Jails fear UAV smuggling; France leads UAV smallsat launcher; Darpa aims for ubiquitous lidar; Roke takes cellular to high altitude; Airbus Perlan glider moves to new test phase.
Amid signs of growing U.S. Air Force and Navy interest in a sixth-generation combat aircraft, Northrop Grumman is accelerating studies of key technologies for directed energy weapons and thermal management, which it says will be fundamental to future capability.
PALMDALE -- Amid signs of growing U.S. Air Force and Navy interest in a sixth-generation combat aircraft, Northrop Grumman is accelerating studies of key technologies for directed energy weapons and thermal management, which it says will be fundamental to future capability.
As the U.S. Navy gets down to developing its future cruiser or large surface combatant, the service wants to design and build a ship that can be upgraded to face new threats in a way that does not mean ripping apart most of the ship, as it does with the current fleet.
Staffing of the International Space Station temporarily dropped from six to three people on Dec. 11, as NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko descended to Earth.
In the first live-fire intercept test of Aegis Ashore, contractor Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Navy and the Missile Defense Agency successfully destroyed a ballistic missile target at the Pacific Missile Range Facility.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar reiterated their countries’ strong bonds earlier this month during the minister’s visit to the Pentagon.
Congressional restrictions on U.S. space activities have left the European Space Agency in a better position to guide international space cooperation, ESA’s new director general says.
System-performance improvements should allow space-based ADS-B provider Aireon to offer ANSPs with both terrestrial and oceanic ADS-B surveillance capabilities.
Semiconductor technology that would eliminate bulky optical telescopes and enable lightweight, low-cost light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors for foliage penetration, collision avoidance, robotic vision and optical communications is to be developed under a new five-year, $58 million Darpa program.
Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, California, earlier this month hosted a live-fire test of the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA missile.
As the Pentagon gets ready to buy new submarines, bombers and missiles to support the U.S. nuclear strategy, the hunt for national funding continues to help cut costs of the SSBN boomer-submarine fleet.
Saab says it began testing a gallium-nitride fighter radar more than a year ago and has verified that the sensor is ready for production, although the complete system has not flown.
