Back to news

May 12, 2021 | International, Aerospace

Space Development Agency (SDA), HQ085021S0001

The DoD Small Business and Technology Partnerships Office announces the opening of the following Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) topics:

Space Development Agency (SDA), HQ085021S0001

IMPORTANT DATES:

  • May 12, 2021: Topic Q&A opens; BAA opens, begin submitting proposals in DSIP
  • June 1, 2021: Topic Q&A closes to new questions at 12:00 p.m. ET
  • June 15, 2021: BAA closes, full proposals must be submitted in DSIP no later than 12:00 p.m. ET

Full topics and instructions are available at the links provided above.

Topic Q&A

Topic Q&A is available for proposers to submit technical questions at https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/submissions/login beginning today, May 12, 2021. All questions and answers are posted electronically for general viewing. Topic Q&A will close to new questions on June 1, 2021 at 12:00 p.m. ET but will remain active to view questions and answers related to the topics until the BAA close.

Proposers are advised to monitor Topic Q&A during the BAA period for questions and answers, and frequently monitor the beta.SAM.gov link above for updates and amendments to the topic.

Learning & Support

Visit the Learning & Support section for Job Aids and Help Videos to guide you through submitting and viewing questions and answers in the Topic Q&A, preparing and submitting your proposal in DSIP, and more: https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/submissions/learning-support/training-materials

DSIP Help Desk Contact Info

Thank you for your interest in the DoD SBIR/STTR Program.

DoD SBIR/STTR Support Team

To sign up and receive upcoming emails, please follow this link: https://secure.campaigner.com/CSB/Public/Form.aspx?fid=667492&ac=g9gk



