Blue Devil I / II

Blue Devil Block I flew an integrated pod (wide-area imagery, night imagery, FMV, SIGINT cueing) on contractor King Air C90s. NSA and JIEDDO supported it; a SIGINT intercept could cue WAAS then narrow-FOV video. PED used NSA-Net, Trojan Spirit SATCOM and DIA VSAT. SAIC contract FA8650-10-C-1887 grew to ~$243.5m by August 2013. Block II (MAV6 contract FA8620-11-C-4024, initially $86.2m, 14 March 2011) tried to put the architecture on a 5–7 day airship with Payload Integration Infrastructure, ground station, onboard processing and mission payload. Payload integration stopped 4 January 2012; airship work ended May 2012; ~$149m spent. Equipment shipped Q4 FY2012 to BIG SAFARI storage, Greenville, Texas. DODIG-2013-128: residual components absorbed into other Air Force programmes. Whether any of that hardware became Orion GFE is OPEN.