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Category: government – Page 77

A flurry of upgrades is on the horizon.

The conference version of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 shows that the U.S. Congress wants new engines to be installed in the current and future F-35 aircraft starting from 2027, Air Force Magazine reported.

We had earlier reported that the U.S. military would be required to look into re-engining its F-35s towards the end of this decade. The F-16s and A-10C Thunderbolts are close to the end of their lifetimes which means that the bulk of the workload for the U.S. military will fall on F-35s’ shoulders. Under the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), the U.S. Air Force has already begun work to develop engines that can deliver more power or range as required.

According to the Air Force Magazine, Congress has sought details of the acquisition strategy and fiscal considerations that the Air Force will apply in its plan to re-engine its F-35As. We had reported that the development cost of the AETP is likely going to be too high for the Air Force to bear alone. However, the U.S. Navy uses a different configuration of the F-35s, where the AETP cannot be deployed in its present form.

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Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0,” where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.

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“The industry will see normalization and balance by the middle of 2022, with a potential for overcapacity in 2023 as larger scale capacity expansions begin to come online towards the end of 2022,” the research firm predicts.

Indeed, major semiconductor makers—including Intel, TSMC and Samsung—have all boosted investment in expanding chip capacity amid the current shortage. At the same time, the US government wants to spur more domestic chip manufacturing with billions in potential funding.

The big question is which sectors will see the semiconductor supplies improve to the point of overcapacity. Current shortage have ensnared a wide range of products, including PCs, graphics cards, video game consoles, in addition to cars, smartphones, and smart home devices.

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While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.

The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now.

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Security experts around the world raced Friday to patch one of the worst computer vulnerabilities discovered in years, a critical flaw in open-source code widely used across industry and government in cloud services and enterprise software.

“I’d be hard-pressed to think of a company that’s not at risk,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Cloudflare, whose online infrastructure protects websites from malicious actors. Untold millions of servers have it installed, and experts said the fallout would not be known for several days.

New Zealand’s computer emergency response team was among the first to report that the flaw in a Java-language utility for Apache servers used to log user activity was being “actively exploited in the wild” just hours after it was publicly reported Thursday and a patch released.

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Car sharing should become the norm to end “20th-century thinking” that values private vehicle ownership, as part of the drive to cut carbon emissions, a government minister has said.

Trudy Harrison, a junior transport minister, said the transport system would soon be designed around “access to services rather than what you own”.

She said the UK was “reaching a tipping point where shared mobility in the form of car clubs, scooters and bike shares will soon be a realistic option for many of us to get around.”

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The South African satellite, SumbandilaSat (Pathfinder in Venda) is reaching the end of its life and will deorbit on Friday 10 December 2021.

The satellite was launched in 2009 and took a total of 1,128 high-resolution, usable images. In addition, these imageries were applied in local research and on the Copernicus (previously GMES: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. The data also contributed towards disaster management such as flood monitoring in Namibia and fire campaigns in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Furthermore, it also recorded timely images of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tuscaloosa tornado in the USA.

In May 2005, the then DST (Department of Science and Technology) of the South African Government commissioned Stellenbosch University and SunSpace to develop the ZASat pathfinder satellite program (later renamed SumbandilaSat), a technology demonstrator in conjunction with the South African industry. Consequently, SumbandilaSat was delivered 15 months later and launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on September 17 2009 with monitoring and satellite support from the SANSA Space Operations facility in Hartebeesthoek.

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And it can go faster than five times the speed of sound.

A team of researchers in China has built and tested a prototype hypersonic flight engine based on a design that was scrapped by NASA over 20 years ago, according to a report from the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The prototype itself might not lead to a production version of hypersonic aircraft. Still, in a paper in the Journal of Propulsion Technology, the team behind the machine said “understanding its work mechanism can provide important guidance to hypersonic plane and engine development.”

NASA’s scrapped X-47C program is revived The original design was proposed by Ming Han Tang, a former chief engineer of NASA’s hypersonic program in the late 1990s. Tang’s Two-Stage Vehicle (TSV) X-plane design was at the center of the Boeing Manta X-47C program. However, before the program could verify the viability of the design, it was terminated by the U.S. government due to its high costs as well as a series of technical issues.

Continue reading “China’s New Hypersonic Aircraft Is Based on a Rejected NASA Design” | >