GovConWire's Government Contracting News 9/19/2022

Former State Department official Thomas Smitham has been named chief of the U.S. business development unit at aerospace and defense conglomerate Leonardo. Smitham, who most recently served as acting ambassador to Italy, will be responsible for helping grow the company’s market presence in the U.S through commercial campaigns and institutional interactions, Leonardo said Friday. His diplomatic

Anthony Robbins, vice president of the federal business at NVIDIA, accepted his 2022 Wash100 Award, the highest honor in government contracting (GovCon), from Executive Mosaic CEO Jim Garrettson during a recent visit to the company’s office in Herndon, VA. “Anthony Robbins is an artificial intelligence evangelist known to almost everyone in the Department of Defense or adjacent markets,”

Textron‘s (NYSE: TXT) Bell subsidiary has secured a five-year, $228.2 million contract to implement hardware and software updates to the U.S. Navy’s H-1 light attack helicopter fleet. The company will modernize the baseline configuration of the airframe, flight controls, aircraft wiring interface terminals and weapon systems interfaces under the indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, the Department of Defense

The General Services Administration has released requests for proposals for Historically Underutilized Business Zone and service-disabled veteran-owned small business pools of the Polaris governmentwide acquisition contract for information technology products and services. GSA said Friday it will accept proposals through Nov. 4 for SDVOSB and HUBZone pools of Polaris, which supports a January 2021 executive

NASA has started soliciting proposals for a program to build and demonstrate astronaut moon landers for future Artemis lunar missions. The space agency said Saturday it expects the Human Landing System Sustaining Lunar Development program to create the way for companies to offer recurring lunar landing services beyond the Artemis III mission. “Work done under

Space technology developer Intuitive Machines has agreed to go public as part of a planned merger with New York-based blank check company Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: IPAX). The combined entity will list securities on the Nasdaq upon completion of the deal and estimates it will exceed $1 billion in pro forma equity value, Intuitive

The U.K. government has approved Viasat’s (Nasdaq: VSAT) proposed acquisition of Inmarsat under the National Security and Investment Act. Mark Dankberg, executive chairman and CEO of Viasat, said in a statement published Friday Viasat has been a partner of U.K. national security and defense communities for over 10 years, particularly in the delivery of encryption

Leidos (NYSE: LDOS) will continue its engineering and technical support of the U.S. Navy’s Synthetic Signature Generation-based training systems under a six-year, $83.3 million contract. The cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract is aimed at preparing the SSG trainers to meet the branch’s fleet requirements, the Department of Defense said Friday. The Navy will obligate fiscal 2022 operation

Beacon Global Strategies has hired four former government officials who will bring their knowledge of national security matters to the company’s advisory work in various practice areas such as risk analysis and government acquisition. Michael Groen, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general who formerly led the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and a

The U.S. Army is seeking additional vendors capable of providing high performance computing in support of research, development, test and evaluation efforts of Department of Defense organizations. In a SAM.gov notice for combined synopsis/solicitation, the  Army Engineering Research and Development Center said it seeks to on-ramp qualified firms onto current technical insertion basic ordering agreement