spacetoday.net: TRW, Spectrum Astro win satellite contracts

Posted: Mon, Aug 26, 2002, 10:27 AM ET (1427 GMT)
TRW won a multi-billion dollar government contract late Friday to build the next generation of weather satellites, while Spectrum Astro won a smaller, unrelated contract to build a NASA science satellite. The Defense Department, NOAA, and NASA jointly awarded TRW a $4.5-billion contract to build the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), a new generation of polar-orbiting weather satellites that will serve military and civil government needs. Raytheon, the company acting as a key subcontractor to TRW on NPOESS, will receive $1 billion of the contract award. The contract calls for two satellites, with options to build four more, for launch between 2009 and 2018. In a separate contract announcement late Friday, NASA announced that it had awarded Spectrum Astro a contract to build the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) spacecraft. The $107-million spacecraft, scheduled for launch in 2006, will follow up on observations made by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.