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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.

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

Under the agreement, Agile Space — based in Durango, Colorado — will supply the main engines, attitude control thrusters, propellant tanks, and other critical propulsion components for True Anomaly’s spacecraft.

WASHINGTON — Russia, as expected, vetoed April 24 a United Nations Security Council resolution crafted in response to reports that the country was developing a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.

Russia cast the only vote against the draft resolution that reaffirmed provisions in the Outer Space Treaty prohibiting the placement of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in space. Thirteen other members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution while China abstained. As a permanent member of the Security Council, though, Russia’s vote acted as a veto preventing adoption of the resolution.

Japan and the United States drafted the Security Council resolution, which they billed as the first devoted to outer space issues. The resolution directed members to uphold Article 4 of the Outer Space Treaty, which forbids countries from placing nuclear weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies. It also called on countries not to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction specifically designed to be placed in orbit.

Extract from the documentary “Singularity or Bust”.Pr. Hugo de Garis describes his view of a potential future warfare resulting from the conflict between pro…

Science And Technology For Emerging National Security Threats — Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. — Nonlinear Solutions LLC — Fmr. Director, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), United States Department of Defense.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. is Owner of Nonlinear Solutions LLC., an advisory group that provides strategic scientific and intelligence consulting services, with a focus on emerging science and technology trends, to clients in both the defense and intelligence communities.

Dr. Kirkpatrick recently retired from federal Senior Service in December 2023 and prior to his current responsibilities he answered to the Deputy Secretary of Defense to stand-up and lead the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO — https://www.aaro.mil/) in early 2022, leading the U.S. government’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.

Dr. Kirkpatrick attended University of Georgia as an undergraduate, to study physics, where he also did his Ph.D. work in nonlinear and nonequilibrium phonon dynamics of rare earth doped fluoride crystals, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at UGA.

Dr. Kirkpatrick began his career in Defense and Intelligence related science and technology immediately out of graduate school. After receiving his Ph.D. in Physics in 1995, he subsequently took a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, investigating laser-induced molecular vibrations of high explosives under an AFOSR program. In 1996, he was offered a National Research Council Fellowship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. investigating novel solid-state lasers for the Department of the Navy. In 1997, he was recruited by the Air Force Research Laboratory to build an Ultrafast Laser Physics Lab to investigate nonlinear optics, novel ultrafast spectroscopic methods, and nonlinear micro/nano-fabrication techniques for the Air Force.

In 2003, Dr. Kirkpatrick was offered a program manager position in the National Reconnaissance Office and converted to CIA in 2005. In 2007, he was assigned as Chief Technology Officer in a joint CIA-DIA program office, where he later became division chief as a DIA officer. In 2010 he was asked to serve as the space control portfolio manager for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Space and Intelligence, Office of the Secretary of Defense.

In 2012, Dr. Kirkpatrick returned to DIA and served as the Defense Intelligence Officer for Scientific and Technical Intelligence, serving as the Department of Defense’s counterpart to the National Intelligence Manager for Science and Technology until 2016. Towards the end of his tenure as DIO/S\&TI, Dr. Kirkpatrick served on special assignment to the Principal Deputy Director National Intelligence leading the Intelligence Community’s support to the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (now the National Space Defense Center).

From 2016 onwards, Dr. Kirkpatrick served in a variety of no-fail roles including Deputy Director of Intelligence, US Strategic Command; Director, National Security Strategy, National Security Council; Deputy Director of Intelligence and the DNI Representative for USSPACECOM. The USSPACECOM Intelligence Enterprise was the fifth organization he has been the IC lead for establishment, with AARO being the sixth “new start” he’s led.

In China, scientists say they’re developing technology that uses lasers to propel submarines nearly as fast as a jet engine.

As the South China Morning Post reports, engineers at the Harbin Engineering University in Heilongjiang province — where, notably, China’s first experimental submarine was developed — claim that the country’s military is close to achieving this colossal feat.

