India has become the fourth country to successfully flight test hypersonic technology, joining an elite club alongside the US, Russia and China with the ability to develop missiles that can travel several times faster than the speed of sound.
Defence ministry says demonstration vehicle with scramjet engine reached an altitude of 30km and six times the speed of sound.
The DR7 is designed to be a personal commuter aircraft. So far, a 1/3 scale full composite proof-of-concept aircraft has been tested successfully. In order to minimize the propeller hazards, the rotors have been enclosed. They are tilted downwards for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) launches and landings. They tilt horizontally to go forward. And all of this fits into a regular car garage.
http://www.deloreanaerospace.com/
Short of the revolutionary Burt Rotan wild aircraft designs, airplanes have changed little over the past decades. Winged-cylinder with a propulsion system is how we travel through the air. Unless you have the astronomical budget the military enjoys to design hypersonic aircraft, not for the general public, the choice is simple — airplanes or helicopters. DeLorean Aerospace just announced that its DR7 should fly by the end of 2018. That would shake things up, but is it practical, viable, for real?
In the 1980s, the DeLorean Motors Corporation gave us a break from the ho-hum cars sold everywhere by offering an aesthetically pleasing aerodynamic car. Eventually, DeLorean Aerospace picked up where its four-wheel parent left off, with a uniquely designed aircraft, the DR7. Although the name more or less gives it away, the company was founded in 2012 by Paul DeLorean, John DeLorean’s nephew. The mission was to develop a flying car.
Israeli VTOL air taxi developer Urban Aeronautics has announced it’s partnering with HyPoint to develop a long range, hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered, emissions-free version of its remarkable CityHawk aircraft, based on the military Cormorant/AirMule design.
HyPoint’s “turbo air-cooled” fuel cell design radically expands the power and lifespan of traditional designs, making it an ideal lightweight powertrain component for aviation use. Hydrogen is becoming one of the most exciting technologies in the emerging electric aviation market, with exceptional energy density compared to lithium batteries, as well as super-quick refueling as compared to long waits on a battery charger.
The CityHawk airframe looks like no other design in the eVTOL air taxi market. It has no wings or external propeller arms, and isn’t much bigger than a large SUV. Urban Aeronautics calls it a “fancraft,” after the large fans at the front and rear of the aircraft, totally shielded thanks to tiltable vanes at both the inlet and outlet sides, which can be moved to effect yaw and horizontal movements. For such a tiny ground footprint, it offers an impressive capability to seat six people.
Defense advanced research projects agency — DARPA.
DARPA and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) today announced successful completion of captive carry tests of two variants of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) and are ready to proceed to first free-flight testing within the calendar year. The joint Agency and Service effort seeks to develop and demonstrate critical technologies to enable an effective and affordable air-launched hypersonic cruise missile.
HAWC performers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies have each tested advanced air vehicle configurations that promise to achieve and sustain efficient hypersonic flight. Their upcoming flight tests will focus on hydrocarbon scramjet-powered propulsion and thermal management techniques to enable prolonged hypersonic cruise, in addition to affordable system designs and manufacturing approaches.
“Completing the captive carry series of tests demonstrates both HAWC designs are ready for free flight,” said Andrew “Tippy” Knoedler, HAWC program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “These tests provide us a large measure of confidence – already well informed by years of simulation and wind tunnel work – that gives us faith the unique design path we embarked on will provide unmatched capability to U.S. forces.”
In October 1961, the Soviet Union dropped the most powerful nuclear bomb in history over a remote island north of the Arctic Circle.
Though the bomb detonated nearly 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above ground, the resulting shockwave stripped the island as bare and flat as a skating rink.
Onlookers saw the flash more than 600 miles (965 km) away, and felt its incredible heat within 160 miles (250 km) of Ground Zero. The bomb’s gargantuan mushroom cloud climbed to just below the edge of space.
Sarcos Robotics, a startup developing robots for industrial and defense applications, today nabbed $40 million in equity financing, bringing its total venture capital raised to nearly $100 million. The company plans to use the capital to commercialize its first full-body, self-powered product — the Guardian XO — ahead of an anticipated 2021 ship date.
According to a 2020 Grand View Research report, the exoskeleton market could be worth $4.2 billion by 2027. The firm sees adoption growing steeply in health care, where exoskeletons could address the increased prevalence of spinal cord injuries in industries like security, disaster recovery, infrastructure inspection and maintenance, maritime, oil and gas, and mining. The National SCI Statistical Center reported 17,730 new spinal cord injuries in 2019 in the U.S. alone.
Sarcos spun out from the University of Utah in 1983 and for years operated as a bioengineering research institution. By 2000, the lab had expanded into segments like animated film props, prostheses, and human-computer interfaces. A DARPA grant to develop a military exoskeleton steered Sarcos toward defense applications. After DARPA accepted Sarcos’ proposal in 2006, the company began developing prototypes and contracted with the U.S. Navy to pilot salvage robots.
Adapting the Intelligence Community
As machines become the primary collectors, analysts, consumers, and targets of intelligence, the entire U.S. intelligence community will need to evolve. This evolution must start with enormous investments in AI and autonomization technology as well as changes to concepts of operations that enable agencies to both process huge volumes of data and channel the resulting intelligence directly to autonomous machines. As practically everything becomes connected via networks that produce some form of electromagnetic signature or data, signals intelligence in particular will need to be a locus of AI evolution. So will geospatial intelligence. As satellites and other sensors proliferate, everything on earth will soon be visible at all times from above, a state that the federal research and development center Aerospace has called the “GEOINT Singularity.” To keep up with all this data, geospatial intelligence, like signals intelligence, will need to radically enhance its AI capabilities.
The U.S. intelligence community is currently split up into different functions that collect and analyze discrete types of intelligence, such as signals or geospatial intelligence. The RIA may force the intelligence community to reassess whether these divisions still make sense. Electromagnetic information is electromagnetic information, whether it comes from a satellite or an Internet of Things device. The distinction in origin matters little if no human ever looks at the raw data, and an AI system can recognize patterns in all of the data at once. The division between civilian and military intelligence will be similarly eroded, since civilian infrastructure, such as telecommunications systems, will be just as valuable to military objectives as military communications systems. Given these realities, separating intelligence functions may impede rather than aid intelligence operations.
The Defense Department expects to stand up its first battalion of Stryker vehicles outfitted with high-powered laser weapons by some time next year, Army officials say.
“Expect to have the first battalion fielded in 2021 with four battalions by 2023,” U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command chief Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler told the audience at the virtual Space Missile Defense symposium on Tuesday.
The so-called “laser battalion,” as Defense One described it, would eventually deploy the new 50 kw Directed Energy-Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE-MSHORAD) Stryker that the Army is working to field by 2022, a ten-fold power increase over the 5 kw-class system that artillery soldiers have been testing in Germany since early 2018.