Navy creating unmanned, AI operations hub within US Southern Command

On the same subject

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  August 18, 2020 | International, Naval

  In developing robot warships, US Navy wants to avoid another littoral combat ship

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Navy pushes forward with developing its large unmanned surface vessel, envisioned as a kind of external missile magazine that will tag along with larger manned surface combatants, a growing consensus is forming that the service needs to get its requirements and systems right before making a big investment. Congress has, for the second year in a row, slowed the development of the large unmanned surface vessel, or LUSV, in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The language in this year's bill would essentially force the Navy to have a working prototype with all systems tested and fully integrated before using procurement dollars for the boats. In an exclusive July 16 interview with Defense News, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said that while the marks were frustrating, he agreed with Congress that requirements must be concrete right up front. “The approach has to be deliberate,” Gilday said. “We have to make sure that the systems that are on those unmanned systems with respect to the [hull, mechanical and electrical system], that they are designed to requirement, and perform to requirement. And most importantly, are those requirements sound? “I go back to: Do I really need a littoral combat ship to go 40 knots? That's going to drive the entire design of the ship, not just the engineering plant but how it's built. That becomes a critical factor. If you take your eye off the ball with respect to requirements, you can find yourself drifting. That has to be deliberate.” Gilday has called for the Navy to pursue a comprehensive “Unmanned Campaign Plan” that creates a path forward for developing and fielding unmanned systems in the air, on the sea and under the water. Right now, the effort exists in a number of different programs that may not all be pulling in the same direction, he said. “What I've found is that we didn't necessarily have the rigor that's required across a number of programs that would bring those together in a way that's driven toward objectives with milestones,” Gilday told Defense News. “If you took a look at [all the programs], where are there similarities and where are there differences? Where am I making progress in meeting conditions and meeting milestones that we can leverage in other experiments? “At what point do I reach a decision point where I drop a program and double down on a program that I can accelerate?” ‘A lot of risk' According to the Congressional Research Service, the Navy's approach is to adapt a commercial design and put a bare-bones crew onboard while the service figures out how to move toward a fully unmanned system. “The Navy wants LUSVs to be low-cost, high-endurance, reconfigurable ships based on commercial ship designs, with ample capacity for carrying various modular payloads — particularly anti-surface warfare (ASuW) and strike payloads, meaning principally anti-ship and land-attack missiles,” the report read. But some very basic questions still need to be answered about how a large unmanned, or lightly manned, surface vessel might work, said Matthew Collette, an associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. “One of the biggest challenges people are realizing now is the machinery systems and keeping the systems operational for six months [over a deployment],” Collette said. “If you think about a ship today, there are daily machinery rounds and constant preventative maintenance. The Navy has its casualty reporting system, and the commercial world has something very similar. And over six months, that's a lot of work that's not getting done on the autonomous ship. “And there are two approaches to this that I've seen: One is you design it essentially like a space craft where you really limit what you do with the ship to make it as robust as possible and really accept that today that means less capability. We're just not going to be able to throw all the bells and whistles on that kind of a ship today. And for the smaller size ships, that's a good approach. “But the other approach is to try and monitor it and put in a lot of redundancy and figure out how we get this system reimagined so it can do a six-month deployment. And I can't really assess where we are with that at this point, I just don't have enough insight to know if that's six months away. Is it six years? Is it never reachable?” It's unclear that adapting an existing design will get the Navy where it needs to be, in large part because the Navy is going somewhere radically different from what the commercial offshore oil and gas or ferry industry is going, Collette said. “It's important to note that where the commercial industry is going is different from where the Navy wants to go,” Collette said. “In the commercial marine industry, you have a licensed captain ashore who is able to teleport to the ship whenever it needs human intervention. And we're really talking about short runs, like inter-European runs of six hours, 12 hours, and working their way out from there. “The Navy has really asked for a much harder, much more difficult problem. And you could see how something like the [extra-large unmanned underwater vehicle] as a technology trail that works toward this direction, but jumping toward something like large unmanned surface vessel, is a big, big step with a lot of risk.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/08/17/in-developing-robot-warships-us-navy-wants-to-avoid-another-littoral-combat-ship/

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  November 16, 2022 | International, C4ISR

  Pentagon must embrace commercial technologies to win data war

  Commercial cloud providers, well entrenched in the DoD, already have the capabilities integrated into their offerings.

