Air Force officials say they may still be able to institute a new satellite purchasing method, even if the Congress adopts language in the House Armed Services Committee’s markup curtailing the scheme.
The new plan, called Evolutionary Acquisition for Space Efficiency (EASE), has three facets. It calls for stable funding of a block buy of two satellites at a fixed price; a parallel account to provide money for product improvement; and parallel work on the mission area’s architecture. Advanced appropriations were envisioned to allocate money years ahead of time.
However, the House Armed Services Committee is insisting on incremental funding instead of the desired advanced appropriations in the 2012 defense bill. Air Force Undersecretary Erin Conaton said yesterday that the service will still be able to implement the new strategy.
“They gave us what we asked for the first year,” Conaton said. “We can achieve EASE under the funding profile Congress has put in there. We’d prefer to do it with advanced appropriations, but we’ll continue to work with them going forward.”
She was speaking at a breakfast sponsored by the Air Force Association.
Conaton added that the Air Force is still trying to secure the advanced appropriations money as the fiscal 2012 defense bills are take up by the various congressional defense committees.
The executive director
 of 
Air Force Space Command’s Space and Missile Systems Center, Doug 
Loverro, told reporters during a teleconference later in the day that the command is still examining how the HASC approach, if adopted by the other committees and then the full Congress, would affect the Air Force’s plan.
He added that the Air Force would still use fixed-price incentive-fee contracts, regardless of what Congress decides on the funding mechanism. He said such arrangements are better able to hold costs steady.
“A fixed price arrangement gives us, and them, a higher degree of surety that the price proposed will end up being the price of the satellite,” he said.