Cosmic Log
Reuters reports that Canadian officials have decided to cancel an order of 18 Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet jets, marking an escalation in the trade battle involving Canadian jet maker Bombardier’s sales to U.S. markets. Unnamed officials are quoted as saying that the decision will be announced next week, and that Canada’s armed forces will buy used Australian F/A-18 Hornets instead.
As if the mere phrase “killer robots” weren’t scary enough, AI researchers and policy advocates have put together a video that combines present-tense AI and drone technologies with future-tense nightmares.
The disturbing seven-minute movie is being released to coincide with a pitch being made on Nov. 13 in Geneva during talks relating to the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or CCW.
Diplomats will be discussing the prospects for a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons, and an advocacy group known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is pressing for quick action. The campaign’s video is meant to show how quickly the threat could move from TED talks to mass killings.
After more than a week of delays, the National Reconnaissance Office was glad to see its latest spy satellite go into orbit on Oct. 15 — and so was Kirkland, Wash.-based Systima Technologies.
When a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket launched the NROL-52 satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Systima’s pyrotechnic valves played a mission-critical role as part of the reaction control system on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
“This marks the first flight of Systima’s pyrovalves, RCS hardware, as well as the first time Systima has supported an Atlas 5 launch,” Taylor Banks, Systima’s controller and contracts manager, told GeekWire in an email. “Systima is thrilled to be part of the ULA team and would like to congratulate all that supported the successful mission.”
Northrop Grumman’s purchase of Orbital ATK for $7.8 billion will create a company involved in projects ranging from America’s next stealth bomber and ballistic missile system to the International Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope.
The deal, previewed in news reports over the weekend and announced today, is part of a trend toward greater consolidation in the defense and aerospace industry.
Virginia-based Orbital ATK itself was part of that trend back in 2014, when it was formed through the merger of Orbital Sciences Corp. and Alliant Techsystems’ aerospace and defense groups. More recently, United Technologies announced its $30 billion acquisition of Rockwell Collins, including the combination of the companies’ aerospace operations to create a new business unit.
President Donald Trump was stretching the truth when he claimed that he trimmed a billion dollars from the cost of procuring the next two Air Force One planes, but a report on Defense One reveals that significant savings are indeed being made – primarily by cutting back on features that are on the existing Air Force One planes.
According to today’s report, there’s at least one capability on the current Boeing 747-200B jets that the Boeing 747-8 planes acquired last month won’t be able to match: aerial refueling.
Air Force sources told Defense One that the current aircraft, which entered presidential service in 1990, have never used that capability. And thanks to an expanded range of nearly 9,000 statute miles, as opposed to the current range of 7,750 miles, the new planes should be able to manage without an in-flight fill-up.
Going without the aerial refueling was just one of the cost-cutting measures that came out of Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s December meeting with Trump and the follow-up talks between Boeing and the Pentagon, Defense One reported.
SpaceX launched the Air Force’s X-37B robotic space plane on its latest months-long, classified mission today – marking another first for the company, with an oncoming hurricane adding to the pressure.
Evacuations in advance of Hurricane Irma’s Florida landfall have already begun, but SpaceX managed to get its Falcon 9 rocket launched, and its first-stage booster landed, at the end of a smooth countdown.
“Everything proceeded nominally,” SpaceX launch commentator Michael Hammersley said. “Weather was looking potentially a bit tricky with those clouds, but ended up being a ‘go.’”
The Falcon 9 rose from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10 a.m. ET (7 a.m. PT), sending the X-37B spaceward for the fifth mission of the test program. The four earlier launches were executed using United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket.
In a tweet, Gen. Jay Raymond, who heads the Air Force Space Command, said the launch was a success.
BlackSky, a division of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries, has been awarded a two-year, $16.4 million cost-plus prime contract with the Air Force Research Laboratoryto deliver a cloud-based platform that can provide geospatial intelligence to government agencies.
The platform will provide on-demand analytics, collection and information services from global data sources, including satellite imagery, Spaceflight Industries said today in a news release.
Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, played host to Defense Secretary James Mattis today during the Pentagon chief’s swing through high-tech hot spots (and military facilities) on the West Coast.
“A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today,” Bezos wrote in a tweet.
The subject of the Pentagon chief’s chat with the world’s third-richest person wasn’t disclosed, but one of the reasons for this week’s Western trip was to meet with tech leaders. In addition to Amazon, Mattis is due to visit Google’s main campus as well as Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, or DIUx, both in Silicon Valley.
Stratolaunch, the six-year-old space venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it’ll use the world’s biggest airplane to launch small satellites into orbit – but what kind of satellites?
The company’s executives have always said the Pentagon could be a payload customer, but when Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson visited Stratolaunch’s super-hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on July 17, it threw a spotlight on how important military contracts could be.
Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality system is scoring victories with the U.S. military, which means the goggle-eyed headsets are more likely to pop up at a wargame near you.
Last November, the HoloLens system was incorporated into a platform known as the Augmented Immersive Team Trainer, which lets Marines plan missions and conduct “what-if” simulations while looking at a real or virtual terrain.
The experiment, conducted during training exercises at Camp Lejeune, N.C., worked so well that the Marines are now distributing HoloLens kits to 24 infantry battalions around the country.