Lockheed Martin & Boeing get Space Force satellite development contracts
The Space Force has awarded Lockheed Martin and Boeing $66 million contracts each to design their own version of a new communications satellite for the military.
Over the next 15 months, the companies will create prototype satellites showing how they would meet the Space Force’s requirements for the MUOS satellites. DoD announced the contract awards Jan. 25.
The Space Force is expected to select one of the companies in 2025 to manufacture two flight-ready narrowband satellites to modernize the existing constellation of five MUOS satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Narrowband communications use relatively small amounts of data, but are critical for military operations.
A third unnamed company also bid but was not selected. The choice of Boeing for this competition is surprising, considering its numerous management and engineering problems across a wide range of products, from airplanes to space capsules. NASA itself has been so dissatisfied with Boeing’s work that in 2020 it decided at that time “to eliminate Boeing from future award consideration.” That decision appears to still stand. As far as I can remember Boeing not won any NASA contracts since.
Moreover, Lockheed Martin built the current MUOS satellites in orbit, while Boeing does not have a big reputation in recent years building satellites.
All told, it will therefore be extremely surprising if Boeing wins this competition. I suspect the Space Force issued this contract to help keep Boeing a viable company and to give it an opportunity to get its act together. Rewarding incompetence however is rarely successful.
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The Space Force has awarded Lockheed Martin and Boeing $66 million contracts each to design their own version of a new communications satellite for the military.
Over the next 15 months, the companies will create prototype satellites showing how they would meet the Space Force’s requirements for the MUOS satellites. DoD announced the contract awards Jan. 25.
The Space Force is expected to select one of the companies in 2025 to manufacture two flight-ready narrowband satellites to modernize the existing constellation of five MUOS satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Narrowband communications use relatively small amounts of data, but are critical for military operations.
A third unnamed company also bid but was not selected. The choice of Boeing for this competition is surprising, considering its numerous management and engineering problems across a wide range of products, from airplanes to space capsules. NASA itself has been so dissatisfied with Boeing’s work that in 2020 it decided at that time “to eliminate Boeing from future award consideration.” That decision appears to still stand. As far as I can remember Boeing not won any NASA contracts since.
Moreover, Lockheed Martin built the current MUOS satellites in orbit, while Boeing does not have a big reputation in recent years building satellites.
All told, it will therefore be extremely surprising if Boeing wins this competition. I suspect the Space Force issued this contract to help keep Boeing a viable company and to give it an opportunity to get its act together. Rewarding incompetence however is rarely successful.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Here is some worthwhile commentary on Boeing’s nosedive:
https://www.rt.com/business/591332-boeing-wall-street-profit/
Quoting from this post:
“For many decades, Boeing was a decidedly unpretentious, engineer-driven company with a culture emphasizing
both dazzling innovation and the sober virtue of impeccable craftsmanship. It was a place where the top managers
held patents and could talk shop with the floor workers.”
Then the nosedive…
“Great companies invariably embody some intangible quality of the nations that spawned and nurtured them.
Boeing came to represent in distilled and mythologized form something that Americans had come to see as forming
an essential part of their national identity: unpretentious and focused on the task at hand. But if Boeing was the
quintessential American company on the way up, it came to embody many of the country’s ills on the way down.
Few companies have traced an arc of ascendancy and decline that so closely mirrors the nation’s own trajectory.”
In addition to embracing the ideology of financialization and discarding the idea that creating actual things of value was a primary source of revenue (in the author’s words, moving from value creation to value extraction), Boeing and its corporate friends also lost sight of the nexus between their welfare and the continued success / sustainability of the nation as a whole. Long before the exhortations of the World Economic Forum, they became so enamored with the idea of outsourcing and globalization that they no longer really thought of themselves as an “American” corporation at all. Likewise, they came to believe that they had no steak in the viability of the culture and civilization that nurtured them, with no incentive to do anything but maximize shareholder profits.
How, one might ask, is all of this working out?
Here is another perspective on Boeing’s tragic fall from grace:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/boeing-s-tragedy-inside-the-fall-of-an-american-manufacturing-icon/ar-BB1hlwZj?cvid=bf9701577b914e458a01dd202dd2cd5d&ei=17
American Airlines appears to be emulating Boeing, “value extracting” its way (it hopes) to greater profits.
https://www.aol.com/american-airlines-lay-off-656-060706609.html
“… laser-focused on improving … customer experience,” the company is laying off 8.2% of its 8,000 customer service-related positions for a total of 656 employees.
According to the post:
“Currently, American Airlines passengers have to reach out to separate customer service teams for different issues, but the new structure will consolidate that assistance into one team. This will likely be passengers whose flights are impacted by factors like weather. More easily addressed, ‘lighter-touch’ problems will then be outsourced to international contact centers, which operate 24/7.”
Yes, just call one of our international contact centers. What a wonderful idea.