years, although the first signs of schedule pressure have appeared. Most of the details of the U.S. Air Force's newest stealth bomber remain a tightly guarded secret, but those facts released show the program is following a conventional trajectory despite being managed by an organization with the word “rapid” in its title. The Air Force announced completion of the critical design review in December 2018 in the standard three years after Northrop Grumman won the engineering and manufacturing development contract. The target for the first flight milestone stayed secret until July , when Gen. Stephen Wilson, the Air Force's vice chief of staff, stated publicly—and with remarkable specificity—that the milestone was 863 days away. Wilson offered that timetable on July 25, suggesting the targeted date is around Dec. 3, 2021. SCO leader says earliest flight would be in December 2021 Public rollout event expected in Palmdale, California The final piece of the publicly acknowledged schedule is that the first B-21 entered the early stages of final assembly around September in Palmdale, presumably within Northrop's Site 4 manufacturing complex and perhaps inside Building 401 in the same assembly bay that once housed the B-2. To hit Wilson's first-flight target, Northrop's staff must complete assembly of the first aircraft, stage a public rollout event and perform necessary ground testing within about two years. But Wilson's first-flight target may already be under pressure. His description made the December 2021 date seem like a fixed schedule milestone typical of most major defense acquisition programs. Randall Walden, who leads the Rapid Capabilities Office assigned to lead the B-21 program, describes Wilson's timing as closer to a schedule goal than a deadline. Walden recast the target as the “earliest possible” date for first flight, which he has little confidence the program will achieve. “I would not bet on that date,” Walden told an audience at a Capitol Hill Club breakfast on Oct. 24 organized by the Air Force Association. The comment is a rare cautionary note among otherwise glowing descriptions of the B-21 program by officials cleared to know the status of the development program. In March 2018, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) reported concerns about the design of the engine inlet, citing an internal dispute between Northrop and engine supplier Pratt & Whitney's engineers. Twelve months later, Wittman confirmed that the inlet design problem had been resolved. The program has since received only glowing assessments by Air Force leaders, including a statement in October by Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein that the B-21 ranks at the top of his list of successful acquisition projects. Despite those assurances, transitioning a new aircraft from a paper design into manufactured hardware is a challenging phase for any program. Large pieces of the first aircraft are now in assembly. “We're working a production line, literally, today,” Walden says. An official artist's rendering shows the B-21 shares the all-wing profile of the B-2, minus the latter's distinctive sawtooth trailing edge. The Air Force's acquisition strategy also focused on minimizing risk by relying as much as possible on available technology. But a modern bomber with the B-21's mission to penetrate into highly contested airspace is still anything but a simple project. “It is a complex airplane. I'll leave it at that,” Walden says. Walden expects the Air Force to stage a public rollout event in Palmdale when the aircraft is ready. For the B-2, the rollout was staged seven months before the first flight. If the B-21 stays to the same schedule, the unveiling could come as early as May 2020. But Walden adds that includes several big “ifs.” “Like anything, building a complex system could add those schedule pressures,” Walden says. “We've got to bring parts together, got to assemble it and get it stuffed with the right avionics, get the landing gear on it, all the things that go along with an airplane.” Any schedule pressure facing the B-21 would not surprise Frank Kendall, the former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Kendall led the shaping of the acquisition strategy for the B-21. In a recent interview, he recalled pushing back against attempts by the Air Force to award a firm, fixed-price contract instead of a more flexible cost-plus arrangement, which is generally applied to acquisition projects with a higher risk. “When I looked at . . . the actual content of the program, I [was] so glad I told [the Air Force to use cost-plus],” Kendall says. “It's not risk-free. I'll be amazed if they get this thing in on schedule and on cost. But it was designed to have a reasonable chance of success.” An independent estimate by the Defense Department assessed the cost of the engineering and manufacturing development phase at $21.4 billion, with follow-on production of at least 80-100 bombers worth up to $60 billion more. The Air Force has budgeted $5.9 billion over the next five years to pay for the first operational aircraft, with low-rate initial production possibly beginning in fiscal 2023. “There are a lot of things that have to happen between now and a couple of years,” Walden says. https://aviationweek.com/defense/b-21-program-hits-schedule-pressure-even-conventional-trajectory

