Air Force Research Lab also issued a contract—this one just over $231 million—to General Electric for work on its revolutionary engine program, dubbed Adaptive Versatile Engine Technology. As with the contract awarded to Rolls Royce, AFRL expects the work to be done by September 2012 on this hunt to find greater fuel efficiency and thrust and reduced maintenance and production cost.
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.