In Pictures: Top Aerospace & Defense Stories, May. 15 2023

Credit: Thales Alenia Space/Briot.

The Italian Space Agency (ASI) awarded a contract worth about $255 million to a Thales Alenia Space-led consortium to design, develop and qualify a spacecraft for an in-orbit servicing demonstration mission that is targeted to launch in 2026.

Credit: Space Forge.

Space Forge has unveiled additional details about its unfolding, “origami” heat shield for its ForgeStar re-entry vehicle.

Credit: U.S. Air Force.

The U.S. Air Force has stood up a fourth aggressor squadron, comprising older, fourth-generation aircraft to allow other squadrons to focus on fifth-generation training.

Credit: Rhea Space Activity.

The U.S. Space Force has granted Rhea Space Activity a contract to study resurrecting the NASA Spitzer space telescope 186 million mi. away from Earth.

Credit: U.S. Air Force.

The Pentagon hopes to save $3.5 billion through its planned divestments of aircraft and ships across all services, according to a new congressionally mandated report on the impacts of its 2024 budget request.

Credit: U.S. Air Force.

The problem has defied easy solutions since the late Andrew Marshall, founder of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, formulated the concept of network-centric warfare in the early 1990s: How do you affordably connect weapon systems fielded over various decades to multiple warfighting domains with incompatible datalinks?

Credit: Tony Osborne/Aviation Week.

Germany’s army is to begin phasing out its Airbus Tiger attack helicopters beginning in 2031 after concluding that a planned upgrade program would be “highly risky,” officials say. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA has terminated efforts to place its small, propulsively challenged Lunar Flashlight mission spacecraft into a backup orbit around the Earth.