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  6 août 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed space exec talks future space endeavors

  By: Mike Gruss WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is intricately tied to the Pentagon's future space endeavors. The giant defense contractor has deals for the Air Force's next-generation missile warning satellites, it's new batch of GPS satellites and the current generation of protected communication space vehicles. But the national security space community is changing fast. Space is now viewed as a war-fighting domain, a far cry from decades ago. Rick Ambrose heads the company's space division. He spoke with Mike Gruss, editor of Defense News sister publications C4ISRNET and Fifth Domain, about where the Pentagon is headed and how to make sense of the new realities in space. What advantages do you see with the Air Force's new missile warning satellite program over the current Space Based Infrared Program? The Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Program is, in essence, a whole new design, which is why we're competing for payload. So it's going to have a tremendous new mission capability, built-in resiliency capabilities, much more flexibility. What does that mean, flexibility? We're going to put in some of our smart sat processing that will help with the payload. We'll make sure we can incrementally upgrade, or the Air Force can, over time. If you think about this, SBIRS [the Space Based Infrared Surveillance system] was originally designed back in the '90s. Basically it's a whole modernization of the mission — better performance across the board. We need more continuous coverage; you need better resolutions. You need a better differentiation of the threat. You need to build in the resiliency, plus the modern ability and some of the processing. So how do we upgrade algorithms on the fly? All that's going to be enabled in this design. When we talk about the smart sat part of that, is that something that today you would get an image and then have to process it on the ground? So the savings is you can do it there so you get it faster. Or is there a different advantage? This is always the trade-off. To process everything on the ground, you have to now communicate every piece of data down right away. We still may ultimately want to do that. But what if we can run some processing on the satellite versus the ground? That design's still not perfectly baked in yet, but that's the direction we're going, is to build in some of that. I think of it like adding filters on Instagram. Another way to look at it would be: There are certain things that you'll locally process on your phone not to clog the communications. We can upload patches and software like we do on most satellites. We've been doing this for decades. But now it just gives you more flexibility to do even more things. You know, a lot of times we're flying satellites for 20 years and we keep finding new ways to use them. Let's build that in up front. I would imagine the Air Force is more open to that kind of thinking. Oh, absolutely. Well, because the threat environment has changed, there are go-fast initiatives, [such as Space and Missile Systems Center] SMC 2.0. We love it because things in the past, it would take longer to prosecute changes on. Now with their new push — you know, [the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics], Dr. [Will] Roper's push for speed and agility — now once we get the program going and get all the designs finalized, then you'll go to a more traditional —you have to prove out the concept and prove out that the system works and then deploy. We do agile develop for them, but they go: “We're going to constantly change.” Well, commercial could get away with that because if suddenly Google goes down, you don't lose lives. These systems protect lives. The men and women that serve, weather systems, even the private citizens. It's serious business. So that's where we'll always be different than some on the commercial side. If you think about timing of the program up front, at the stage we're at [a low-production rate]. Now is where we can do experimentation and try out new designs. With the Space Development Agency, how do you see that integration improving? What happens is the exact opposite of what should happen. Let's say it takes five or six or seven, eight years to get a satellite up. That's an expensive item. We have to move out and let's get the satellite going. Well, nothing ever works that simple. What we're saying is you need to put the end-to-end architecture together. That's why we brought our ground system together with us to help us help the government with this challenge. And then you get faster. And the other side of this, because it's on the ground, you go: “Oh, it's on the ground. We can always fix it.” The hope is with the Space Force, [SMC 2.0] and all this, we can synchronize better. But more importantly, how do we make a lot of technology more common to the space and ground infrastructure? If you're having to develop every element of that from scratch, it's just massive, it's costly. So what can you do? I did a study decades ago because everyone concentrates on the satellite. I said: “Well, what's the ground cost?” I ran our satellites and we've designed them to run 20 years. You go: “OK, what's the infrastructure cost around that?” And when you took a 20-year cycle of the ground and operations and processing, and think about it, every three years or so they're upgrading. Because you have people touch your computers so now they got to upgrade the machines every three or four years. The IT infrastructure and all