By Marina Malenic
The Air Force will create a complete strategy for the acquisition of the three increments of its Next-Generation Global Positioning System Ground Control Segment (GPS-OCX) in the coming months, the program manager said last week.
Lt. Col. Janet Grondin, the OCX program manager, said the strategy-including whether the Block I contractor will be carried over into future increments–is to be determined shortly.
“We’ll determine that by the end of the calendar year,” Grondin told Defense Daily during a July 25 telephone interview.
The undersecretary of the Air Force altered the initial acquisition strategy in 2005. Under the revised strategy, the next generation space and ground control segments were competed separately. Last month, Maj. Gen. William McCasland, director of space acquisition in the Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, said service officials believe they “can manage the program as a whole better if we separate the replenishment of the space component with the management of the ground segment” (Defense Daily, June 23).
GPS is a dual-use, military and civil system whose primary mission is to provide Position, Navigation and Time (PNT) services. The Nuclear Detonation (NUDET) Detection System (NDS) is carried as a secondary payload.
Grondin said specialized contractors for each of the components made more sense than a single contractor that might not have the same level of expertise across mission areas.
“We wanted to have a best-of-breed ground system contractors, as well as best-of-breed space system contractors,” she explained. “Sometimes when you lump the two together, you’ll get best-of-breed in one area but not the other.”
GPS OCX will deliver new mission planning, constellation management, ground antenna, monitoring station and satellite command and control capabilities.
Under their current 18-month contract, Raytheon [RTN] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] are providing systems engineering and integration; architecture design; communications and network engineering; information assurance and security; modeling and simulation; network management; software development; support, maintenance and implementation; and test and evaluation for their respective OCX offerings.
The contractors will each deliver prototypes, and the Air Force is expected to award the Block I production contract to one of the companies in May 2009, according to Grondin. She said fielding for that increment is scheduled to begin two years later. OCX will be acquired in three blocs and deliver capabilities incrementally over the course of the next 30 years.
According to the Air Force, key capabilities for the next-generation GPS system include higher accuracy in a jammed environment, increased time transfer accuracy, increased position accuracy, higher system integrity, greater survivability, greater signal commonality with the European Union’s Galileo system, and interoperability with the Global Information Grid.