DARPA’s Robots

After completing testing, the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) payload resides in the cryogenic thermal vacuum chamber at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Naval Center for Space Technology in Washington, D.C. Oct. 8, 2024. Once on-orbit, the RSGS payload will inspect and service satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Sarah Peterson





The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and DARPA have developed a robotic payload capable of servicing satellites in orbit.

This payload, designed to perform repairs and upgrades, promises to revolutionize satellite operations by enhancing longevity and reducing costs associated with satellite servicing. With successful thermal vacuum testing and a partnership with Northrop Grumman, the project is poised for a 2026 launch, setting the stage for a new era of resilient and adaptable space infrastructure.

Transforming Space Operations: NRL and DARPA’s Robotic Revolution
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST), in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has successfully completed the development of a spaceflight-qualified robotics suite designed to service satellites in orbit. The milestone was achieved on October 8.       READ MORE...

TWELVE TON Electric Robot Tank

The official YouTube channel for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled a new phase of testing of its 12-ton autonomous RACER Heavy Platform (RHP) diesel hybrid. 

The new testing included an autonomous route, which was tested for mobility and demonstration, including sensor point cloud visualizations.

The agile and fast tank utilizes the Textron M5 base platform, which was previously developed and used in US Army campaigns of learning for robotic combat vehicle requirements and acquisition. 

The fourth experiment of RACER was performed by teams from the University of Washington and from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). DARPA remarked that RACER is on track to continue its autonomy development and experiment spirals with a new round of testing roughly every six months.     READ MORE...

Pentagon's Secretive Tech Agency

I

n 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below.

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) 

The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network.

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?
The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?
Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM.  READ MORE...

THe Reality of Wireless Energy

DARPA plans to create wireless energy transfer infrastructure to supply near-uninterruptable power to U.S. military bases worldwide. The plan, as reported by Popular Mechanics, is to use laser technology to beam electricity around the planet. Famously a dream of Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago, if successful, this technology, called fittingly enough POWER ("Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay"), would make the U.S. military less reliant on liquid fuel like diesel and vulnerable power lines, which can be intercepted or sabotaged by enemy forces.

“First of all, the environment has changed, and the need for more resilient energy transport methods for military operations is at a premium,” explained Col. Paul “Promo” Calhoun to Popular Mechanics in an exclusive interview. American forces operate globally like the special operations units he resupplied as a C-17 cargo pilot, from outposts in the South China Sea to the Iraqi desert. Since there is no simple way to power them, many forces use their radars, anti-drone microwave weapons, lasers, or other energy-intensive equipment. And with each passing year, the severity of the issue increases.

“On the technology side, significant advancements have been made in high-energy lasers, wavefront sensing, adaptive optics, high-altitude electric air platforms, safety interlocks, and narrow-bandgap-tuned high-efficiency photovoltaics,” Col. Calhoun explains.

“POWER is an optical power beaming program,” Calhoun says. “There are other potential power-beaming modalities, such as microwaves, that we intend to explore in future programs. For POWER, the propagating wave is a laser [that] provides long-range high-throughput capability when transmitted at high altitudes. The relays redirect the laser energy without conversion, and then the end-user converts that laser energy back into electricity using narrow-bandgap-tuned monochromatic photovoltaics,” he added.  READ MORE...

An Aviation Milestone

An artificial intelligence algorithm developed by DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program flew a modified F-16 fighter jet for over 17 hours in December, officials announced this week.

The jet, a Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft (VISTA), took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California, marking the first time that artificial intelligence has been used to fly a tactical aircraft.

"We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities," Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan "Hal" Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, said in a statement.

"We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live."


US AIR FORCE'S NEW F-15EX BREAKS KEY RECORD AS THREATS AGAINST AMERICA GROW


VISTA was developed by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and the Calspan Corporation for the U.S. Air Force's Test Pilot School.  READ MORE...

