Boeing officials let it drop that the company has already invested about $1 billion of its own money in the KC-767 tanker program. They pointed out to reporters last week that the first KC-767 tanker—bound for the Italian Air Force—made its first flight last May 21 and has been in flight test ever since. Boeing is bearing most of the cost of the flight tests, which are due to wrap up late next year. Italy has ordered four KC-767s so far. So has Japan. Thus far, the Air Force has not contributed any money to the test program, but, at the request of Italy, USAF personnel have been placed on the KC-767 test team.
The Space Force is playing midwife to a new ecosystem of commercial satellite constellations providing alternatives to the service’s own Global Positioning Service from much closer to the Earth, making their signals more accurate and harder to jam.
