UK MoD HTCDF contract announcement July 2024

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  28 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin just landed a major rocket deal

  Michael Sheetz | @thesheetztweetz Blue Origin has won a contract to supply its next-generation engines for the massive rocket United Launch Alliance is developing, a person familiar with the negotiations told CNBC ULA – a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin – will announce the deal on Thursday, the person said. The companies confirmed CNBC's reporting in a press release Thursday afternoon Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, has won a contract to supply its next-generation engines for the massive rocket United Launch Alliance is developing, a person familiar with the negotiations told CNBC. The company's BE-4 engine, the thunderous staple of Blue Origin's propulsion business, will power ULA's Vulcan rocket: a new heavy lift vehicle being built to compete with SpaceX for lucrative commercial and military contracts. ULA, a joint venture of Boeingand Lockheed Martin created in 2006, will announce the deal on Thursday, the person said. ULA confirmed CNBC's reporting in a press release Thursday afternoon. "We are pleased to enter into this partnership with Blue Origin and look forward to a successful first flight of our next-generation launch vehicle," ULA CEO said in a statement Thursday afternoon. Bezos is investing heavily in Blue Origin, pouring about $1 billion of his Amazon stock into the rocket venture each year. In a speech Sept. 19, Bezos said he plans to invest another $1 billion next year into the company's New Glenn rocket, which BE-4 will power. The engines of a rocket represent the majority of the cost, so the contract may be worth several billion dollars to Blue Origin. The Wall Street Journal first reported the contract win by the company. Blue Origin has long been the front-runner in a race against Aerojet Rocketdyne, which has been developing its AR1 engine. While AR1 was still technically in the running until now, Bruno had said he would prefer BE-4 for Vulcan, with AR1 potentially becoming a backup. Aerojet was behind in the development, while Blue Origin had already completed multiple tests, firing the BE-4 engine for long durations. Aerojet has not completely lost, even if AR1 ends up with no part in Vulcan. ULA announced in May it picked the Aerojet's smaller RL10 engine to power the upper-stage of Vulcan — the part of the rocket that places spacecraft into their intended orbits after a launch. ULA currently uses the RL10 for its Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. All eyes on the Air Force The deal also represents a key first step toward Blue Origin winning lucrative military contracts. The Pentagon is working to ensure that all the rockets it buys are built entirely in the U.S., making Blue Origin a potential propulsion supplier for several companies. Congress has set a deadline of 2022 for phasing out Russian-built rocket engine, which currently power ULA's Atlas V rocket. Vulcan's development began once the Pentagon started pushing to end reliance on Russian engines. The competition to launch U.S. military equipment is stiff. SpaceX is grabbing more and more share of the market from ULA — which was the sole provider of U.S. military launches for nearly a decade. Northrop Grumman may also get a foothold through its recent acquisition of Orbital ATK. Jefferies said on April 23 that the company's OmegA rocket "is starting at a high level of technology readiness given its leverage of current components." The next big milestone in the rocket business is an Air Force award expected later this year, with about $1.2 billion up for grabs over the next five years. Known as the Launch Services Agreement, the Air Force is looking to narrow the field of ULA, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and Blue Origin. Each company won an initial development award in 2016, with the next step to narrow the field to three companies for the development of system prototype. "We have been working closely with the U.S. Air Force, and our certification plan is in place," Bruno said in his statement. The military is then anticipated to make a final decision in 2020, picking two suppliers to compete for 28 missions over five years. Blue Origin becoming a major player Morgan Stanley told clients earlier this month "to take notice" of Bezos investments in the space industry through Blue Origin, pointing to him as a "force" bringing financial muscle. "We believe investors may want to pay far more attention to another emerging force for the advancement of efforts in Space that has both the will and, increasingly, the financial muscle to put to work," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a note. Morgan Stanley estimated that Bezos' Amazon shares are worth about $160 billion — "equal to around 16 years worth of NASA expenditures on Space exploration," the firm said. Morgan Stanley advised its clients to take note of that comparison as Bezos' wealth continues to grow. Blue Origin has "invested about $1 billion in the Space Coast," Bezos said in his recent speech, with funds going to the company's manufacturing facility and Launch Complex 36, which Blue Origin leased at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Blue Origin has spent "over seven years developing this engine to make it reusable," CEO Bob Smith told CNBC on April 18. At the time, Smith said the company was "excited about the commercial opportunities" that BE-4 will provide. "United Launch Alliance is the premier launch service provider for national security missions, and we're thrilled to be part of their team and that mission," Smith said in a statement Thursday. Smith has also said before that the engine was "certainly demonstrating all the technical characteristics" that ULA needs for Vulcan – but Blue Origin expects to be able to sell BE-4 to other rocket companies, too. "We're going to offer it to whoever else will come out and say they need a new engine," Smith said at the time. Reusability remains the emphasis of Blue Origin, which already has launched and landed its smaller New Shepard rocket multiple times. Each BE-4 engine is designed to complete "100 full missions," Smith said in April. Reusability provides tremendous cost savings of 50 to 75 percent, Smith said — a claim made more believable by SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket coming with a price tag of just $150 million, at most. The first launches of New Glenn and Vulcan are not expected before 2020, the companies have said. Vulcan and New Glenn are expected to compete with Falcon Heavy on cost and power – but SpaceX remains undaunted. New Glenn will be a monstrous vehicle, standing as high as 313 feet, with seven BE-4 engines powering each rocket. The Vulcan rocket is 191 feet and capable of launching a more than 7 tons of payload into orbit. Falcon Heavy, on other hand, stands 230 feet tall and, after its launch in February, is the world's most powerful rocket since NASA's Saturn V. The space race is on After Falcon Heavy launched successfully, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters he thinks the historic flight will "encourage other companies and countries" to be ambitious in the same way as SpaceX. Musk's company helped the United States reclaim not just a portion but a majority in the global launch market in 2017 and represented more than 60 percent of U.S. launches while doing so. Bezos has said Blue Origin is "the most important work" he's doing. He also has said there should be "a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon" and thinks it's not just time for humans to return to the moon, it's "time to stay." While SpaceX may be out to an earlier lead in the development of next-generation rockets, Blue Origin solidified itself as a true competitor with this BE-4 contract — one that may help ULA keep its competitive edge. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/blue-origin-lands-major-rocket-engine-deal-with-ula-source.html

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  3 août 2022 | International, Autre défense

  Big changes ahead for how troops battle future chemical, biological threats

  New funding, strategy and focus puts CBRN back in the mix.

