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Category: government – Page 17

Aerospacelab opens doors to first US satellite manufacturing facility

TAMPA, Fla. — European small satellite maker Aerospacelab announced the opening of its first manufacturing facility in the United States Sept. 5 amid efforts to break into the lucrative U.S. government market.

The company sees the potential for contracts that would enable the 3,300 square-meter facility in Torrance, California, to reach a capacity to produce an average of two satellites a week in a single shift.

“With Space Force recently announcing its plans for not only a commercialization strategy, but [also the Space Development Agency] signaling their desire to diversify their supply base, we see potential not only for U.S. commercial customers,” said Tina Ghataore, group chief strategy and revenue officer at Aerospacelab and its CEO for North America.

Elytra Mission 1

This team is on a roll.

Launching aboard Firefly’s Alpha vehicle in 2024, this mission will demonstrate the responsive on-orbit capabilities of our Elytra vehicle. As the first of many missions utilizing multiple Firefly vehicles, the demonstration will lay the groundwork for Firefly’s end-to-end mission solutions, proving our capabilities to rapidly launch, maneuver, and deploy satellites at a time and place of our customers’ choosing.

In support of Xtenti’s follow-on study contract with the NRO, the mission will demonstrate a rapid payload reconfiguration utilizing Xtenti’s FANTM-RiDE payload dispenser prior to launching on Firefly’s Alpha vehicle. Upon launching on Alpha, Firefly’s Elytra vehicle will utilize the FANTM-RiDE dispenser to first deploy commercial rideshare payloads in Sun-Synchronous Orbit, and then perform an on-orbit maneuver and stand ready to deploy U.S. government payloads on-demand.

These important demonstrations will further advance our nation’s responsive space capabilities.

Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees

A real stinker.

The trial, conducted by Amazon Web Services, was commissioned by the government regulator as a proof of concept for generative AI’s capabilities, and in particular its potential to be used in business settings.

That potential, the trial found, is not looking promising.

In a series of blind assessments, the generative AI summaries of real government documents scored a dire 47 percent on aggregate based on the trial’s rubric, and were decisively outdone by the human-made summaries, which scored 81 percent.

NASA and ISS National Lab Collaborate on $4M Grant for Space-Based Disease Research

“Space-based research has a long history of contributing to advancements on Earth,” said Dr. Lisa Carnell.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been a beacon of scientific and medical research ever since the station’s first module was launched in 1999, as astronauts continue to push the boundaries regarding microgravity research that has contributed to advancing science and medical knowledge back on Earth. To continue this, NASA and the ISS National Laboratory recently announced a partnership through the ISS National Lab Research Announcement (NLRA) 2024-09: Igniting Innovation: Science in Space to Cure Disease on Earth that will provide up to $4 million with the goal of helping to advance disease diagnosis and treatment back on Earth.

Through collaboration between government agencies, industry, and academia, the NLRA hopes to accomplish several objectives pertaining to developing medical technologies on Earth, including disease mechanism models, population and disease diversity, drug discovery & development, drug delivery, and drug resistance. This announcement comes after the ISS National Laboratory announced in July 2024 that five projects were selected for the Cancer Research in Space for Life on Earth with the goal of providing $7 million in grants to advance cancer research in microgravity onboard the ISS.

Honeywell to continue sustaining radiation-hardened circuit manufacturing capability for space applications

The services are necessary to maintain a domestic trusted source for strategic radiation-hardened microelectronics to meet the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) certification to Congress, as stipulated by the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act Section 1,670, DOD officials say.

Radiation-hardened microelectronics components are necessary for manned and unmanned spacecraft operating on long-duration orbital missions in high-radiation space environments like geosynchronous orbits.

This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death.

His idea?

Scholz is still skeptical though. “A new brain is not going to be a popular item,” he says. “The surgical element of it is going to be very severe, no matter how you slice it.”

Now, though, Hébert’s ideas appear to have gotten a huge endorsement from the US government. Hébert told MIT Technology Review that he had proposed a $110 million project to ARPA-H to prove his ideas in monkeys and other animals, and that the government “didn’t blink” at the figure.

ARPA-H confirmed this week that it had hired Hébert as a program manager.

Japan will launch DARPA-esque research institute for cyberwarfare

Japanese officials on Monday announced the opening of a new government-run defense research institute this fall, as reported by the Kyodo News agency.

The agency, which will be tasked with developing innovative cyber war technologies, said the new project is directly modeled after DARPA, the US Defense Department’s research agency – responsible for some of the world’s most cutting-edge defense technologies.

Japan’s Ministry of Defense (MOD) said the Tokyo-based facility will officially launch in October with about 100 personnel – with about half coming from the private sector – using “novel approaches and methods” taken from DARPA initiatives.

EastWind Attack Deploys PlugY and GrewApacha Backdoors Using Booby-Trapped LNK Files

The Russian government and IT organizations are the target of a new campaign that delivers a number of backdoors and trojans as part of a spear-phishing campaign codenamed EastWind.

The attack chains are characterized by the use of RAR archive attachments containing a Windows shortcut (LNK) file that, upon opening, activates the infection sequence, culminating in the deployment of malware such as GrewApacha, an updated version of the CloudSorcerer backdoor, and a previously undocumented implant dubbed PlugY.

PlugY is “downloaded through the CloudSorcerer backdoor, has an extensive set of commands and supports three different protocols for communicating with the command-and-control server,” Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said.

Weapons startup Anduril hits $14-billion valuation, plans huge new facility

Defense technology startup Anduril Industries Inc. has raised $1.5 billion in a new funding round and plans to spend hundreds of millions on a new facility to manufacture its rockets, underwater vehicles and other autonomous weapons systems at greater scale and speed.

The deal, which values Anduril at $14 billion, is one of the largest venture capital financings of the year so far, and reflects the company’s success getting government contracts, as well as rising investor enthusiasm for defense technology companies.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Sands Capital co-led the Series F funding round, which has been in the works for more than a month. The deal nearly doubles the startup’s valuation from its previous funding round in 2022, which raised $1.48 billion.