Defense contractors compete for huge bomber contract

In the coming weeks, the U.S. Air Force will announce the biggest defense deal of the decade. It will also be the last contract for a new manned combat aircraft for probably 20 years. (Tweet This)

Whoever wins the bid will have years' worth of manufacturing work. Whoever loses may have to exit the business of building piloted military aircraft.

The Long Range Strike-Bomber will replace an aging bomber fleet whose oldest aircraft go back to the Korean War. The Air Force has revealed little about what it wants out of the new bomber, but one thing is clear: it does not want an explosive price tag. The most recent bomber contract went to Northrop Grumman for the B-2, which first flew in 1989. The Pentagon purchased only 21 of the sleek, stealthy aircraft, at a cost of $2 billion each.

This time, the Air Force wants to buy up to 100 bombers and keep the price to $550 million per aircraft. Add in an estimated $20 billion for research and development, and the total value of the contract could close in on $80 billion. The new bomber should be airborne in 10 years.

Source: Northrop Grumman

An advertisement from Northrop Grumman touting their experience in delivery the world's most advance military aircrafts.

Many wonder—with good reason, given the recent history of military aircraft contracts—whether the cost can really be kept to $550 million per plane. One strategy may be to build a plane that uses existing technology with an open architecture that allows future upgrades.

Via: CNBC

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Boeing 787 Dreamliner performs near-vertical takeoff

Via: Fox News

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Seattle City Councilmember-elect shares radical idea with Boeing workers

SEATTLE — 

Seattle City Councilmember-elect Kshama Sawant told Boeing machinists her idea of a radical option, should their jobs be moved out of state 

“The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine,” Sawant announced to a cheering crowd of union supporters in Seattle’s Westlake Park Monday night.

This week, Sawant became Seattle’s first elected Socialist council member. She ran on a platform of anti-capitalism, workers’ rights, and a $15 per-hour minimum wage for Seattle workers.

On Monday night, she spoke to supporters of Boeing Machinists, six days after they rejected a contract guaranteeing jobs in Everett building the new 777X airliner for eight years, in exchange for new workers giving up their guaranteed company pensions.

Via: KIRO-TV

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Los Angeles: Proud Bird, aerospace watering hole, about to run dry

With a martini in hand, John Cashen was deep in a discussion of military electronics, when a 747 jetliner seemed to float past in slow motion onto LAX's south runway complex.

Cashen, who pioneered the radar-evading design of the B-2 Stealth bomber, stopped to watch the plane — just a few hundred yards away — thunder past his table at the Proud Bird, the aerospace industry's favorite watering hole for more than a half-century.

"There's no place else like this in the world," said Cashen, 76, who retired from Northrop Grummanin 1993 but still consults for the firm.

The biggest names in aerospace have sat at the bar here to watch the planes land, people such as Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh and Neil Armstrong.

But the Proud Bird's days may be numbered.

John Tallichet, the current owner and son of the late founder, said it will close Nov. 21, after an unsuccessful two-year effort to negotiate a new lease from the property owners, Los Angeles World Airports.

The Los Angeles World Airports Commission says it can't help the historic gathering place, saying that federal law, which controls some aspects of airport operations, requires current market value for rents.

Although Boeing Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., the Aerospace Corp. and Raytheon Co. all have major facilities nearby, the industry is much smaller than in its heyday and less able to support the red-meat-and-fish dining room.

Nonetheless, supporters of the restaurant are outraged by the upcoming closure, saying that it would mean the loss of an important piece of Los Angeles' history.

Tallichet blames a tangle of federal and city laws that have raised his costs.

Via: LA Times

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Historic NASA facilities going to waste

The space agency has an unusual problem: space.

A recent review of NASA’s land holdings on earth revealed a new challenge for the agency: poorly maintained, aging facilities once used for research and development or space vehicle construction, now essentially useless.

NASA spends about $1.1 billion annually on maintenance and upkeep of its more than 5,400 buildings, landing strips and other unique sites; but approximately 9 percent of its real property assets aren’t being used, NASA told FoxNews.com. The solution, according to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG): lease them

.

Kennedy leases a clean room where Apollo capsules were readied 40 years ago to Lockheed Martin. Boeing is building space taxis in a processing hangar where shuttles were once routinely readied to soar. And there are plenty of others, from Rolls-Royce and Google to local schools and, in areas where businesses aren’t interested, parks, gardens and visitor centers.

But not enough, according to Paul K. Martin, NASA Inspector General.

“Few incentives exist for NASA to identify underutilized property as unnecessary to its mission needs,” he concluded in the August report.

Olga Dominguez, NASA’s assistant administrator for the office of strategic infrastructure, agreed that the agency wasn’t 100 percent sure how many buildings and facilities were unusued. Part of the challenge, she said, was the changing nature of the space agency’s mission. As NASA has refocused from the space shuttle to the private space industry, its needs have changed as well.

“Because our mission has gone through such extensive changes, all of these new programs -- commercial crew, commercial space -- all of these have different requirements,” she told FoxNews.com. “So the space needs have changes every year.”

“Right now, well we think we might need [a facility] and then seven months later, no we don’t.”

NASA is the ninth largest land owner in the federal government, with more than 100,000 acres that occupy 44 million square feet and are estimated to cost $29 billion to replace.

Via: Fox News

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