On the same subject

  • The tiny tech lab that put AI on a spyplane has another secret project

    February 15, 2021 | International, Aerospace

    The tiny tech lab that put AI on a spyplane has another secret project

    By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — It started as a dare. When Will Roper, then the Air Force's top acquisition official, visited Beale Air Force Base in California last fall, he issued a challenge to the U-2 Federal Laboratory, a five-person organization founded in October 2019. The team was established to create advanced technologies for the venerable Lockheed Martin U-2 spyplane, and Roper wanted to push the team further. “He walked into the laboratory and held his finger out and pointed directly at me,” recalled Maj. Ray Tierney, the U-2 pilot who founded and now leads the lab. “He said, ‘Ray, I got a challenge.' We didn't even say hello.” Roper, a string theorist turned reluctant government bureaucrat who was known for his disruptive style and seemingly endless references to science-fiction, wanted the team to update the U-2′s software during a flight. It was a feat the U.S. military had never accomplished, but to Tierney's exasperation, Roper wanted only to know how long it would take for the lab to pull off. The answer, it turns out, was two days and 22 hours. A month later, in mid-November, Roper laid out a second challenge: Create an AI copilot for the U-2, a collection of algorithms that would be able to learn and adapt in a way totally unlike the mindlessness of an autopilot that strictly follows a preplanned route. That task took a month, when an AI entity called Artuμ (pronounced Artoo, as in R2-D2 of Star Wars fame) was given control of the U-2′s sensors and conveyed information about the location of adversary missile launchers to the human pilot during a live training flight on Dec. 15. Now, the U-2 Federal Laboratory is at work again on another undisclosed challenge. Tierney and Roper declined to elaborate on the task in interviews with Defense News. But Roper acknowledged, more broadly, that a future where AI copilots regularly fly with human operators was close at hand. “Artuμ has a really good chance of making it into operations by maybe the summer of this year,” Roper told Defense News before his Jan. 20 departure from the service. “I'm working with the team on how aggressive is the Goldilocks of being aggressive enough? The goal is fairly achievable, but still requires a lot of stress and effort.” In order to ready Artuμ for day-to-day operations, the AI entity will be tested in potentially millions of virtual training missions — including ones where it faces off against itself. The Air Force must also figure out how to certify it so that it can be used outside of a test environment, Roper said. “The first time we fly an AI in a real operation or real world mission — that's the next big flag to plant in the ground,” Roper said. “And my goal before I leave is to provide the path, the technical objectives, the program approach that's necessary to get to that flag and milestone.” Meanwhile, the team has its own less formal, longer-term challenge: How do you prove to a giant organization like the Air Force, one that is full of bureaucracy and thorough reviews, that a small team of five people can quickly create the innovation the service needs? No regulations, no rules During a Dec. 22 interview, Tierney made it clear that he had little interest in discussing what the U-2 Federal Lab is currently working on. What he wanted to promote, he said, was the concept of how federal laboratories could act as innovation pressure chambers for the military — a place where operators, scientists and acquisition personnel would have the freedom to create without being hamstrung by red tape. For those immersed in military technology, focusing on the promise of federal laboratories can seem like a bit of a letdown, if not outright academic, especially when compared to a discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. The U.S. government is rife with organizations — often named after tired Star Wars references that would make even the most enthusiastic fanboy cringe — created in the name of fostering innovation and rapidly developing new technologies. Many of those advances never make it over the “valley of death” between when a technology is first designed and when it is finally mature enough to go into production. Ultimately, that's the problem the U-2 Federal Lab was created to solve. As a federally accredited laboratory, the team is empowered to create a technology, test it directly with users, mature it over time, and graduate it into the normal acquisition process at Milestone B, Tierney said. At that stage, the product is ready to be treated as a program of record going through the engineering and manufacturing development process, which directly precedes full-rate production. “We're basically front loading all the work so that when we hand it to the acquisition system, there's no work left to do,” Tierney said. The lab essentially functions as a “blue ocean,” as an uncontested market that does not normally exist in the acquisition system, he explained. “There's no regulations; there's no rules.” While that might sound similar to organizations the Air Force has started to harness emerging technologies, such as its Kessel Run software development factory, Tierney bristled at the comparison. “We're basically developing on the weapon system, and then working our way back through the lines of production, as opposed to a lot of these organizations like Kessel Run, which is developing it on servers and server environments,” he said. That distinction is critical when it comes to bringing modern software technologies to an aging platform like the U-2, an aircraft that took its first flight in 1955 and is so idiosyncratic that high speed muscle cars are needed to chase the spyplane and provide situational awareness as it lands. Because the team works only with the U-2, they understand the precise limitations of the weapon system, what its decades-old computers are capable of handling, and how to get the most out of the remaining space and power inside the airplane. Besides Tierney, there are only four other members of the U-2 Federal Lab: a National Guardsman with more than a decade of experience working for IBM, and three civilians with PhDs in machine learning, experimental astrophysics and applied mathematics. (The Air Force declined to provide the names of the other employees from the lab.) As the lone member of the team with experience flying the U-2, Tierney provides perspective on how the aircraft is used operationally and what types of technologies rank high on pilots' wish lists. But what most often drives the team are the projects that can make the biggest impact — not just for the U-2, but across the whole Defense Department. Making it work One of those projects was an effort to use Kubernetes, a containerized system that allows users to automate the deployment and management of software applications, onboard a U-2. The technology was originally created by Google and is currently maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Essentially, what it does is it federates or distributes processing between a bunch of different computers. So you can take five computers in your house and basically mush them all together into one more powerful computer,” Tierney said. The idea generated some resistance from other members of the lab, who questioned the usefulness of deploying Kubernetes to the U-2′s simple computing system. “They said, ‘Kubernetes is useless to us. It's a lot of extra processing overhead. We don't have enough containers. We have one processing board, [so] what are you distributing against? You got one computer,'” Tierney said. But a successful demonstration, held in September, proved that it was possible for even a 1950s-era aircraft to run Kubernetes, opening the door for the Defense Department to think about how it could be used to give legacy platforms more computing power. It also paved the way for the laboratory to do something the Air Force had long been aiming to accomplish: update an aircraft's code while it was in flight. “We wanted to show that a team of five in two days could do what the Department of Defense has been unable to do in its history,” Tierney said. “Nobody helped us with this; there was no big company that rolled in. We didn't outsource any work, it was literally and organically done by a team of five. Could you imagine if we grew the lab by a factor of two or three or four, what that would look like?” The lab has also created a government-owned open software architecture for the U-2, a task that took about three months and involved no additional funding. Once completed, the team was able to integrate advanced machine learning algorithms developed by Sandia National Laboratories in less than 30 minutes. “That's my litmus test for open architecture,” Tierney said. “Go to any provider that says I have open architecture, and just ask them two questions. How long is it going to take you to integrate your service? And how much is it going to cost? And if the answer isn't minutes and free, it's not quite as open as what people want.” The U-2 Federal Lab hopes to export the open architecture system to other military aircraft and is already in talks with several Air Force and Navy program offices on potential demonstrations. Could the Air Force create other federal laboratories to create specialized tech for other aircraft? The U-2 lab was designed from the outset to be franchisable, but Tierney acknowledged that much of the success of future organizations will rest in the composition of the team and the level of expertise of its members. “Can it scale? Absolutely. How does it scale is another question,” Tierney said. “Do you have one of these for every weapon system? Do you have just a couple sprinkled throughout the government? Does it proliferate en masse? Those are all questions that I think, largely can be explored.” For now, it's unclear whether the Air Force will adopt this framework more widely. The accomplishments of the U-2 Federal Laboratory have been lauded by Air Force leaders such as Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, who in December wrote on Twitter that the group “continue[s] to push the seemingly impossible.” However, it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will give the lab the champion it found in Roper, and continued pressure on the defense budget — and to retire older aircraft like the U-2 — could present greater adversity for the lab. But as for the other challenge, the one Tierney and Roper didn't want to discuss, Tierney offered only a wink as to what comes next: “What I can say is that the future is going to be an interesting one.” https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/02/11/the-tiny-tech-lab-that-put-ai-on-a-spyplane-has-another-secret-project/

