ISIS Rising

The Pentagon today awarded Lockheed Martin Aeronautics a $100 million increment of a nearly $400 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract for phase three of an effort to develop a stratospheric airship that can simultaneously track airborne and ground targets in flights lasting upward of 10 years, according to a Defense Department announcement.

The program is dubbed Integrated Sensor is Structure, or ISIS for short. Work on the contract is expected to be completed in March 2013, according to the DOD statement. "This contract was procured under a limited source competition with two bids solicited and two bids received," the statement reads.

As Inside the Air Force reported last month:

In the second phase, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman worked on the systems design, and several sectors of Lockheed, Northrop and Raytheon were contracted for “critical technology” development, which included low areal density hull materials, lightweight low-power-density radar arrays, extremely low-power transmit-receive modules and regenerative power systems.

In Phase III, the agency will design, develop and fabricate a subscale demonstration system and conduct flight tests, Walker said.

Flight demonstration is scheduled for fiscal year 2013; it will be up to the Air Force following the flights to determine future acquisition and operations of a production asset, Walker added in a March 17 e-mail.