[09-05-11] Boeing<\/b> was awarded a $1.09 billion contract from the U.S. Air Force<\/b> to build its seventh Wideband Global Satcom (WGS-7) satellite at its manufacturing facility in El Segundo, Calif., the U.S. Department of Defense<\/b> announced Sept. 2.
\n The contract also includes a provision that will allow the Pentagon to procure its eighth WGS satellite (WGS-8) from Boeing, as well as an option for production and launch of WGS-9. The WGS satellite series were designed to dramatically enhance U.S. military communications from troops in the field to fighter jets overhead. WGS-7 will specifically support additional X- and Ka-band communications requirements for U.S. military warfighters. The satellites have recently been a part of Boeing\u2019s discussion concerning the complimentary abilities of hosted payloads. No target launch date for WGS-7 has been set at this time.
\n In August 2010, Boeing won a $182 million Air Force contract to begin long-lead procurement and development work on WGS-7.
\nBoeing Space and Intelligence Systems\u2019 Bob Pickard told Satellite TODAY Insider<\/i> that the successful launch and operation of WGS-3 provided a stepping stone to the company\u2019s work on the Air Force\u2019s Block 2 constellation and the WGS-7 satellite. \u201cThis is a satellite program that continues to deliver positive results and significant value to the warfighter. Boeing is progressing well in building the 3 Block 2 satellites and is working with the Air Force on a follow-on series with up to six more satellites.\u201d
\n In April, EMS Defense & Space<\/b> received a follow-on contract from Boeing to design and fully integrate a power divider and a splitter combiner assembly for the WGS-7 spacecraft. EMS Defense & Space will provide space, airborne and ground-based applications, as well as its Wavestorm GS-GBS Ka-band receive antenna aperture designed to enable full data rates from the WGS constellation and support airborne or ground-based comms-on-the-move applications across all of the major X-band constellations.<\/p>\n
\u201cEMS\u2019s solution significantly lowered our risk and made integration much easier. It also reduced spacecraft mass, which has enhanced the spacecraft\u2019s overall performance,” Boeing Project Manager Les Maldoon said in a statement. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[09-05-11] Boeing was awarded a $1.09 billion contract from the U.S. Air Force to build its seventh Wideband Global Satcom (WGS-7) satellite at its manufacturing facility in El Segundo, Calif., the U.S. Department of Defense announced Sept. 2. The contract also includes a provision that will allow the Pentagon to procure its eighth WGS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}