Lifeboat Foundation

Without a new legal framework, they could destabilize societal norms.

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Continue reading “Could Autonomous Robots Be More Dangerous than Nukes?” »

Supersonic and hypersonic aircraft are slowly but surely coming back to the forefront of aviation. NASA is in the last development stages of its supersonic research aircraft, X-59, and Stratolaunch is getting ready to operate its first hypersonic test vehicle, the Talon-A.

This week’s episode is brought to you by The Space Force. For more information, please go to http://www.spaceforce.com #sponsored.

How much of your life is touched by space? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice break down the newest branch of the US military, The Space Force, with Charles Liu, Major General DeAnna Burt, and Dr. Moriba Jah. Is this one step closer to Star Wars?

Continue reading “Space Force: A New Domain with Neil deGrasse Tyson” »

What is this world with a simple idea and lots of engineering? Father-son duo power regular trucks with military jet engines and almost make them fly.

November 12 2020

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. — A new machine learning algorithm, developed with Army funding, can isolate patterns in brain signals that relate to a specific behavior and then decode it, potentially providing Soldiers with behavioral-based feedback.

“The impact of this work is of great importance to Army and DOD in general, as it pursues a framework for decoding behaviors from brain signals that generate them,” said Dr. Hamid Krim, program manager, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Develop Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. “As an example future application, the algorithms could provide Soldiers with needed feedback to take corrective action as a result of fatigue or stress.”

Continue reading “Machine learning algorithm could provide Soldiers feedback” »

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian organizations are racing to establish regulations and prohibitions on such weapons development. Without such checks, foreign policy experts warn that disruptive autonomous weapons technologies will dangerously destabilize current nuclear strategies, both because they could radically change perceptions of strategic dominance, increasing the risk of preemptive attacks, and because they could become combined with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons themselves.

Some people say that the definition of genius is to take the inner workings of one or multiple systems and apply them to another domain with absolute success. One designer may just fall right into that definition with this SWATH conceptual vehicle.

The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) vehicle, developed under a partnership of the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, made a free flight the week of Sept. 20 a DARPA spokesman said, but most details are being withheld. The vehicle, which was built by Raytheon Technologies with a hypersonic engine built by Northrop Grumman, flew faster than Mach 5 but DARPA declined to say how long the vehicle flew.

The engine “kicked on” seconds after being released from an aircraft, which DARPA and the Air Force declined to identify, although DARPA expressed appreciation to “Navy flight test personnel.” The Navy has been conducting hypersonic missile research with F/A-18 aircraft.

The engine “compressed incoming air mixed with its hydrocarbon fuel and began igniting that fast-moving airflow mixture, propelling the cruiser at a speed greater than Mach 5,” DARPA said. In order for the scramjet engine to ignite, the vehicle must be moving at hypersonic speed, so a booster is used for that portion of the flight.

Some improvements of the new model include a significantly improved range, fuel offload capacity, operational and combat-proven advanced camera and vision system, and upgraded communications system. The tanker will have 271,700 pounds (123,241 kg) of fuel capacity – 12,000 kg more than the Airbus A330 MRTT and an almost 20-hour endurance.

“Lockheed Martin has a long and successful track record of producing aircraft for the US Air Force, and we understand the critical role tankers play in ensuring America’s total mission success,” said Greg Ulmer, executive vice president Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. “The LMXT combines proven performance and operator-specific capabilities to meet the Air Force’s refueling requirements in support of America’s National Defense Strategy.”

In addition to better range and increased payload, the LMXT tanker is equipped with a proven fly-by-wire boom currently certified and used by allies to refuel US Air Force receiver aircraft in operations around the world, the world’s first fully automatic boom/air-to-air refueling (A3R) system, and open system architecture JADC2 (Joint All-Domain Command and Control) systems.