  • The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

    May 6, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    The Key To All-Domain Warfare Is ‘Predictive Analysis:’ Gen. O’Shaughnessy

    By THERESA HITCHENS on May 05, 2020 at 3:23 PM WASHINGTON: Northern Command head Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy says the key to winning tomorrow's all-domain wars is predicting an adversary's actions — as well as the impacts of US military responses — hours and even days in advance. The capability to perform such “predictive analysis” will be enabled by the US military's Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative for managing high-speed battle across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains,” he told the Mitchell Institute yesterday evening in a webinar. “We see JADC2 is absolutely core to the way we're gonna defend the homeland,” O'Shaughnessy enthused. “And the part that I think is going to be so incredibly game-changing is the ability for us to really use predictive analysis and inform our decisions going into the future.” “That's, to me, what JADC2 is going to do: it's going to inform our decision-makers, it's going to help them make decisions that, like playing chess, are thinking about two or three moves downstream,” he added. “It's going to give the decision-makers, at the speed of relevance, the ability to make really complex decisions.” NORTHCOM was a key player in the Air Force's first “On Ramp” demonstration in December of technologies being developed under its Advanced Battle Management System effort, which the service sees as a foundation for JADC2. O'Shaughnessy said he is excited that NORTHCOM will be expanding its participation in the next demonstration, now slated for late August or early September having been pushed back from its original April data due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. O'Shaughnessy said JADC2 also will be critical for providing much-needed improvements to domain awareness in the Arctic. The US military has to “put together a bigger ecosystem for sensing” rather than relying on “traditional stovepiped systems” in the High North, he explained. That ecosystem needs to fuse information from as many systems as possible — from submarines patrolling beneath the icy waters to ground-based radar to long-endurance unmanned drones to future sensors based on large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites — which is exactly the goal of JADC2. “We have to continue to work on our ability to see the approaches to our homeland and understand what what is there and be able to react to it,” said O'Shaughnessy, who also is the commander of NORAD. As Breaking D readers know, the US military is turning an increasingly worried eye toward the Arctic where Russia and China both have begun to covet as a future zone of economic wealth as the Earth's climate opens shipping routes and expands access to undersea oil. O'Shaughnessy said he sees three areas where more investment is required to up the US military's game in the Arctic: communications, training, and infrastructure. Communications at northern latitudes is a particular struggle due to the difficulties of laying fiber optic cable in the harsh terrain, and the paucity of satellite coverage in the region. This, he said, is why NORTHCOM is extremely interested in the potential for so-called proliferated LEO satellite constellations. — both those currently being built by commercial firms and any future military networks. As Breaking D readers are well aware, DoD's Space Development Agency is planning a multi-tiered network of satellites in LEO that includes “data transport” satellites to allow faster communications between satellites and air-, land- and sea-based receivers that Director Derek Tournear sees as integral to JADC2. DARPA also is experimenting with proliferated LEO architectures under its Blackjack program, which plans 20 satellites using various buses and payloads to test their capabilities by the end of third-quarter 2022. DARPA late last month selected Lockheed Martin to undertake Phase 1 satellite integration of satellite buses with payloads and the central Pit Boss C2 system under a $5.8 million contract. SEAKR Engineering announced on April 28 that it had been granted a sole source Phase I, Option 2 contract (under a three-phased program plan) to develop a Pit Boss demonstrator, beating out two other teams led, respectively, by BAE and Scientific Systems. “One of the things we find is after you get above about 65 degrees or so north, some of our traditional means of communications really start breaking down,” he said, “and once you get closer to 70, almost all except for our most exquisite communications capability really starts to break down. And so we see a need to relook our ability to communicate in the Arctic” — with proliferated LEO “one of the best approaches.” “If you look at some of the companies out there doing incredible things, we see that as a solution set to allow us to communicate in the Arctic in the relatively near future, and that will be critical,” he added. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/the-key-to-all-domain-warfare-is-predictive-analysis-gen-oshaughnessy

