New research from Oxford University and the University of Adelaide found that asbestos exposure has led to a higher incidence of asbestos-related lung cancers in British and Australian naval personnel. The study published November 14 in the journal Scientific Reports estimates that the proportion of lung cancers related to onboard asbestos exposure was 27 percent in Australian naval personnel and 12 percent in British servicemembers.

[Related: The US never banned asbestos. These workers are paying the price.]

Toxic exposure

This study is a reminder of the continuing need for protections against exposure to harmful airborne dusts and other dangerous substances from sources like toxic burn pits. According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, nearly 300,000 United States veterans have reported exposure to pollution from burn pits since the early 2000s. The chemical pollutants that were released during these burns include volatile organic compounds associated with cancer, kidney disease, and nervous system damage. In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the PACT Act into law to address the health concerns related to burn pits like these.

Illnesses related to asbestos exposure persist, despite the mineral being a known carcinogen. Asbestos has been used in a wide variety of building materials for their strength, flexibility, and electrical and heat resistant properties. Breathing it in can cause mesothelioma, lung cancer, and a non-cancerous condition called asbestosis. About 1,290 Americans die annually from asbestos-related causes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Australia currently has a ban and strict control on asbestos-containing materials, they still pose a risk to some workers. A 2021-2022 New South Wales Dust Disease Register report found that there were 142 cases of asbestosis and 111 deaths related to the illness. 

In the United States, asbestos use is not completely banned. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed another ban in April of 2022 that has yet to be finalized. 

An increased risk to sailors

For this study, researchers collected data from 30,085 United Kingdom and Australian personnel who served during the 1950s and 1960s. During this time period, asbestos-containing materials were still present in British and Australian naval vessels. Earlier studies of one Australian and two British cohorts also involved in this new research found that increased rates of lung cancer could not be attributed to radiation exposure from nuclear testing. The team used a separate study of Australian Korean War veterans as a comparison in this new research.

The team found that all four cohorts had an elevated incidence of mesothelioma among naval veterans. This same rate was not not statistically significant among sailors from the Korean War. British and Australian personnel involved in nuclear testing also saw higher rates of lung cancers.

Additionally, the rates of pulmonary disease and heart disease were similar between naval and army personnel. This suggests that smoking was not driving higher lung cancer rates among sailors.

[Related: The PACT Act will take the burden of proof off US veterans exposed to burn pits.]

“We found the lung cancer rate was higher overall in naval personnel than in the other armed services, and, while smoking remains the dominant cause of lung cancer, it is unlikely the excess could be explained by a higher smoking rate in the navy,” study co-author and University of Adelaide medical doctor Richard Gun said in a statement.  “Although actual measurements of airborne asbestos levels were not available, and estimates are difficult, we have concluded that the higher lung cancer rate in sailors was most probably caused by onboard asbestos exposure.”

The high occurrence of deaths in sailors from asbestosis also strengthened the team’s conclusion. The team believes that the effects of asbestos exposure are likely underestimated, unless lung cancer is considered alongside mesothelioma and asbestosis.

“Although it remains true that smoking causes most lung cancers, other agents such as asbestos can contribute to the incidence of cancer in an exposed population,” Gun said. “Moreover, we know from other studies that the combination of smoking and asbestos exposure has an enhanced influence on lung cancer risk; this interactive effect would have contributed to the observed lung cancer excess.”

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Oceans are now one step closer to being battlefields for robotic ships. This past week the US Navy announced that its task force focused on developing autonomous technology and artificial intelligence for the service successfully fired several small missiles at empty boats in the Middle East as part of a test, hitting the targets each time. It was a major step in the Navy’s efforts to build uncrewed surface vessels (or USVs, as they are also called) that can be used for smaller combat situations.

The tests, dubbed Exercise Digital Talon, took what essentially looked like a small speed boat fitted with a weapons system in open international waters in the Arabian Peninsula on Oct. 23. The ship, called a MARTAC T38 Devil Ray USV, took its orders from a human operator who was on shore.

The Digital Talon tests were carried out by Task Force 59, a Navy group focused on building out USV capabilities and integrating them with crewed ships, in conjunction with Special Operations Forces Central Command.

“During Digital Talon, we took a significant step forward and advanced our capability to the ‘next level’ beyond just maritime domain awareness, which has been a traditional focus with Task Force 59,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, commander US Naval Forces Central Command (or NAVCENT), said in a statement. “We have proven these unmanned platforms can enhance fleet lethality.”