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  June 5, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  NASA’s new administrator says he’s talking to companies to take over the International Space Station

  NASA is talking to several international companies about forming a consortium that would take over operation of the International Space Station and run it as a commercial space lab, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. “We're in a position now where there are people out there that can do commercial management of the International Space Station,” Bridenstine said in his first extensive interview since being sworn in as NASA administrator in April. “I've talked to many large corporations that are interested in getting involved in that through a consortium, if you will.” The White House touched off a heated discussion about the future of the orbiting laboratory earlier this year when it said it planned to end direct government funding of the station by 2025, while working on a transition plan to turn the station over to the private sector. Some members of Congress said they would vigorously oppose any plan that ends the station's life prematurely. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said the decision to end funding for it was the result of “numskulls” at the Office of Management and Budget. And it was unclear, who, if anyone, would want to take over operations of the station, which costs NASA about $3 billion to $4 billion a year and is run by an international partnership that includes the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency. An orbiting laboratory that flies some 250 miles above the Earth's surface, it has been continuously inhabited by astronauts since 2000. In unveiling its plan to commercialize the station earlier this year, the White House offered few details of how exactly it would work. As it prepares a transition plan, the White House said it “will request market analysis and business plans from the commercial sector and solicit plans from commercial industry.” The international nature of the station could make it tricky, though perhaps there could be an international commercial partnership with some sort of a government role, said Frank Slazer, the vice president of space systems for the Aerospace Industries Association. “It will be very hard to turn ISS into a truly commercial outpost because of the international agreements that the United States is involved in,” he said. “It's inherently always going to be an international construct that requires U.S. government involvement and multinational cooperation.” Bridenstine declined to name the companies that have expressed interest in managing the station, and said he was aware that companies may find it “hard to close the business case.” But he said there was still seven years to plan for the future of the station, and with the White House's budget request “we have forced the conversation.” A former congressman from Oklahoma, Bridenstine, was confirmed by the Senate by a narrow 50-to-49 votethis spring, after the post had remained vacant for 15 months. Democrats had rallied against his nomination, saying he lacked the managerial and scientific background for the job. Many had labeled him a climate-change denier over controversial comments Bridenstine, a conservative Republican, had made in the past. But during a Senate hearing last month, he said his views had evolved, and that he believes human activity is the leading cause of climate change. That earned him plaudits from Democrats, such as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) who had opposed his nomination. “I have come to the conclusion that this is a true evolution,” Schatz said. “That you respect people with whom you work, you respect the science, you want their respect.” In the interview, Bridenstine said there was no single event that cause him to change his thinking. As chairman of the Environment subcommittee, he said he “listened to a lot of testimony. I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot. I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen. And we've done it in really significant ways.” In the wide-ranging interview, Bridenstine also listed a return to the moon and the restoration of human spaceflight from United States soil as two of his top priorities. NASA has proposed building an outpost in the vicinity of the moon that could be inhabited by humans from time to time, with landers that could ferry supplies to the lunar surface. Known as the Lunar Orbiting Platform Gateway, the system would be built by NASA in partnership with industry and its international partners, he said. “I've met with a lot of leaders of space agencies from around the world,” he said. “There is a lot of interest in the Gateway in the lunar outpost because a lot of countries want to have access to the surface of the moon. And this can help them as well and they can help us. It helps expand the partnership that we've seen in low Earth orbit with the International Space Station.” But the first element of the system wouldn't be launched until 2021 or 2022, he said. Perhaps as early as this year, Boeing and SpaceX, the companies hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the space station, could see their first test flights with people on board, though it's possible they could be delayed to next year. Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, Russia has flown NASA's astronauts to the station, charging hundreds of millions of dollars over that time. Bridenstine said that it is “a big objective is to once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil.” Both Boeing and SpaceX have had delays and setbacks in their programs. Government watchdogs have said they were concerned about an issue with Boeing's abort system that may cause its spacecraft to “tumble,” posing a threat to the crew's safety. Boeing has said it has fixed that problem, as well as a concern with the heat shield that the Government Accountability Office said last year could disconnect “and damage the parachute system.” John Mulholland, Boeing's commercial crew program manager, told Congress earlier this year that the company's "analyses show that we exceed our requirements for crew safety." As administrator, Bridenstine and his staff will also have to sign off on SpaceX's decision to fuel its Falcon 9 rocket after the crews are on board -- which some have said could put astronauts at risk. But during a recent NASA safety advisory panel, some members said they thought the procedure could be a “viable option” if adequate safety controls are in place. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told reporters last month that he did not think the fueling process "presents a safety issue for astronauts. But we can adjust our operational procedures to load propellant before the astronauts board. But I really think this is an overblown issue.” In the interview, Bridenstine said no decision had been made yet about the fueling procedures. “I haven't signed off on anything at this point,” he said. “We're going to make sure we test it every which way you can possibly imagine. And that's underway right now. We're not going to put anybody in any undue risk.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/05/nasas-new-administrator-says-hes-talking-to-companies-to-take-over-the-international-space-station/