The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has awarded a new $82 million contract to Raytheon Company to modernize the Indian air navigation system.

Raytheon will build the ground stations for the GPS-Aided Geosynchronous Augmented Navigation System (GAGAN), and the Indian Space Research Organization will provide the space segment and additional ground equipment. GAGAN will provide satellite-based navigation for civil aviation over Indian airspace and adjoining areas in south and east Asia.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has awarded a new $82 million contract to Raytheon Company to modernize the Indian air navigation system.

Raytheon will build the ground stations for the GPS-Aided Geosynchronous Augmented Navigation System (GAGAN), and the Indian Space Research Organization will provide the space segment and additional ground equipment. GAGAN will provide satellite-based navigation for civil aviation over Indian airspace and adjoining areas in south and east Asia.

The Indian satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS) is expected to bridge the gap between the European EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) and the Japanese MSAS (MTSAT Satellite-Based Augmentation System) to provide seamless navigation of aircraft across a wide portion of the Earth.

Raytheon will continue the work it began several years ago and expects to have the GAGAN system fully functional by 2013.

Raytheon offers a broad range of automation and surveillance systems in use today in more than 50 countries around the world. The company developed the Federal Aviation Administration’s GPS Wide Area Augmentation System and was engaged in the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau’s Multi-Function Transport Satellite Augmentation System.

“Our GAGAN solution addresses the four essential elements of safe air navigation: accuracy, integrity, availability and continuity,” said Fritz Treyz, director of business development for Raytheon Network Centric Systems who led the Raytheon team pursuing the GAGAN initiative.

A. S. Ganeshan, GAGAN project director of ISRO Satellite Center, has led the ISRO team.

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The GPS Wing has announced that the Raytheon Modernized User Equipment (MUE) team has achieved live satellite M-code tracking with an MUE receiver.

The team has developed modernized versions of the Avionics GPS Receiver Application Module and Ground Based GPS Receiver Applications Module (GB-GRAM) receivers under MUE receiver development contracts awarded to three companies in June of 2006. M-code signals from Block IIR GPS satellites were acquired using a Raytheon GB-GRAM-M.

The GPS Wing has announced that the Raytheon Modernized User Equipment (MUE) team has achieved live satellite M-code tracking with an MUE receiver.

The team has developed modernized versions of the Avionics GPS Receiver Application Module and Ground Based GPS Receiver Applications Module (GB-GRAM) receivers under MUE receiver development contracts awarded to three companies in June of 2006. M-code signals from Block IIR GPS satellites were acquired using a Raytheon GB-GRAM-M.

M-code acquisition and tracking is one of many steps taken towards completion of the MUE receiver, but a very important step that indicates the proper operation of many receiver functions, according to a spokesperson at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, where the GPS Wing is located.

The team will continue its work on receiver integration throughout the summer culminating in the scheduled delivery of pre-production GRAM-S/M and GB-GRAM-M modules to the GPS Wing in November of this year.

The GB-GRAM-M and GRAM-S/M will replace legacy GB-GRAM and GRAM-S embedded GPS receivers in systems such as the Raven unmanned air vehicle and Miniature Airborne GPS Receiver.

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(Updated Jan.26) President Barack Obama’s nomination of William J. Lynn III, a senior vice-president at Raytheon Corporation, for deputy secretary of defense and his granting Lynn a waiver from the new administration’s own rules on former lobbyists has provoked considerable criticism from some quarters.

As the number two official in the Department of Defense (DoD), Lynn would report directly to Robert Gates, the current secretary of defense who has continued in that position in the new administration, the only holdover from ex-President Bush’s cabinet. Gates has come out strongly in support of Lynn, saying that he requested the waiver from the president.

Among other responsibilities, the deputy secretary serves as the co-chair of
the Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Executive
Committee (ExCom). Lynn would succeed Gordon England, who has paid a lot of attention to GPS during his term in office and enhanced the role of the PNT ExCom as an arbiter and advocate for the GPS program throughout the federal government.

(Updated Jan.26) President Barack Obama’s nomination of William J. Lynn III, a senior vice-president at Raytheon Corporation, for deputy secretary of defense and his granting Lynn a waiver from the new administration’s own rules on former lobbyists has provoked considerable criticism from some quarters.

As the number two official in the Department of Defense (DoD), Lynn would report directly to Robert Gates, the current secretary of defense who has continued in that position in the new administration, the only holdover from ex-President Bush’s cabinet. Gates has come out strongly in support of Lynn, saying that he requested the waiver from the president.

Among other responsibilities, the deputy secretary serves as the co-chair of
the Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Executive
Committee (ExCom). Lynn would succeed Gordon England, who has paid a lot of attention to GPS during his term in office and enhanced the role of the PNT ExCom as an arbiter and advocate for the GPS program throughout the federal government.

Although Lynn apparently hasn’t had a close association with the GPS program, in his role as Raytheon’s senior vice-president for government operations and strategy he is the chief liaison with federal executive and legislative branches for a company that does. Raytheon is the prime contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration’s GPS Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) and leads one of two competing teams seeking the contract to build the next-generation GPS operational control segment (OCX).

