Jared Isaacman made a small fortune training fighter pilots but his wealth soared this summer when he took his payments processing business public amid the pandemic.
#SpaceX just partnered with the U.S. military’s #Space Development Agency (SDA) to manufacture four new satellites that the Pentagon will use to detect and track missiles from space.
The $149 million contract is for four satellites, according to Reuters, which are scheduled to be delivered by the end of 2022. The actual #missile-tracking sensors will be developed by a separate subcontractor and attached to the #satellites later, but the military is hoping to piggyback on SpaceX’s recent success in ramping up satellite production for its #Starlink network.
It’s the first time SpaceX is building satellites for the military.
SpaceX is developing a new satellite bus for the Space Development Agency based on the Starlink design.
WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency awarded SpaceX a $149 million contract and L3Harris a $193.5 million contract to each build four satellites to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
The contracts announced Oct. 5 are for the first eight satellites of a potentially much larger Space Development Agency constellation of sensor satellites known as Tracking Layer Tranche 0. This is SpaceX’s first military contract to produce satellites.
The U.S. #military, like many others around the world, is investing significant time and resources into expanding its electronic #warfare capabilities across the board, for offensive and defensive purposes, in the air, at sea, on land, and even in space. Now, advances in #machinelearning and #artificialintelligence mean that electronic warfare systems, no matter what their specific function, may all benefit from a new underlying concept known as advanced “Cognitive Electronic Warfare,” or #Cognitive EW. The main goal is to be able to increasingly automate and otherwise speed up critical processes, from analyzing electronic intelligence to developing new electronic warfare measures and countermeasures, potentially in real-time and across large swathes of networked platforms.
The holy grail of this concept is electronic warfare systems that can spot new or otherwise unexpected threats and immediately begin adapting to them.
Cambodia has razed a US-funded defence facility on its southern coast, the deputy prime minister confirmed Sunday, the latest move in the ongoing controversial expansion of a strategically crucial naval base being developed with Chinese aid.
The Wall Street Journal reported last year on a secret draft deal allowing China to dock warships at the Ream naval base near the kingdom’s coastal city of Sihanoukville.
But Cambodia — awash in recent years with Chinese investments — has strenuously denied the report, although strongman premier Hun Sen has said aid from Beijing will fund the naval base’s development.
With increasingly sophisticated Russian submarines prowling the Atlantic, the U.S. Navy is working harder to keep track of what’s happening off the U.S. coast.
The Navy’s focus on anti-submarine warfare waned during the Middle East wars, but attention is shifting, underscored by Exercise Black Widow 2020 in the North Atlantic between September 12 and 18.
The deterioration of Russia’s navy in the decade after the Cold War “allowed a lot of folks to think that the homeland is a sanctuary from Russian forces,” Vice Adm. Daryl L. Caudle, commander of Naval Submarine Forces, told reporters on September 16.
“But it’s pretty well known now that our homeland is no longer a sanctuary, so we have to be prepared here to conduct high-end combat operations in local waters,” Caudle added.
Two DARPA-developed technologies – a novel decision aid for mission commanders and a rapid software integration tool – played a critical role in the recent Air Force demonstration of the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).
The Adapting Cross-domain Kill-webs (ACK) program and the System-of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems (STITCHES) were among a number of technologies employed in the Aug. 31 – Sep. 4 ABMS on-ramp demonstration, which involved attacks using live aircraft, ships, air defense batteries, and other assets.
ACK is developing a decision aid for mission commanders to assist them with rapidly identifying and selecting options for tasking – and re-tasking – assets within and across organizational boundaries. Specifically, ACK assists users with selecting sensors, effectors, and support elements across military domains (space, air, land, surface, subsurface, and cyber) that span the different military services to deliver desired effects on targets. Instead of limited, monolithic, pre-defined kill chains, these more disaggregated forces can be used to formulate adaptive “kill webs” based on all of the options available.
#DARPA is the US military department responsible for developing cutting edge technologies for use on the front line. Boasting an annual budget of billions and with some of the world’s smartest minds on its roster, DARPA is responsible for some of the world’s most exciting tech. And it has now emerged the secretive research arm is advancing brain-machine interface capable of allowing soldiers to telepathically control “active cyber defence systems” and “swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles”.
US MILITARY Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is preparing telepathic technology which some fear is capable of remotely controlling war machines with military minds.