that. Refurbish all that. The cost of that dwarfed any costs over that time period of the space asset because you paid once. It actually was more expensive than all the satellites and launches combined. We can knock the ground back a little bit by putting artificial intelligence in, ultimately machine learning, more automation, simplifying operations. You mentioned resilience at the satellite level. There's been talk: “Could a satellite evade a missile? Or evade another satellite?” People have a difficult time understanding what resilience at the space level means. If you're thinking of resilience, it's going to come in a couple of flavors. You touched on the first one. First, if you set your architecture up right, it'll inherently give you some resilience and allow you to make some different trades on the satellite level. Then the satellite itself can just be much more robust. So just inherently for mission assurance, the satellites are more robust and we've put redundant systems at higher quality, higher-reliability parts. You can think of it that way. For resiliencies, you well know there's some level of hardening on SBIRS and the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite anyway for both environmental as well as man-made events. The best it can do. Think safety systems you've put on your cars. In the past, when there were a few cars on the road, no one really worried about it. I think the first cars didn't even have seat belts. Or you just keep adding features as you learn more things. It's like with cyber, everyone says: “When are we done with cyber?” You're not because it's a journey. Every time you do something, someone else tries to defeat it. Boeing is under contract for the Air Force's next wideband communications satellite. The company is trying to quickly build it. Are you watching that process? We can come up with our ideas, some other people have ideas. The thing that is just fantastic about space right now [is] it's no longer just competition of its traditional players. There are over a thousand new entrants now if you count the numbers. You got large players coming in like Jeff Bezos. You've got traditional competitors, you've got the supply chain forward integrating. Think of a Harris and L3 combination. Those are all competitive surfaces, which makes this industry just damn exciting right now. And it may sound crazy, but that stimulates motivation. It stimulates innovation. It simulates the thinking and those competitive spirits, where it's kind of what this country was founded on, right? So we're always watching that. We've really modernized our production. In the old days everyone would hand-lay down the solar cells. We now have robotics and automation equipment just literally laying those cells down. It's more predictable. It's more ergonomically friendly for my technicians. One cell was like art almost. Now we're trying to say: “OK, we don't want to lose performance, but let's build in the design for producibility, operability, operations [on] Day One so that we can automate it.” So let's say an electronic card, which would take a technician three months to put together, solder, fill and now we run it down the line; in under eight hours, it's done. Is the Air Force OK with that process? I think of this as pretty unforgiving. Well, it still is. You go back six years ago, I think we did a dozen [3D]-printed parts. We did over 14,000 last year. If you go through our space electronic center, we put automation in. The problem for us in space is we have some unique parts and they weren't precise enough. How do you measure it? You know it's very valuable. You know you're taking time out. If anything, you're improving the quality of work life for your employees. There's this discussion that GPS III is the most resilient GPS satellite ever. And at the same time, the Army says: “We should count on it less than we ever have before.” How can both things be true? In GPS III, it's a much higher power. The M-code coming online makes it somewhat more resilient. But you'll still — again, just like cyber — you'll have adversaries still trying to figure out engineering and different things, techniques. If you take your GPS commercial receiver and you're running in the city, you get a lot of bounce off that urban canyon. So it knows like: “What? That dude looks funky. Throw him out.” Then it processes the ones that it thinks are good. That's a form of protecting that environment if you think about it. How will this play out? There's going to be some combination of software and then maybe some other sensors like we've been toying with, some microgravity sensors, which you can then kind of tell the region you're at. And some of the — just the onboard inertial systems — are getting pretty damn good. It's like your self-driving cars. It's going to rely on not just the cameras, but the little radar sensors and some combination of sensors. For [timing], when you're running software and you have all these sensors that are nodes in the network, and they can actually talk to each other, this is maybe a nirvana future state. Then the guesses you make are better informed with more data. There could be a world where GPS is making decisions with 80 percent of data that's coming from GPS satellites, and maybe it's pulling something from some other sources. https://www.c4isrnet.com/industry/2019/08/05/lockheed-space-exec-talks-future-space-endeavors/

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  23 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial

  Saab to modernise Sweden’s coastal anti-ship missile capability

  The total order value is SEK 800 million and deliveries will begin in 2026.