Space Coast Launch Services Receives $40.2 Million Air Force Contract Change

The Air Force gave Space Coast Launch Services a $40.2 million contract change for launch operations support.

Space Coast will provide operations maintenance and engineering support to critical launch, spacecraft and ordnance facilities and support systems owned by the 45th Space Wing.

These facilities and systems are vital to the support of Department of Defense, civil and commercial space launch processing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

The launch operations support contractor is responsible for planning and executing all preventive and corrective maintenance and performing configuration changes to facilities and systems necessary to achieve the greatest operational availability for mission support.

This action awards the fiscal 2008 option for launch support, the third of ten contract options.

NASA Gives $300 Million Pact To Greenbelt, Md., Firm

NASA gave Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc. a contract worth up to $300 million for intelligent systems research and development support.

SGT Inc. will provide support to the Intelligent Systems Division at Ames Research Center. The division conducts scientific research, develops technologies, builds applications and deploys advanced information systems technology into NASA missions and other federal government projects.

Project areas include autonomous systems and robotics, collaborative and assistant systems, discovery and systems health, robust software engineering, and software systems engineering and software project management.

The contract is a cost plus fixed-fee indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, single award task order with a two-year base performance period, followed by three one-year options.

General Dynamics Gains Contract For Military Satellite Command And Control; Potential Value Could Be $57 Million

The Navy gave General Dynamics Corp. [GD] a $7 million contract to provide engineering services for military satellite command and control at the Naval Satellite Operations Center (NAVSOC).

Engineering functions include day-to-day operations of satellites and associated ground components of critical space-based systems

NAVSOC is one of the nation’s first space-related military commands and has been operating military and government spacecraft for more than 36 years.

GD will provide engineering services for military satellite command and control at the NAVSOC headquarters and Satellite Operations Center in Point Mugu, Calif., and its facilities in Colorado, Maine and Guam.

The contract has a total potential value of $57 million over seven years if all options are exercised.

General Dynamics provides engineering services that support communication satellites and scientific payload missions for Navy and military missions worldwide. The first NAVSOC contract was awarded to General Dynamics in 1991.

General Dynamics Gains $4 Million Landsat Pact

The Hammers Co., Inc., of Greenbelt, Md., gave General Dynamics Corp. [GD] a $4 million engineering contract.

General Dynamics C4 Systems over five years will provide systems engineering and integration services needed to build the ground-based command and control system for the Mission Operations Element (MOE) of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) satellite.

Hammers Company, Inc., of Greenbelt, Md., is the prime contractor with the National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center for the command and control system.

General Dynamics C4 Systems will ensure that ground systems are compatible with those aboard the new LDCM satellite being built by General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems (Fairfax, Va.) under a separate contract to NASA.

LDCM is scheduled to be launched in 2011.

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission will succeed the current Landsat 7 mission and provide expanded detection, differentiation and characterization of manmade and natural changes of global land surfaces.

The Mission Operations Element will reside in the LDCM mission operations center at the U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D. The system will handle spacecraft command and control, memory management, mission planning and scheduling and orbit dynamics.

Since the first Landsat satellite, Landsat 1, was launched in 1972, Landsat satellites have continuously captured images of the Earth’s land surface as seen from space. Used by agriculture, education, business, science and government agencies, Landsat imagery supports global-change research and applications.