Nuclear Powered Spacecraft by 2027

The top official at the United States space agency NASA has said the country plans to test a spacecraft engine powered with nuclear fission by 2027, an advancement seen as key to long-haul missions including a manned journey to Mars.

NASA will partner with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it into space, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said on Tuesday. The project has been named the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislpaunar Operations or DRACO.

“With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever – a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” Nelson said in a statement.

The announcement comes amid a new nuclear space race between the US, Russia and China, with the three superpowers working to expand their extraterrestrial nuclear capabilities, including for use propelling spacecraft and powering colonies on the moon.  READ MORE...

Hypersonic Missile

The U.S.'s ability to counter emerging hypersonic threats has completed a major milestone as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Phase 2 of the Glide Breaker Program.

Among its other projects, DARPA is also focusing on the development of the hypersonic missiles which are currently under flight testing. 

However, with adversarial countries such as Russia and North Korea having tested their versions of hypersonic missiles, the U.S. also needs to develop systems that can counter these missiles if they were ever fired toward U.S. territory.

How does one counter hypersonic missiles?

To understand how a hypersonic missile can be countered, one needs to understand how the hypersonic missile works. There are two major hypersonic missiles: a cruise missile and a hypersonic boost-glide missile. 

While the former works like any other cruise missile but at hypersonic speeds, the latter is relatively easier to work with.  READ MORE...

Top ArticlesREAD MOREHumans will soon mine outer space. But we need toreach key goals to make it happen

A Real Life Warp Drive

A team of physicists has reported the accidental discovery of a real-world "warp bubble" whilst observing the structure of Casimir cavities – a small step towards building a potential warp drive.

The Debrief reports that Dr. Harold G. "Sonny" White and his team stumbled upon the existence of a warp bubble whilst conducting DARPA-funded research into Casimir cavities and the energy density present in those structures. White acknowledged the significance of the fluke findings but asserted that it was only a small step forward in regards to actually building a warp drive.

"Our detailed numerical analysis of our custom Casimir cavities helped us identify a real and manufacturable nano/microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble, not an analog, but the real thing," White explained in a statement to the publication.

He emphasized that the findings recorded by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team centered around "a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble" as opposed to a warp bubble analog, and confirmed that the structure "predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric," hence the significance of the observation.

IGN previously referred to the Alcubierre metric and the possibility of warp drives becoming a reality, as Space.com noted that "a concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre; however, subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy."  READ MORE...

A Warp Bubble is Made

A properly constructed Alcubierre warp bubble. As space constricts in front of the vessel and expands behind, the ship is theoretically pushed forward at speeds faster than light.   Image: LSI, White, et al.

Space is vast. Really, really vast. So vast, in fact, that it would take Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object from earth, more than 73 millenia to reach the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, at its current speed of over 38,000 mph, if it were headed that way to begin with. In short, if we're ever going to find a way to explore beyond our own solar system, we need to find a way to bend the laws of physics to make faster-than-light travel possible.

A team of scientists working with DARPA, including warp drive pioneer Dr. Harold G "Sonny" White, may have just taken us one step closer to that reality with the announcement that they've discovered a space-warping bubble, the fundamental thing needed for the faster-than-light travel of the Star Trek universe.

Before we jump ahead to romantic visions of space travel, Dr. White said, we need to think about what we could do with a microscale warp bubble, like the one his team discovered, before even dreaming of what it could be in the future. Dr. White is passionate about space travel, but says we need to start simple. "there may be lots of other things along the way before we ever get there that could have some really interesting implications," he said.

What is a warp bubble?

This is a pretty complicated notion that involves a ton of math, but at its most basic level, a warp bubble is a bit of space that's contracted in the front and expanded in the back. The contraction/expansion theoretically pushes the bubble, and its contents, forward at speeds surpassing the speed of light without ever violating the laws of physics: You're not technically traveling faster than light, you're surfing a bubble of condensed space.  READ MORE...