Weeks after the Air Force issued a statement claiming that Boeing would pay for changes to the KC-46 tanker’s panoramic suite, the service has reversed course and now says the Air Force itself will pony up the cash for new panoramic sensors—a major and potentially costly element of the fix. Meanwhile, service officials remain seemingly unable to lay out how much the repair will cost taxpayers to allow the tanker to do its one key job: refueling American jets mid-flight.
AFA’s StellarXplorers Space STEM program capped its eighth season by declaring Team Panther No. 3 from Palos Verdes Peninsula High School in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., the champion of its National Space Design Competition Finals held at Space Center Houston. The StellarXplorers VIII season, presented by Lockheed Martin, began with 375 teams from across the country competing in four rounds of competition. The National Finals, held April 21-23, featured the 10 remaining teams in a tense, two-day competition.
While the Space Force was created in fiscal 2020, Congress didn’t expand the definition of “veteran” or make other changes to the law requiring VA to furnish benefits and services to Space Force veterans until 2021. Now halfway through 2022, the VA is announcing it has updated its regulations to include the Space Force as a military branch.
When they heard "Space Force," many Americans' first thought wasn't of the two-year-old U.S. Space Force military branch but, rather, a Netflix comedy series of the same name starring actor Steve Carell. The streaming giant's show parodied military life in the newest service with an ensemble cast and made it difficult for the real Space Force's Guardians to teach and educate the importance of their mission—protecting the U.S. satellite fleet—to the public.
The Air Force hosted the BRAVO 0 hackathon earlier this year—the first secret-classification hackathon with 80 hackers working on a so-called “air-gapped” system at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. While on the surface, the hackathon may have looked like an exercise in better data-sharing to drive rapid software development for weapon systems, Stuart Wagner, the service’s chief digital transformation officer, told FedScoop he is searching for a “Billy Mitchell moment” to spark innovation and change the way the service thinks about data and software development.
As 11 more Mi-17 helicopters originally intended for Afghanistan head to Ukraine, eyes turn to the Afghan Air Force planes left in Central Asia.
“While the world witnesses Russia’s senseless and shockingly muddled invasion of Ukraine, military logisticians around the globe are drawing a collective sigh: ‘See? We told you so.’ Two weeks ago, the Russian bear withdrew from key objectives that Western intelligence once estimated would fall in a matter of days. How did the Russian military go from near-peer powerhouse to sideshow spectacle in so little time? The answer is fuel. Russian planners fell victim to the classic blunder of warfare: ignoring their logistics,” write U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Theodore “Doc” Shanks, a C-17A command pilot as well as a national defense fellow and visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University; and Alexander Gard-Murray, a political economist at the university’s Climate Solutions Lab.
SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the Space Force, has selected 125 industry teams for the initial phase of the Orbital Prime program, an effort to develop technologies for orbital debris cleanup and other space services. Each team will receive a $250,000 contract to flesh out their concepts and do early design work.
Military officials from the Naval Postgraduate School and representatives from Microsoft say a new contract to explore technology in four cyber research areas is a sweet deal for everyone. “This allows us to let Microsoft inside of our problem space, and allow them to go out and build better things that will serve the military … and allies, for export, so that the collective international security enterprise is stronger,” said Col. Randy Pugh, NPS Senior Marine and Deputy Director of the Naval Warfare Studies Institute. “Also, dual-use, working the other direction, there may be things that we have thought about or have invented together that can be used by the general public.”
“The Ghost of Kyiv is a legendary superhero whose myth was created by Ukrainians! It is rather a composite image of the pilots of the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade of the Air Force of Ukraine, protecting the skies of the capital, who suddenly appear where they are not expected!” Ukraine's Air Force Command explained. It also denied claims that have popped up in the media in recent weeks, including that Ukrainian pilots had been training to fly U.S. F-16 fighter jets. However, Ukrainian pilots “are not yet studying abroad on the F-16, no matter how much we all want it,” the military said.