Pratt & Whitney’s F135 initial flight test powerplant for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has finished successful runs at NAS JRB Fort Worth, Tex., which is near Lockheed Martin’s final assembly plant, according to a company statement. The company says the runs took place at an indoor facility that had been modified to handle the new engine’s 40,000 pounds of thrust—which makes it “the most powerful fighter engine ever built.”
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.