Senior Pentagon officials are crafting a major aid package to help money-losing rocket programs at Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., including possibly adding hundreds of millions of dollars to existing government launch contracts.
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Such a contracting change would benefit the two companies, largely because it would cushion their businesses from the recent sharp dropoff in the number of commercial satellite launches.
Defense Department officials didn't disclose the specific size of the aid package under consideration, and they stressed that no final decisions have been made because "the acquisition strategy" for the next round of launches hasn't yet been approved. Nonetheless, their comments amounted to the first official confirmation that both White House and Pentagon leaders are mulling a package to funnel significant funds to rocket programs, over and above the fixed-price contracts for anticipated launches.
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Pentagon officials said they hope to award rocket-launch contracts by the summer, after Boeing is expected to become eligible to bid again. The Chicago aerospace company was handed a suspension last year after Air Force officials determined the company had improperly obtained thousands of pages of proprietary Lockheed Martin documents.
On Friday, Pentagon officials said Boeing's transgressions are projected to eventually cost the Air Force an extra $223 million, to switch launches, underwrite construction of a second West Coast launch facility and complete more engineering work. The Pentagon is expected to try to recover those funds from Boeing.
Boeing's velvet wrist-slap is to have to wait until summer (so long!) for its share of those hundreds of millions of dollars. By then maybe we all will have hopefully forgotten about those purloined Lockheed Martin documents, as well as the crimes of former Air Force procurement officer and Boeing CFO confidante Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun.
This still cracks me up: Michael Sears — the Boeing CFO who hired Dragon Lady Darleen Druyun away from the Air Force after she deviously took Airbus out the running — wrote and was about to publish a business management self-help book called "Soaring through Turbulence" on the theme of ethics in business. Oddly enough for an author, he had no direct experience of such a mythical concept, based on the abysmal example of his own management behavior at Boeing.
