The Air Force awarded teams led by Boeing and Lockheed Martin contract modifications up to $75 million to conduct additional risk-reduction work on their respective transformational communications satellite concepts, the Department of Defense announced June 6. Further, the new awards task each team to perform an industrial base impact study that assumes that USAF picks one of them to finish development and build the TSAT system anytime between July 1 and “six months thereafter through a total delay of 24 months.” The contractors will also develop concepts for two alternative requirements sets called “TSAT digital core” and “TSAT lite,” DOD said.
The United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force has unveiled a new electronic warfare drone designed to fly with fighter jets into contested airspace, including alongside its fleet of F-35s. RAF says it plans to develop models that draw on the U.S. Air Force’s approach of mating unmanned systems with crewed platforms.