Watch the tests for yourself here.

The vessel used in the test was fitted with a small missile launching apparatus called a Lethal Miniature Aerial Missile System. The USV specifically fired a Switchblade 300 loitering munition, according to Switchblade maker AeroVironment. Loitering munitions function essentially like a drone with a camera, able to provide surveillance—but then operators have the option of having them hit a target like a missile. US special operations forces have increasingly used the Switchblade in recent years. Thanks to its versatility for surveillance and offense, the weapons were also sent to Ukraine as part of the American effort to arm Kyiv with an array of drones and powerful missile systems. The War Zone (which is owned by PopSci’s parent company, Recurrent Ventures) noted that the boat appears to have a Starlink satellite antenna module mounted on it.

This is not the first time the Navy has successfully fired a weapon from an uncrewed ship like this. In 2021, it successfully launched a SM-6 missile from the USV Ranger. That ship, essentially a repurposed supply vessel with advanced autonomous technology, let the Navy experiment with how automated systems and weapons platforms function when added to an existing vessel. 

The Digital Talon test marked the Navy’s first live-fire exercise with a USV in the Middle East, where the US military has increasingly deployed uncrewed surface vessels in recent years. Alongside testing the weapons systems themselves, Digital Talon was meant to examine the Navy’s capabilities for “manned-unmanned teaming.” And although the Switchblade munitions— while destructive—are much less powerful than the wider weapons capabilities of the Navy’s crewed vessels, the Digital Talon test is another benchmark in the Navy’s goal of building out its ghost fleet of USVs in the coming decades.

In fact, the Navy wants to deploy a lot of USVs in the next two decades. The Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan 2022, published in July 2022 by then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday, outlined a goal of essentially doubling the size of the current combat fleet by 2045, with 350 new crewed vessels by 2045 as well as 150 new vessels that are totally crewless. 

So far the US Navy has been steadily testing different models of USVs in the field. That ranges from smaller Saildrone Explorer USVs that the Navy uses to monitor Iranian maritime activities in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as having two USVs, including the USV Ranger, participate in the 2022 addition of a multinational exercise called the Rim of the Pacific. Although technically uncrewed, many of these USVs can also have Navy personnel onboard, for monitoring and manual control should the need arise. 

Uncrewed surface and submersible vessels have already been used as lethal and effective weapons. In the Middle East, Houthi militants have used USVs against Saudi Arabian forces, where the Saudi’s military capabilities and equipment far outclass the Yemeni rebels. In the war in Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have used these ships as part of joint aerial and maritime drone swarm attacks on Russian military ships.

The Digital Talon test also comes as the United States has increased its military presence in the Middle East over the past several months. That started in the spring and summer, in response to incidents in the Strait of Hormuz. The US military sent warships, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, and an array of additional aircraft to the region.

This past month, in response to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the Israeli war with Hamas, the US has sent additional troops and aircraft, as well as deployed two carrier strike groups to the region. In the Navy’s statement on the Digital Talon tests, Vice Admiral Cooper added that the successful exercise is helping the Navy with “strengthening regional maritime security and enhancing deterrence against malign activity.”

The Navy’s 2045 vision imagines a number of uncrewed or skeleton-crewed large ships in the fleet, such as the Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles. But smaller USVs like the one used for Digital Talon are important in other ways. These small vessels fitted with loitering munitions could essentially serve as a protective force for larger ships, intercepting boats and USVs armed with explosives for attacks on those vessels. As a war game in 2002 showed, the low-tech tactic of simply sending large waves of tiny vessels toward larger ships can be devastatingly effective. In that game, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, commanding the exercise’s adversarial “red team,” was able to quickly take out the more high-tech and advanced “blue team” vessels with such an attack. 

The Digital Talon test was just that—a test. It’s still unclear if the fleet proposal for 2045 that Gilday laid out will become a reality, as many of those ships would need to be financed and constructed. But last month’s test showed the very real weapons capabilities the Navy’s USVs have now, and could presumably be expanded to other ships in the current fleet.

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Unauthorized harvesting of Americans’ personal online data isn’t just a privacy issue—it’s also a matter of national security, according to new findings. As highlighted in a recent study from Duke University researchers, bad actors can purchase current and former US military personnel’s sensitive information for as little as 12 cents a person.

