JPSS Moves Ahead

Congress may not yet have voted on NOAA’s FY2011 appropriations bill, but NASA moved forward today with acquisition of the first satellite for NOAA’s restructured polar orbiting environmental satellite program. The first Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) spacecraft will be a clone of NASA’s NPOESS Preparatory Project satellite being built by Ball Aerospace, and the agency awarded a sole source control to Ball for JPSS-1. It is a firm fixed price contract for $248 million with a performance period through 2015; launch is expected in 2014.

In February, the White House announced that it was abandoning the Clinton-era policy of merging NOAA’s civil and DOD’s military polar-orbiting weather satellite programs and letting the agencies return to separate systems. The converged program, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) suffered repeated cost overruns and schedule delays for many reasons.

NOAA is proceeding with its new program, JPSS, with NASA as its acquisition agent. NASA was involved in the NPOESS program in a technology development role only; DOD was the acquisition agent. DOD’s portion of the new program is the Defense Weather Satellite System (DWSS). Congressional appropriators have expressed significant reservations about the future of JPSS and DWSS, but the need for moving quickly on JPSS-1 is not disputed. All of NOAA’s polar orbiting weather satellites already are in orbit, while DOD has two of its legacy satellites awaiting launch when needed.