The idea behind the burgeoning technology is ingenious: lasers generate plasma underwater, which then creates a so-called “detonation wave” to propel a submarine vessel forward. As the SCMP notes, Japanese researchers first proposed this sort of laser propulsion methodology 20 years ago, and in China, scientists have been trying to figure out how to hack it for at least a decade.

I found this on NewsBreak: NASA accuses China of ‘hiding military projects’ in space as it warns of ‘extraordinary strides’

NASA administrator Bill Nelson has warned the US is in a space race with China and fears the East Asian powerhouse will land on the moon by the end of the decade.

The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were finalists for the 2023 Robert J. Collier Trophy, a formal acknowledgement of recent breakthroughs that have launched the machine-learning era within the aerospace industry. The teams worked together to test breakthrough executions in artificial intelligence algorithms using the X-62A VISTA aircraft as part of DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. In less than a calendar year the teams went from the initial installation of live AI agents into the X-62A’s systems, to demonstrating the first AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, otherwise known as a dogfight. In total, the team made over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights. Dogfighting is a highly complex scenario that the X-62A utilized to successfully prove using non-deterministic artificial intelligence safely is possible within aerospace.

“The X-62A is an incredible platform, not just for research and advancing the state of tests, but also for preparing the next generation of test leaders. When ensuring the capability in front of them is safe, efficient, effective and responsible, industry can look to the results of what the X-62A ACE team has done as a paradigm shift,” said Col. James Valpiani, commandant of the Test Pilot School.

“The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now. In 2023, the X-62A broke one of the most significant barriers in combat aviation. This is a transformational moment, all made possible by breakthrough accomplishments of the X-62A ACE team,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. Secretary Kendall will soon take flight in the X-62A VISTA to personally witness AI in a simulated combat environment during a forthcoming test flight at Edwards.

I found this on NewsBreak: The big idea: are we about to discover a new force of nature?

Intriguingly, both disciplines are grappling with unexplained results that could be pointing to the existence of a new force of nature. If such a new force were to be confirmed, the implications for our understanding of the universe, its history and makeup would be profound.

There are four forces that we already know about. Gravity governs the grandest scales, marshalling the planets in their orbits and shaping the evolution of the universe as a whole. Electromagnetic force gives rise to a vast range of phenomena, from the magnetic field of the Earth to radio waves, visible light and X-rays, while also holding atoms, molecules and, by extension, the physical world together. Deep within the atomic nucleus, two further forces emerge: the vice-like “strong force”, which binds atomic nuclei, and the “weak force”, which among other things causes radioactive decay and enables the nuclear reactions that power the sun and the stars.

Studying these forces has transformed our understanding of nature and generated revolutionary new technologies. Work on electromagnetism in the 19th century gave us the electric dynamo and radio broadcasts, the discovery of the strong and weak forces in the 1930s led to nuclear energy and atomic bombs, while understanding gravity has made it possible to put astronauts on the moon and to develop GPS satellites that can tell us our location anywhere on Earth to within a few metres. Uncovering a fifth force would be one hell of a prize.

Today is the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Venado” supercomputer, which was hinted at back in April 2021 when Nvidia announced its plans for its first datacenter-class Arm server CPU and which was talked about in some detail – but not really enough to suit our taste for speeds and feeds – back in May 2022 by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory where Venado is situated.

Now we can finally get more details on the Venado system and get a little more insight into how Los Alamos will put it to work, and more specifically, why a better balance of memory bandwidth and compute that depends upon it is perhaps more important to this lab than it is in other HPC centers of the world.

Los Alamos was founded back in 1943 as the home of the Manhattan Project that created the world’s first nuclear weapons. We did not have supercomputers back then, of course, but plenty of very complex calculations have always been done at Los Alamos; sometimes by hand, sometimes by tabulators from IBM that used punch cards to store and manipulate data – an early form of simulation. The first digital computer to do such calculations at Los Alamos was called MANIAC and was installed in 1952; it could perform 10,000 operations per second and ran Monte Carlo simulations, which use randomness to simulate what are actually deterministic processes.