Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk’s giant rocket is getting a bizarrely-shaped tower.

WASHINGTON — L3Harris has been awarded a 10-year $1.2 billion contract by the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center to maintain and modernize the military’s network of space surveillance sensors.

The award is for a new program named MOSSAIC, short for maintenance of space situational awareness integrated capabilities. The selection of L3Harris was announced Feb. 25 on the beta. SAM.gov federal contracting opportunities website.

MOSSAIC replaces a previous contract that Harris (before it merged with L3) had held since 2002 to maintain the Air Force’s network of telescopes — known as the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System — that track objects in geostationary orbits. Now under control of the U.S. Space Force are three GEODSS sites — on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean; at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; and in Maui, Hawaii.

Elon Musk also shared some thoughts on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Dyson helped create modern particle physics, criticized nuclear weapons tests, and imagined how civilizations could take to the stars.

Circa 2008

Okay, so no one has quite perfected laser weapons yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t at least think about possible defenses. Naval researchers are looking at materials that could deflect high-powered lasers, reports Discovery:

“If you have a ship being hit by a laser, and it was made of this metamaterial, you could reflect the laser beam,” said Simin Feng, one of the study co-authors and a researcher at China Lake.

Continue reading “Researchers Work to Laser-Proof Ships” »

Freeman Dyson, renowned scientist and scholar, has died at 96, according to his daughter Mia.

The British-born scientist and professor emeritus spent much of his career as a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, according to his biography on the institute’s website. He was among 29 scientists who supported the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. In 1967, he also acted as a military adviser regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War, and in 1984 he wrote a book on the dangers of nuclear warfare.

A futurist and space-enthusiast, Dyson had several scientific concepts named after him, including the “Dyson Tree,” a genetically engineered plant that would be able to survive in a comet and grow in space. One of his ideas, the Dyson Sphere, was featured in an episode of the sci-fi series Star Trek.

Two former top special operations officials say their job was too junior and the Pentagon isn’t taking information warfare seriously enough.

Despite shifting military budgets to better keep up with competitors, there’s one area where countries like China, Russia, and even Iran are proving nimble and frustrating for the Department of Defense: influence operations.

In this new age of information warfare, the military art of influence ops — otherwise sometimes called psychological ops, information ops, or most-recently, military information support ops — lacks the senior level leadership it deserves, say two former Pentagon officials who were in charge of special operations policies. According to them, the position they once held is too junior for the seriousness of the threat and mission, and influence ops is spread so wide, that nobody is sure who is really in charge.

Can you trust them?

The Defense Department announced five ethical principles it plans to live by as it develops and uses artificial intelligence.

Handicaps: weak private sector, Soviet-style bureaucracy. Helps: Great STEM education — and history.

More than Western governments and even more than China’s, the Russian government is trying to position itself as a facilitator of innovation in artificial intelligence, the technology that Vladimir Putin said will lead whoever masters it to global advantage. Russia seeks “to go our own way,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, borrowing Lenin’s 1917 words about various anti-capitalist ideologies to describe his government’s 21st-century attempt to shake the world.

Those who doubt that this uniquely state-heavy approach can succeed would do well to remember that today’s internet and mobile telecommunications grew out of Pentagon-funded research, that the Soviet Union led the Space Race for a decade, and that U.S. astronauts currently ascend to orbit atop Russian rockets.