Overall, Raytheon reportedly did $18.3 billion worth of business with the U.S. government in 2007. Lynn has agreed to sell his stock in Raytheon and other defense contractors to avoid potential conflicts of interest in the future.

According to an Associated Press report, until early last year Lynn had lobbied Congress and federal agencies on a variety of programs including missiles, sensors and radar, advanced technology programs, and space and intelligence funding. That put Lynn inside the two-year ban on lobbing of federal agencies and Congress that Obama has set for new appointees — hence, the need for a waiver in the case of the Raytheon executive.

In a January 22 press conference, Gates defended that decision, noting, "People in the transition certainly recognized that it [Lynn’s Raytheon role] was an issue. And I interviewed Bill Lynn. I was very impressed with his credentials. He came with the highest recommendations of a number of people that I respect a lot. And I asked that an exception be made because I felt that he could play the role of a deputy — of the deputy — in a better manner than anybody else that I saw."

Gates has been “intimately involved” in the process of identifying and interviewing appropriate candidates for various vacancies throughout the department, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell.

Morrell added that, before Obama made his announcement, Gates has been busy working with the president-elect’s transition team to identify appropriate candidates for various vacancies throughout the department and interview them personally.

“I think he feels as though . . . we’ve made some good progress toward identifying some very capable candidates to fill some very big jobs within the department,” Morrell said.

Among the people expressing concern about the nomination and waiver are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which conducted a hearing on Lynn’s nomination last week. Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Michigan) said that under congressional
ethics rules, Lynn would still have to recuse himself for one year from
matters related to Raytheon, but he says he will back the waiver.

Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) the ranking Republican on the Armed
Forces Committee and the Republican nominee in last November’s presidential election, said on Sunday, January 25: "I have asked to see which areas that Mr. Lynn will be recused from. But I think we need to probably move forward with his nomination."

Lynn returns to the capital as no stranger to either DoD or Congress. From 1997 to 2001, Lynn served as one of five under secretaries of defense, acting as the department’s comptroller and principal advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) for all budgetary and fiscal matters.

Another significant DoD position held by Lynn was that of OSD director of program analysis and evaluation (PA&E) from 1993 to 1997, where he oversaw all aspects of the DoD’s strategic planning process.

Raytheon recently announced that its OCX team completed the segment design review and modernized capability engineering model demonstration on Dec. 13, 2008. The company is working under a $160 million Phase A system design and risk reduction contract awarded by the GPS Wing in November 2007. A team led by Northrop Grumman is the other contender for the OCX contract. A final decision on the OCX prime contract is expected later this year.

Before entering the DoD in 1993, Lynn served for six years on the staff of Senator Edward Kennedy as liaison to the Senate Armed Services Committee. He has also been a Senior Fellow at the National Defense University, on the professional staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses and served as the executive director of the Defense Organization Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

A graduate of Dartmouth College, Lynn has a law degree from Cornell Law School and a Master’s in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

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Under the new awards, Raytheon will receive $65 million; Rockwell Collins, $50.7 million; and L-3/Interstate Electronics Corporation, $36 million. All options were awarded on or about October 19.

The U.S. Air Force has exercised new options on contracts with three companies for development of GPS Modernized User Equipment (MUE) for future military applications.

Under the new awards, Raytheon will receive $65 million; Rockwell Collins, $50.7 million; and L-3/Interstate Electronics Corporation, $36 million. All options were awarded on or about October 19.

The existing contracts were signed in mid-2006 for proof-of-concept designs of ground and airborne OEM modules: a Ground Based GPS Receiver Application Module with a Modernized Standard Serial Interface (GB-GRAM-M SSI) and a GPS Receiver Application Module Type S (GRAM-SEM-E/M) card.

Under the initial contract award IEC received nearly $37.2 million; Raytheon, about $37.8 million; and Rockwell Collins, more than $27.8 million. Additional contract options are available.

The new modernized modules are standard and backward compatible, making them useable in many GPS receiver applications. In most cases, this should eliminate the cost of developing new modules for each individual application.

L-3 says it will integrate its modules into a new line of MUE GPS receivers, using a single system-on-chip (SoC) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The ASIC integrates the selective availability/anti-spoofing module (SAASM), GPS P/Y- and C/A-code signal functions, and the military M-code signal tracking algorithms in a single unit.

The Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations bill signed into law in November allocates $156.47 million for MUE development.

A GPS Wing spokesperson at the Space and Missile Systems Center, Los Angeles Air Force Base, California, said that the wing is working closely with Office of the Secretary of Defense and the military services “to better define an official program strategy aimed at fielding M-code user equipment sooner. This requires a signed JROC [Joint Requirements Oversight Council] requirements document, a technology development plan, multiple domain (air/ground/space/munition) form factors, initial integration and test into lead service platforms, and the development of prototype user equipment.”

These activities would be followed by services’ platform integration, hardware procurement, and sustainment programs. “It is important that this strategy gets defined and budgeted before attempting to accelerate any one of the individual activities,” the GPS Wing spokesperson added.

Copyright © 2007 Gibbons Media & Research LLC, all rights reserved.

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