The Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded a pair of contracts, to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon respectively, as part of the Integrated Sensor Is Structure (ISIS) program—leading to a stratospheric airship operating at 70,000 feet as a surveillance platform with an autonomous unmanned sensor. The two-year contracts ($10.2 million for Lockheed and $7.9 million to Raytheon), which DARPA is funding, are for work on an advanced hull material (Lockheed) and a lightweight active electronically scanned array (Raytheon). Northrop Grumman previously won a contract to provide a different sensor technology approach. The resulting platform is to be able to tract advanced cruise missiles from 370 miles away and enemy combatants on the ground 200 miles away.
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.
