“The expectation is that we will bounce between those constellations in the same flight, so we’ll move between them. Now, I don’t think anybody should be guaranteeing that on flight one,” said AFRL’s head engineer for Global Lightning Brian Beal. “We’re going to improve as we go and get to that, but that is the goal of the program.”
By Theresa HitchensEnabling seamless operations across land, air, sea, space, and cyber
The real advantage comes when legacy, new, next generation and cutting-edge systems can work together in the battlespace.
The BRIDGES project is Scout’s first with DARPA, but the company’s SDA-related software and hardware — including its “plug and play” optical sensor packages designed as hosted payloads — already have caught the eye of Space Force officials.
By Theresa Hitchens
AFRL’s fiscal 2025 budget plans show that the lab hopes to complete testing of the capability to air-drop cargo pallets down from Starship during FY25, and to launch a demonstration flight to “transport 30 to 100 tons of cargo to an austere site” in late FY25 or early FY26.
By Theresa Hitchens
Under the Science and Technology Applied RF Systems program, estimated to cost a total of nearly $95 million over six years, AFRL is looking to award up to three indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts.
By Theresa Hitchens
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‘Store Now, Decrypt Later’ attacks must be thwarted now with Zero Trust cybersecurity.
By Breaking Defense
The investment in transitioning Rocket Cargo “is focused on utilizing vehicles that traverse from or through space to transport DoD materiel anywhere around the world within tactically responsive timelines,” the Space Force’s FY25 budget request says.
By Theresa Hitchens
The goal of the accelerator is to bring industry, government and academia together to integrate SDA computer systems to “fully leverage” data from myriad sources across the Defense Department, the Intelligence Community, other government agencies, allies and commercial firms — a seemingly unsolvable problem that has bedeviled the Pentagon for decades.
By Theresa Hitchens
Preparing the defense industrial base to surge, collaborate, and deliver
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While this may be the first CRADA’s between the two Indian space startups and the Space Force, neither company is a stranger to the US space market ecosystem.
By Theresa Hitchens
“Right now, the position of my combatant commander is: ‘I wanna move, I wanna refuel, I wanna have life-extension and I wanna live’,” SpRCO Director Kelly Hammett told Breaking Defense.
By Theresa Hitchens
The Space Force sees nuclear fission reactors as a solution to replace solar panels for operations in the darkness of deep space.
By Theresa Hitchens
The five finalists in the Hack-A-Sat 4 contest competed in nine different challenges, seven of them involving hacking into the Moonlighter CubeSat built by The Aerospace Corporation and Space Systems Command as a on-orbit cybersecurity testbed.
By Theresa Hitchens
“Hyperspectral is kind of starting to have its moment in the sun, so to speak,” said Dan Katz, CEO and co-founder of Orbital Sidekick.
By Theresa Hitchens
Responsive launch is enabled by the fact that Draper’s hydrogen peroxide fuel is easily storable, Ursa Major CEO Joe Laurienti told Breaking Defense, which cuts down prelaunch logistics — whereas other highly toxic liquid fuels often used to provide the high thrust needed for a missile to reach hypersonic speeds (Mach 5 and above) require special handling.
By Theresa Hitchens
The company will use its sensor simulation software product Spectral, which can be used to “place sensors anywhere on a platform to visualize the sensor field of view, occlusion, and coverage,” Nicholas Pisciotta told Breaking Defense ahead of the contract announcement.
By Jaspreet Gill
