Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON – Shipboard radar experts at RTX Corp. will build hardware for the new AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), which will be integrated into late-model Arleigh Burke-class (DDG 51) Aegis destroyer surface warships under terms of a $677.7 million U.S. Navy order announced Friday.

Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington are asking the RTX Raytheon segment in Marlborough, Mass., for AN/SPY-6(V) shipboard radar hardware.

The Raytheon AN/SPY-6(V) AMDR will improve the Burke-class destroyer’s ability to detect hostile aircraft, surface ships, and ballistic missiles, Raytheon officials say. The AMDR will supersede the AN/SPY-1 radar, which has been standard equipment on Navy Aegis Burke-class destroyers and Ticonderoga-class cruisers.

The constellation will eventually include 100 satellites providing global coverage of advanced missile launches. For now, the handful of spacecraft offers limited coverage. SDA Director Derek Tournear told reporters in April that coordinating tracking opportunities for the satellites is a challenge because they have to be positioned over the venue where missile tests are being performed.

He noted that along with tracking routine Defense Department test flights, the satellites are also scanning global hot spots for missile activity as they orbit the Earth.

The flight the satellites tracked was the first for MDA’s Hypersonic Testbed, or HTB-1. The vehicle serves as a platform for various hypersonic experiments and advanced components and joins a growing inventory of high-speed flight test systems. That includes the Test Resource Management Center’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed and the Defense Innovation Unit’s Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities program.

Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin also did not explicitly say the Air Force would build its Next Generation Air Dominance fighter amid tight budgets.

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The three companies will compete for orders over the contract period starting in fiscal year 2025 through 2029. Under the NSSL program, the Space Force orders individual launch missions up to two years in advance. At least 30 NSSL Lane 1 missions are expected to be competed over the five years.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a broad agency announcement (HR001124S0029) for the Artificial Intelligence Quantified (AIQ) project.

AIQ seeks to find ways of assessing and understanding the capabilities of AI to enable mathematical guarantees on performance. Successful use of military AI requires ensuring safe and responsible operation of autonomous and semi-autonomous technologies.

Lightweight fighter aircraft with no pilots could support conventional military missions while being easier to launch and recover.

Four Russian warships including a nuclear submarine have reached Cuba, just 200 miles off the coast of Florida, ahead of a planned military exercise in the Atlantic. The fleet — made up of a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine, an oil tanker and a rescue tug — arrived in Havana Bay on Wednesday, welcomed by a 21-cannon salute from Cuba. Dramatic images from the arrival show the ominous and massive vessels entering the bay as Cubans lined up on…

In a study appearing in Nature, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reconstructed the evolutionary history and global spread of malaria over the past 5,500 years, identifying trade, warfare, and colonialism as major catalysts for its dispersal.

Prototype quantum photonic-dimer laser uses entanglement to bind photons and deliver a powerful beam of concentrated light that can shine through adverse weather like thick fog.