Lifeboat Foundation

Satellites operators have been longing for it for decades, and DARPA (once again?) is turning their dream into reality: on March 25, one of America’s most futuristic agency announced it would launch a public-private partnership to provide in-orbit servicing to geosynchronous satellites, both commercial and military.

The program dubbed Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) will be a major breakthrough for the satellite industry world. Since Sputnik’s launch, the biggest weakness of satellites was that, once on orbit, nothing could be done if something went wrong or once the fuel tank ran dry. A rather embarrassing issue when considering how pricey such platforms are. The only maintenance and repair operations performed to date were manned (Hubble telescope, ISS). The agency announced that it would allocate RSGS $500mn over the next few years, supplemented by commercial partner investment.

DARPA’s RSGS is composed of two elements: the arm that will dock and manipulate the satellite, and the space ship carrying it. Regarding the first element, the agency will provide its Front-end Robotics Enabling Near-term Demonstration (FREND) technology. The prototype of the FREND arm was built for the agency by the California-based company Alliance Space Systems. The robotic arm will enable it to dock with satellites and carry out maintenance.

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Air Force Research Laboratory is working on key technologies in hypersonic air vehicles, directed-energy weapons and autonomy, or human-machine teaming, that will be “game-changers”

Air Force Research Laboratory scientists and engineers have developed an unarmed “cruise missile-like vehicle” that reached five times the speed of sound in tests, and have explored pairing drones with combat fighters in latest realm of technological advances.

Pentagon futurists envision a third-offset strategy to leapfrog U.S. technological capabilities to stay ahead of Russia and China.

Continue reading “Air force research lab roadmaps for game changing hypersonic vehicles, directed energy weapons and drones” »

Pretty cool!

As Brain-Computer Interface is rapidly developed worldwide, mind-controlled drones turn into sports and weapons of today.

Continue reading “Brave New World: Mind-Controlled Drones Revolutionizing Sports And Warfare” »

Nice and long overdue; however, finally happening and that’s good as long as security and safety are not compromised.

PENTAGON: One of the most important — and most maligned — elements of the Pentagon bureaucracy has gotten 30 percent faster, according to data exclusively compiled for Breaking Defense by the staff of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council. In a new drive for openness, the infamously opaque JROC is also bringing in outside expertise from industry, military laboratories and the Defense Department’s in-house disruptive innovators at DARPA.

Reforming the Joint Requirements Oversight Council is a big deal. The military’s weapons-buying bureaucracy is a maze, and at the dark heart of the labyrinth lurks the JROC, which must approve the official wish list — the requirements — for almost any major program. Led by the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Paul Selva, and comprising the No. 2 officers of each service, supported by lesser boards and lower-ranking working groups, the JROC has a reputation for delaying, watering down, or killing the armed services’ proposals. Many believe it’s where good ideas go to die — slowly.

Continue reading “JROC Speeds Up & Opens Up: Reforming The Dark Heart of Acquisition” »

They deserve it too.

X2 Biosystems has received the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics (SBMT) 2016 Pioneer in Healthcare Technology Innovations Award for developing its next-generation head impact measurement sensor technology, the company said.

X2´s “X-Patch” wearable impact sensor has become widely deployed and tested head impact monitoring device, used in a continually expanding range of athletic activities from football (youth, high school, collegiate, pro) to hockey, soccer, lacrosse, rugby, Australian rules football, baseball, field hockey, wrestling, boxing, taekwondo, mixed martial arts, skiing and BMX cycling.

The X-Patch is also being actively evaluated for use in military training applications.

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Billionaire Yuri Milner is spending $100 million to work out the technology for ground based laser based beam propulsion for interstellar travel.

California Polytechnic State University researchers propose a 100 kilowatt space based laser system capable of probing the molecular composition of cold solar system targets such as asteroids, comets, planets and moons from a distant vantage. This system uses existing technology and only some needs refinement. All of it looks achievable in the next 3 to 5 years. They have NASA NIAC funding. They have detailed designs for a 900 kilowatt system that would use two Falcon heavy launches.

The military laser segment will be about a $5 billion per year market by 2020. There is a large multi-billion commercial laser market. Those markets will drive improvements in laser efficiency and technological improvements which will be leveraged for space based systems or ground based lasers for space beam propulsion applications.

Continue reading “Megawatt beam propulsion by 2023 and Gigawatts by 2030” »

Re-inventing the integrated circuit.

Since the advent of the integrated circuit in 1958, the same year the Advanced Research Projects Agency was established, engineers have been jamming ever more microelectronic integration into ever less chip real estate. Now it has become routine to pack billions of transistors onto chips the size of fingernails.

DARPA (the D for Defense was first added in 1972) has played key roles in this ongoing miracle of miniaturization, giving rise to new and sometimes revolutionary military and civilian capabilities in domains as diverse as communication, intelligence gathering, and optical information processing. ‎Now a DARPA-funded team has drastically miniaturized highly specialized electronic components called circulators and for the first time integrated them into standard silicon-based circuitry. The feat could lead to a doubling of radiofrequency (RF) capacity for wireless communications—meaning even faster web-searching and downloads, for example—as well as the development of smaller, less expensive and more readily upgraded antenna arrays for radar, signals intelligence, and other applications.

Continue reading “Novel miniaturized circulator opens way to doubling wireless capacity” »

The sky above Osaka Bay is saturated in light pollution teeming from the neon-soaked metropolis below. Military bi-copters circle in patterns between the antenna towers of Niihama City’s looming skyscrapers as they survey the scene of an ongoing domestic security operation. Kneeling from atop the edge of one of these towers is a figure; a mauve-haired saboteur of the state clad in a leotard, side holster, and leather jacket. Combat boots and leggings hiked just past her knees with her upper thighs left exposed. An external HD cable juts from a small input jack indented at the base of her neck.

Her pupils dilate, sifting through the visual noise of an embedded surveillance feed while combing the room below for suspicious movements. She detaches the cable at her subordinate’s signal, stands upright and removes her clothing. She leans over the edge of the building, a smirk streaking across her otherwise stoic expression. A rappel line heaves sharply, suspending her body directly adjacent to that of her target, who is now only a trigger pull from annihilation.

DARPA’s newest invention is the Gremlin: a drone that be deployed from a bomber while in flight, execute its mission, and then return to an extraction point where a cargo plane yanks it out of the sky and brings it safely home.

The drones are capable of flying unmanned, but being able to retrieve them makes them reusable, which is both cost-effective and convenient. But drone retrieval also protects U.S. military technology and secrets. Sending fleets of tiny Gremlins on intelligence-gathering missions is one thing, but being able to recapture them instead of leaving them in the hands of hostiles is a huge boon to the military. Gremlin drones have up to three hours to accomplish reconnaissance missions, at which time they automatically fly back to a retrieval area to be collected by a C-130 cargo plane.

Related: DARPA’s 130-foot submarine-hunting drone will take to the sea in April.

Continue reading “Now that drones have become a standard tool in our military arsenal, the next job is to make them more efficient and capable than ever before” »