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  28 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  We know why innovation is important. Here’s how to do it.

  Tommy Sowers This month, thousands of units across all branches of the U.S. military will execute a change of command. New commanders will seek to set priorities for their command and leave their mark. However, commanders are asked to do something new: innovate. From the National Defense Strategy to the Army Operating Concept that states innovation “is critical” and defined as “the result of critical and creative thinking and the conversion of new ideas into valued outcomes,” why the military must innovate is doctrine. Yet, there is no playbook for how to innovate. Until now. For the past two years, an Air Force wing built an innovation playbook — leadership, buy-in, experimentation and speed. Leadership In July 2018, Col. Donn Yates took command of the 4th Fighter Wing. An intellectual and warrior, he wanted, and was directed, to be more innovative. He knew that the challenges he and the Air Force would face in the future — from fighting when satellite communications capabilities were down, to using data to predict parts failure, to using social media to communicate during a hurricane — were new, with no available checklist and playbook. He set out to develop one and make innovation a priority. A few weeks after taking command, he hosted me to discuss innovation. As the southeast regional director for the Defense Department's National Security Innovation Network, I helped lead the department's innovation efforts across the region. NSIN's mission is to help commanders innovate by tapping into new networks of innovators in the venture technology and academic space to deliver solutions. As a former Green Beret, venture-backed startup CEO and professor at Duke University, I speak the languages of these three different communities. Buy-in He immediately requested one of our programs — a Design Bootcamp — bringing professors from University of California, Berkley to train his innovation team in design thinking. The concepts are different than military thinking — talk with end users to understand their problems; create minimal viable products, or MVP, to solve their problems; test those MVPs and collect data; and use that data to develop better solutions quickly. Col. Yates had the teams work a problem that bedevils commanders across Air Force bases — the long wait times at the pharmacy. The trainers broke the 28 trainees into four-person teams, who camped out at the pharmacy interviewing pharmacists, staff, airmen and retirees. At the end of the week, the teams proposed solutions, from self-serve kiosks to mobile clinics to text notifications. Six months later, pharmacy wait times were down more than 50 percent and those trained teams could apply the same thinking to other problems. Experimentation with new problem solvers New ways of thinking are just the start. Moving from idea to an actual product that the military can use is difficult. While our military hardware remains the best in the world, the software running our military is woefully inadequate. As the chair of the Defense Innovation Board and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated: “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development.” And with virtually no positions for app developers and data scientists within any Department of Defense operational unit, getting solutions means tapping into new communities of problem solvers. Seymour Johnson Air Force Base sits 35 miles from the Research Triangle, one of the leading startup centers in the nation and host to 50,000 students. Could we tap into these problem solvers for a limited tour of duty to build solutions and serve their country? One of NSIN's programs is a university course called Hacking for Defense, or H4D. Delivered at Duke and universities across the nation, H4D teaches teams of students to build a startup to solve a DoD problem. Col. Yates' wing sponsored multiple H4D problems — from using data to predict F-15 part failure to developing new procedures to allow distributed forces to communicate in a SATCOM-denied environment, to an app for optimizing Reserve drill weekends. Working with new problem solvers takes tolerance and openness to new ideas. These teams, beginning with little knowledge of the military, ask first-principle questions. Yet, after 100-plus end-user interviews and working through multiple prototypes, these students become world experts on the specific problems and the likely solutions. Many go on to join the DoD. NSIN is now putting problems in H4D, tech fellowships called X-Force and courses at universities around the nation. These programs use product teams to craft better social media strategies, data dashboards and apps to fill critical needs. (If you are military and need solutions now, you can submit your problem here.) Speed The most important attribute in a venture-backed startup is speed. So, too, for the modern military. In testimony, a former undersecretary of defense stated: “Innovation will remain important always, but speed becomes the differentiating factor.” Two years of command can fly by. Unless new commanders make innovation not only a priority but also commit to do something now, the deployments, requirements and taskings of running any military unit will subsume any desire to innovate. A month after our first meet, Col. Yates brought 30 airmen to Duke to hear from entrepreneurs and academics. The next month, he sent a half-dozen leaders to learn how to work with university teams and carved out the training time for the Design Bootcamp. The following year, he sponsored two H4D teams and an X-Force fellow. This year, we've seen four H4D teams, more X-Force product teams and another boot camp. None were perfect. All could have been delayed. But the 4th Fighter Wing prioritized speed and innovation. The innovation playbook The military knows why it must innovate. The next conflicts will require not only the best hardware, but also a force that rapidly converts new thinking to outcomes; a force that can tap into the wealth of talent in America that will never wear a uniform but want to apply their entrepreneurial and technical skills to solve national security problems. The how — the things new commanders must do to innovate — has been opaque. Now, with the leadership, buy-in, experimentation and speed of the 4th Fighter Wing as an example, there is an innovation playbook. https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/commentary/2020/07/27/we-know-why-innovation-is-important-heres-how-to-do-it/