  • If the money is there, new and improved F-15s could be coming soon to the Air Force

    January 28, 2019 | International, Aerospace

    If the money is there, new and improved F-15s could be coming soon to the Air Force

    By: Jeff Martin IN THE AIR OVER KENTUCKY — The U.S. Air Force could buy a new version of the F-15, known as the F-15X, as long as there is enough money in future defense budgets, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein told Defense News Saturday. And regardless of whether the service does buy the new jets this year, Goldfein said the new aircraft won't be taking money from the Lockheed Martin F-35. “I'm not backing an inch off of the F-35” Goldfein said. “The F-35 buy that we're on continues to remain on track. And I'm not interested in taking a nickel out of it when it comes to buying anything else in the fighter portfolio.” The FY2020 defense budget has been the focus of speculation for months, and the Pentagon has still not released a final topline figure. Original planning had called for a $733 billion topline, which dwindled down to $700 billion after calls from President Donald Trump to slash federal spending and then ballooned up to $750 billion after the intervention of then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. In December 2018, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told Defense News that “all options are on the table," and on Saturday Goldfein acknowledged that the service had built multiple budgets as different figures were proposed. “We built the [$]730[billion] budget, and we went in and did a drill said what if we only get [$]700[billion] and what do we subtract, and what if there was a [$]750[billion] budget?” he said. Goldfein would not directly confirm that the Air Force has the money in the budget for the new planes. But he hinted strongly that the service would pull the trigger on acquiring them. The F-15X is an improved model from Boeing, teaming a new airframe with an improved radar, cockpit, electronic warfare suite and the ability to carry more missiles, bringing in upgrades that have been developed for the F-15s sold to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Late last year, Bloomberg reported that the Air Force was planning to request $1.2 billion for 12 of the fourth-generation jets in the 2020 budget request. The report said the aircraft would go to the Air National Guard to replace the olders F-15Cs, which date to the 1980s. And that age is why the Air Force is looking at a new variant. The service currently has about 230 F-15C and D model aircraft in service. However, Goldfein acknowledged those aircraft don't have the lifespan to make it to 2030 like other current fourth-generation aircraft, such as the F-15E, the F-16 and A-10. “It [has] performed brilliantly, but the cost growth runs to a point to where you're spending too much money," Goldfein said. The Air Force's decision to buy new F-15s came as a surprise late last year, as Air Force leadership had previously pushed back on the Boeing sales pitch. As recently as September 2018, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said that the Air Force needed to prioritize buying fifth-generation aircraft. "We are currently 80 percent fourth-gen aircraft and 20 percent fifth-generation aircraft,” she said at the time. "In any of the fights that we have been asked to plan for, more fifth-gen aircraft make a huge difference, and we think that getting to 50-50 means not buying new fourth-gen aircraft, it means continuing to increase the fifth generation.” But, Goldfein said Saturday that the decision to possibly refresh the F-15 fleet comes down to the need for more fighters in service, regardless of generation. “They complement each other,” he said. “They each make each other better.” When asked if that meant compromising for quantity over quality, he said that would not be the case. “We've got to refresh the F-15C fleet because I can't afford to not have that capacity to do the job and the missions.” Goldfein explained. “That's what this is all about. If we're refreshing the F-15C fleet, as we're building up the F-35 fleet, this is not about any kind of a trade.” He added that Air Force needs to buy 72 fighters a year to get to the amount they need in the future — and to drive average aircraft age down from 28 years to 15 years. And while Goldfein might want all 72 to be fifth generation F-35s, budgetary concerns likely won't let that happen. “If we had the money, those would be 72 F-35s. But we've gotta look at this from a cost/business case.” he explained. “An F-15 will never be an F-35. Never. But I need capacity.” https://www.defensenews.com/newsletters/2019/01/26/if-the-money-is-there-new-and-improved-f-15s-could-be-coming-soon-to-the-air-force

All news