7 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial
19 hours ago
The Air Force One of the future might be getting a major speed boost.
An aerospace company called Hermeus on Thursday announced a contract with the US Air Force and the Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate to develop a hypersonic aircraft for the presidential fleet.
While the next Air Force One, a modified 747-8, is due to be delivered by Boeing next year, the Hermeus contract looks toward its eventual replacement.
Hermeus said it won the contract after designing, building, and successfully testing a prototype of an engine capable of propelling an airplane to Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound — about 3,300 mph. Mach 5 represents the delineation between supersonic and hypersonic speeds.
The company completed those tests in March, Aviation Week reported.
Hermeus plans to build a demonstrator vehicle over the next five years, with commercial aircraft envisioned in about a decade, Skyler Shuford, its cofounder and chief operating officer, said in 2019. A press release announcing the Air Force contract said part of the project would focus on integrating Air Force requirements into the airplane's designs.
Hermeus emerged last year, announcing plans to develop a Mach 5 aircraft that could fly from New York to Paris in about 90 minutes. Ars Technica reported in May 2019 that the company raised an initial round of funding, led by Khosla Ventures, which it used to develop the prototype. Hermeus said it would use a turbine-based combined-cycle engine for the propulsion system, according to the report.
The company's cofounders are alumni of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the aerospace company Generation Orbit.
At the time, Hermeus said it planned to use mostly existing technology and materials to achieve hypersonic travel.
"We can make a vehicle fly that fast with today's technology," Glenn Case, a cofounder and the chief technology officer, said in a video published this spring.
"We aren't getting into anything too miraculous," Shuford told Ars Technica last year. "We want to do engineering, not science."
As of Thursday, the company listed about 10 open positions, including for airframe and propulsion engineers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/hypersonic-air-force-one-hermeus-mach-5-2020-8
15 octobre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
The Psyche should have soared a year ago, but was held up by delays in flight software testing attributed to poor management and other issues.
7 août 2020 | International, C4ISR
by Carlo Munoz The US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is soliciting industry proposals to revamp its command-wide battlefield intelligence analytics programme, updating the legacy system with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and cloud computing architectures to support current and future operations. Potential industry participants in the Global Analytics Platform (GAP) update programme will lay out their tentative proposals to SOCOM acquisition officials, and members of the command's science and technology directorates, during the upcoming GAP virtual industry day at the end of August. Industry proposals will focus on technological applications in data management and dissemination that are designed to support “the search, discovery, and collaborative analysis of large volumes of data within a suite of secure web-based applications,” the 3 August solicitation states. “Companies with experience in information system environments that search, discover, and analyse large volumes of data within a suite of secure web-based applications across a multi security cloud architecture are highly desired,” the solicitation stated, regarding the upcoming industry day. “Additionally, companies with experience in data movement and transport, and data science are also encouraged to attend,” it added. SOFWERX, in conjunction with SOCOM's Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Center, will sponsor the three-day industry event, beginning on 25 August. The main thrust of the 3 August solicitation is to “add, upgrade, and replace individual [GAP] components, tools, and services, using defined interoperability and interface controls to maintain a leading-edge capability” to keep pace with SOCOM's evolving operational requirements, the solicitation stated. https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/socom-industry-day-solicits-proposals-to-update-global-analytics-platform
14 novembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
BY DAVE GERSHGORN The Pentagon's AI shopping list is similar to a Silicon Valley company's: fast data organization, predictive maintenance, and mitigation for threats. While Silicon Valley workers continue to protest their employers selling artificial intelligence products to the US military, the US military is still looking to spend money on AI. The Army Research Lab, the Project Maven team, and the USDepartment of Defense's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center will host technology companies later this month in Maryland, where the government will view private demonstrations. According to federal contracting data (free login required for the full list), large tech companies such as Intel, IBM, GE, Oracle, as well as defense company Raytheon, have expressed interest in showing off their AI for the military. Absent from the list are AI giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, though the DoD has not responded to an inquiry as to whether the available contracting data is the complete list of attending organizations. The DoD's needs aren't too different from those of a Silicon Valley tech company, though the technology is unlikely to be used in a food delivery app or search engine. The military is looking for help organizing and standardizing its data, tools to create AIalgorithms, and infrastructure to test and deploy those algorithms. Some of the military's uses are similar to commercial applications for AI, like predictive maintenance and translation, though other use cases include analyzing drone footage and “force protection,” which means mitigating potential threats to the military. Project Maven, in particular, is focused on tech that autonomously extracts information from still or moving imagery. Smaller, more specialized tech firms from outside of Silicon Valley are also vying for government contracts. Descartes Labs, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze satellite imagery, is planning to attend the industry day and give a demo. Descartes Labs' government programs director, Steven Truitt, tells Quartz the company plans to discuss a super-computing platform for the intelligence community and “defense information awareness missions.” A competitor, Orbital Insight, has also indicated interest in the event. Of the 42 businesses interested in attending the event, six are owned by veterans, according to the contracting documents. John Merrihew, VP government solutions at AI contractor Veloxiti, says his military experience puts him in a different category of tech company than Silicon Valley. “I'm an Army retiree after 24 years and a half-dozen combat tours, so I have an obligation to [provide this technology],” Merrihew told Quartz. “I'm not a guy out on the west coast who's made a lot of money like Google. All of my engineers have security clearances, so we're pretty bought in on trying to help the military in this area.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/11/tech-companies-are-eager-sell-ai-pentagon/152800/