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Category: military

The biggest threat to our success is moving too slowly and refusing to change.

In June, a previously flown Falcon 9 booster lofted a new-generation Global Positioning Satellite for the US Space Force. This marked a watershed moment for the US military and the concept of reusable rockets, as the Space Force entrusted a satellite worth about half a billion dollars to the new technology.

Now, thanks to a recent news release from the US Space Force, we have a little more insight into why the Space Force is leaning into reusable rockets and other technology from innovative companies such as SpaceX.

Using a refurbished booster—this particular first stage had launched a GPS III satellite in November 2020—did save the Space Force money. By agreeing to launch two of its new GPS III satellites on used rockets, essentially, the US government pocketed $52 million in cost savings. This was certainly welcome, Space Force officials said, and it’s nice to have the potential to increase launch tempo.

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“When the final tests are completed in the future, South Korea will become the eighth country in the world that has developed an advanced supersonic fighter,” a government statement said.

South Korea unveiled its homegrown supersonic jet fighter on Friday, joining an exclusive club of military aviation giants and setting the stage for a $5.2 billion program it hopes will be a top export driver and jobs creator.

Once operational, the KF-21 jet is expected to be armed with a range of air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles — and possibly even air-launched cruise missiles.

The twin-engine fighters will come in single-and two-seat versions, depending on the missions to which they are tasked.

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Is this the Air Force’s new top secret stealth drone?

A mysterious aircraft caught flying over the Philippines could be the United State’s ultra-secret new RQ-180 stealth drone, aviation experts believe.

Local landscape photographer Michael Fugnit captured the craft on Thursday when he was attempting to take pictures of the sunrise by the coast of Santa Magdalena, a resort town 364 miles south of Manila.

Fugnit regularly watches the skies for planes, and quickly realized that the batwing-shaped flyer was unlike any commercial or military aircraft he’d ever seen before.

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Quantum radar was proposed as a solution more than a decade ago. Some quantum technologies, such as the entanglement of subatomic particles, could in theory boost the sensitivity of a radar.

Quantum particles in a man-made electromagnetic storm bounced back after hitting stealth object, increasing chance of detection, according to Tsinghua University team.

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China has been building the JF-22 hypervelocity wind tunnel in Huairou, an industrial district of Beijing, since 2018. Wind tunnels are large tubes that move air around stationary objects to simulate flying, allowing researchers to learn more about how the object will fly.

The JF-22 will be capable of simulating flying conditions at about 30 times the speed of sound when it is completed in 2022.

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A P-8I maritime patrol aircraft of the Indian Navy was spotted flying over the Philippines, close to the South China Sea, almost all of which is claimed by China. The submarine-hunting aircraft is in the region to participate in the Malabar Exercise, featuring the navies of all four Quad countries.

This edition of the Malabar naval exercise is being hosted by the United States Navy in the Western Pacific, off the coast of Guam. The area is not far from the South China Sea, where China has built a large number of artificial islands and militarized them to strengthen its territorial claims over these waters, which host some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

China opposes the deployment of foreign military vessels in the region, including the Freedom of Navigation Patrols conducted by the US to assert its right to use the waterways in the South China Sea.

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Housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the US$3.5-billion facility wasn’t designed to serve as a power-plant prototype, however, but rather to probe fusion reactions at the heart of thermonuclear weapons. After the United States banned underground nuclear testing at the end of the cold war in 1,992 the energy department proposed the NIF as part of a larger science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, designed to verify the reliability of the country’s nuclear weapons without detonating any of them.

With this month’s laser-fusion breakthrough, scientists are cautiously optimistic that the NIF might live up to its promise, helping physicists to better understand the initiation of nuclear fusion — and thus the detonation of nuclear weapons. “That’s really the scientific question for us at the moment,” says Mark Herrmann, Livermore’s deputy director for fundamental weapons physics. “Where can we go? How much further can we go?”

Here Nature looks at the NIF’s long journey, what the advance means for the energy department’s stewardship programme and what lies ahead.

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A Chinese military satellite appears to have gotten smashed by a disintegrating Russian rocket, Space.com reports, in what’s likely the worst orbital collision since 2009.

The collision illustrates the growing danger of derelict spacecraft parts and other jetsam in Earth’s orbit, where they can smash functional equipment — as well as the extraordinary difficulty in figuring out what’s going on in Earth’s orbit.

According to an investigation by Harvard astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, Chinese satellite Yunhai 1–02 likely crashed into a piece of space junk earlier this year.

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