Lifeboat Foundation

Developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies.

Northrop Grumman and Umbra have been awarded small contracts by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue to the second phase of a program designed to collect data from radar-equipped satellites flying in formation and develop innovative algorithms to process the data for military applications.

Umbra’s contract under the Distributed Radar Image Foundation Technology (DRIFT) program is for $6 million and will last for six months and Northrop Grumman’s is for $2 million and covers one year, a DARPA spokesperson said.

Join our newsletter to get the latest military space news every Tuesday by veteran defense journalist Sandra Erwin.

The demonstration is a key milestone in the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Defense Experimentation Using Commercial Space Internet, or DEUCSI — a program launched in 2018 to explore augmenting military communications by leveraging the growing commercial satellite internet industry.

DARPA just tested an autonomous tank that could help keep soldiers safe — and even more self-driving military vehicles are on the horizon. If autonomous vehicles prove capable enough for the battlefield, the tech could someday start finding its way over to civilian uses, too.

The challenge: Tanks have played an important role in the US military for more than 100 years, thanks to their tremendous firepower and armor, but every time the Army puts a soldier into a tank and sends them into combat, it’s putting their life at risk.

Continue reading “DARPA is testing this autonomous tank with glowing ‘eyes’” »

A solar geoengineering experiment in San Francisco could lead to brighter clouds that reflect sunlight. The risks are numerous.

By Corbin Hiar & E&E News

CLIMATEWIRE | The nation’s first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.

Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced it was retiring its hydraulic Atlas robot. Atlas has long been the standard bearer of advanced humanoid robots. Over the years, the company was known as much for its research robots as it was for slick viral videos of them working out in military fatigues, forming dance mobs, and doing parkour. Fittingly, the company put together a send-off video of Atlas’s greatest hits and blunders.

But there were clues this wasn’t really the end, not least of which was the specific inclusion of the word “hydraulic” and the last line of the video, “‘Til we meet again, Atlas.” It wasn’t a long hiatus. Today, the company released hydraulic Atlas’s successor—electric Atlas.

According to files accessed by journalist Jack Poulson, Microsoft presented OpenAI’s DALL-E as a tool to conduct Advanced Computer Vision Training of Battle Management Systems (BMS).

A BMS is a software suite that provides military leaders with an overview of a combat situation and helps them plan troop movements, artillery fire, and air strike targets. According to Microsoft’s presentation, the DALL-E tool could generate artificial images and train BMS to visualize the ground situation better and identify appropriate strike targets.

For the first time, an AI fighter pilot faced off against a human pilot in a “dogfight” using actual jets in the air — a huge milestone in autonomous flight and military automation.

“The X-62A team demonstrated that cutting-edge machine learning-based autonomy could be safely used to fly dynamic combat maneuvers,” said Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force. “The team accomplished this while complying with American norms for safe and ethical use of autonomous technology.”

Continue reading “Watch the first AI vs. human dogfight using military jets” »

Join our newsletter to get the latest military space news every Tuesday by veteran defense journalist Sandra Erwin.

This estimated $8 billion procurement, known as Evolved Strategic Satcom (ESS), will supplement and eventually replace the existing Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite constellation. The new system will provide critical jam-resistant communication channels for the National Command Authorities and deployed forces worldwide, even in the North Polar region – a capability lacking in the current system.