Lifeboat Foundation

F-22 Raptors from the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, intercepted a group of Russian aircraft in international airspace near Alaska Monday night.

In a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, NORAD said the Raptors intercepted a pair of Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers escorted by Su-35 fighters. NORAD said it also identified a Russian A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft supporting the other Russian planes that “loitered” in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone and came within 30 nautical miles of Alaska’s shore.

NORAD said that all Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and at no time entered U.S. or Canadian airspace.

Fusion power is the technology that is thirty years away, and always will be – according to skeptics at least. Despite its difficult transition into a reliable power source, the nuclear reactions that power the sun have a wide variety of uses in other fields. The most obvious is in weapons, where hydrogen bombs are to this day the most powerful weapons we have ever produced. But there’s another use case that is much less destructive and could prove much more interesting – space drives.

The concept fusion drive, called a direct fusion drive (or DFD) is in development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Scientists and Engineers there, led by Dr. Samuel Cohen, are currently working on the second iteration of it, known as the Princeton field reversed configuration-2 (PFRC-2). Eventually the system’s developers hope to launch it into space to test, and eventually become the primary drive system of spacecraft traveling throughout our solar system. There’s already one particularly interesting target in the outer solar system that is similar to Earth in many ways – Titan. Its liquid cycles and potential to harbor life have fascinated scientists since they first started collecting data on it.

Sun Tzu said all warfare is based on deception. Today, that means electronic deception.

The video could be the first visual evidence that China is actively testing an air-launched hypersonic weapon.

Article on the soldiers of the very near future. This is when Internet of Things is used for military purposes allowing better situational awareness.

ENVG-B is still being fielded across the force, but the Army is already developing a next-gen system, a set of augmented reality targeting goggles — a militarized Microsoft HoloLens — known as IVAS. The Army’s also developing an Adaptive Squad Architecture to ensure all the different technologies going on a soldier’s body are compatible.

“ENVG-B is a system of systems,” Lynn Bollengier of L3Harris Technologies said at this week’s annual Association of the US Army conference. These systems include integrated augmented reality aspects from the Nett Warrior tablet, as well as wireless interconnectivity with weapon sights.

Continue reading “Soldiers Become Another Node In DoD’s Internet Of Things: ENVG-B” »

6th Generation fighter planes are coming.

# airforce # military.

An article on Britain’s own Future Fighter program.

Britain has new data to help make crucial decisions as to its pathway to future air dominance and a healthy indigenous aerospace and defense sector.

Seven performers selected to pursue novel USV concepts and enabling technologies.

DARPA has awarded seven contracts for work on Phase 1 of the NOMARS program, which seeks to simultaneously explore two competing objectives related to unmanned surface vessels (USV) ship design: the maximization of seaframe performance when human constraints are removed; and achieving sufficient vessel maintenance and logistics functionality for long endurance operations with no human crew onboard. NOMARS aims to disrupt conventional naval architecture designs through creative trade space explorations that optimize useable onboard room considering a variety of constraints. This should pave the way for more capable, affordable small warships that can be procured and maintained in large numbers.

Autonomous Surface Vehicles, LLC, Gibbs & Cox Inc., and Serco Inc. received Phase 1 Track A awards, and will work toward developing novel NOMARS demonstrator conceptual designs. These awards will focus on maximizing vessel performance gain across new design criteria, with potential considerations to include: unusual hull forms, low freeboard, minimizing air-filled volumes, innovative materials, repurposing or eliminating “human space” exploring distributed system designs, and developing architectures optimized for depot-maintenance.

Continue reading “The No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) Program kicks off trade space analysis and conceptual design for long-endurance Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV)” »

Ogba Educational Clinic championing STEM Education and Artificial Intelligence in Africa.

Officials said SpaceX is working on rocket-based delivery of military supplies around the globe just days after the news that it’s developing missile-tracking satellites.