Lifeboat Foundation

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.

I didn’t realize there was a moon-landing Bible verse until my pastor mentioned it a few weeks ago.

It seems that while returning from the historic first landing on the moon 50 years ago, astronaut Buzz Aldrin took part in a TV broadcast the night before splashing down. During the broadcast, the second man to set foot on the moon’s surface read Psalms 8:3–4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest him?”

It turns out Aldrin’s religious faith is not an anomaly. In fact, the 29 astronauts who visited the moon during the Apollo program were a generally religious cohort. According to NASA, 23 were Protestant and six Catholic, with a high proportion of them serving as church leaders in their congregations.

The bad news is that this space rock is between 38 and 86 metres across, according to NASA — that’s about the size of three double-decker buses.

The good news is that it should swing past our home planet (Earth) with no chance of a direct hit.

It will be travelling at a mind-blowing 10.88 kilometers per second which is around 40,000 kilometres per hour.

This week:
👩‍🚀 Three space travelers prepare for an upcoming mission
🚀 8,000 pounds of cargo & research launch to our orbiting lab
📊 A call to use open data to address real-world problems

For these stories and more, watch: https://go.nasa.gov/2SkdkRw

Amazing new Mars panorama from Curiosity For 10 Years NASA Has Been Capturing Images of Mars and They Now Reveal the Planet’s Amazing Beauty.

But they’re real. And they’re spectacular.

“What we have here is a potential space drive,” Laithwaite said. “Properly developed, this would take you to the outer universe on a spoonful of uranium.”

The updates don’t come every spring and fall, but space operating systems keep evolving.