Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr and Victoria state's Minister of Industry and Trade Jacinta Allan officially opened the Richmond engineering center, which will accommodate more than 300 BAE Systems employees.

The building will give teams from the Aerospace and Autonomous Systems Development division and the Weapon Systems business access to modern laboratories to support a range of advanced design and test activities, a BAE Systems statement said.

"Our AASD group in Melbourne leads our global company's engineering development and design capability across BAE Systems Australia's aerospace business unit," Jim McDowell, managing director of BAE Systems Australia, said.

This includes design and development of autonomous enabling technologies, P-3, F/A -18 and Hawk mission systems support and aircraft integration activities for Blackhawk, Chinook and Seahawk.

"Our weapon systems group is also involved in the cutting edge design, integration and support of ship air defense systems and guided weapons, including the highly successful Nulka active missile decoys and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles," said McDowell.

BAE Systems will initially lease around 32,300 square feet and three floors of the new complex with capacity available to expand if needed.

BAE Systems has around 107,000 employees worldwide and reported global sales of $36.2 billion in 2009.

The opening of the research center comes after BAE Systems said the Australian production of parts of the Joint Strike Fighter could be worth a "conservative" $500 million to the Australian division.

The estimate doesn't include revenue from maintenance contracts, McDowell told Adelaide's Advertiser newspaper.

Life support revenue could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The total value of Australian contracts wasn't settled but South Australia could play a big part in the first steps of the JSF project.

"There is still on big initial lump to come, which is manufacturing associated with the vertical tail and we do that in our U.K. business in the northwest of England,'' he said. "We would hope to transfer quite a lot of that to Australia as a second source. That will probably be $500 million to $600 million, conservatively.''

McDowell said maintenance work for any defense project was usually about three times the initial contract size. What BAE Systems gets depends on what the prime contractor decides.

"Lockheed will definitely be the prime but the question will be how thick or thin they want their prime position to be,'' he said.

He also said it is unlikely there will be a need to build new, replicated maintenance facilities that exist at BAE Systems centers in Williamstown, New South Wales.

Contract details are unlikely to be finalized until the final product rolls off the U.S. production line in 2014. New South Wales, though, is likely to pick up the lion's share of the platform and on-base work.

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