At any given time, third-party brokers are collecting and selling millions of people’s personal data, often without their knowledge or consent. Much of this information is legally collected through public records, via embedded codes within websites and apps, or by purchasing other companies’ customer data. This is particularly an issue in the US, where federal laws governing the online data brokerage industry remain relatively permissible—creating huge revenue streams for companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon. Depending on whose hands the data troves fall into, the information can be used for everything from targeted advertising, to surveillance, to financial fraud.

[Related: How data brokers threaten your privacy.]

Disturbingly, researchers at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy found US service members’ non-public, individually-identifying information such as credit scores, health data, marital status, children’s names, and religious practices—reportedly offered for sale through over 500 websites.

To test just how straightforward it can be to obtain the information, researchers first scraped hundreds of data broker sites for terms like “military” and “veteran.” They then contacted a number of these companies—some of which used .org and .asia domain names—via email, phone, Google Voice, and Zoom. The study authors eventually were able to purchase the personal data of almost 50,000 service members, and data about veterans, for barely $10,000. The team also noted that, in some instances, individuals’ current location data was available to purchase, although the authors did not do that.

Many brokers required little-to-no verification or proof of identity information before selling their sensitive data caches. In one instance, a company told researchers they needed to confirm their identity before purchasing military data via a credit card, unless the Duke University team opted to pay through a wire transfer—which they then did.

[Related: Your car could be capturing data on your sex life.]

This “highly unregulated” ecosystem is ripe for exploitation, write the study authors, and could be used by “foreign and malicious actors to target active-duty military personnel, veterans, and their families and acquaintances for profiling, blackmail, targeting with information campaigns, and more.” As NBC News also notes, foreign actors could use such data to identify and approach individuals for access to state secrets via blackmail, coercion, or bribery.

Like many tech industry critics, privacy advocates, and bipartisan politicians before them, the study’s authors stressed the need for comprehensive US data privacy oversight featuring “strong controls on the data brokerage ecosystem.” A handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, have passed or are considering individual data regulatory legislation, but a US federal law remains elusive. Researchers reference the American Data Privacy and Protection Act as a potential roadmap; Congress proposed the bill in 2022, but has yet to reintroduce it this session.

The study also cites the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) as another example of a strenuous, comprehensive approach to protecting online privacy. Passed in 2016 and enforced in 2018, the GDPR guards against many of the digital security problems faced by US residents.

Harvesting American data isn’t just a third-party broker issue, however. According to a partially declassified 2022 report released earlier this year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agencies including the CIA, FBI, and NSA consistently purchase citizens’ commercially available information from data brokers with little regulation or oversight.

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A team of scientists at Northwestern University have developed synthetic melanin that can accelerate healing in human skin. It is applied in a cream and can protect the skin from the sun and heal chemical burns, according to the team. The findings are described in a study published November 2 in the journal Nature npj Regenerative Medicine.

What is melanin?

Melanin is a pigment that is naturally produced in humans and animals. It provides pigmentation to the hair, eyes, and skin. It protects skin cells from sun damage by increasing pigmentation in response to the sun–a process commonly called tanning. 

“People don’t think of their everyday life as an injury to their skin,” study co-author and dermatologist Kurt Lu said in a statement. “If you walk barefaced every day in the sun, you suffer a low-grade, constant bombardment of ultraviolet light. This is worsened during peak mid-day hours and the summer season. We know sun-exposed skin ages versus skin protected by clothing, which doesn’t show age nearly as much.”

[Related: A new artificial skin could be more sensitive than the real thing.]

Aging in the skin is also due to simply getting older and external factors like environmental pollution. Sun damage, chronological aging, and environmental pollutants can create unstable oxygen molecules called free radicals. These molecules can then cause inflammation and break down the collagen in the skin. It is one of the reasons that older skin looks very different than younger skin. 

‘An efficient sponge’

In the study, the team used a synthetic melanin that was engineered with nanoparticles. They modified the melanin structure so that it has a higher free radical-scavenging capacity.

Researchers used a chemical to create a blistering reaction to a sample of human skin tissue in a dish. The blistering looked like a separation of the upper layers of the skin from each other and was similar to an inflamed reaction to poison ivy. 

They waited a few hours, then applied their topical melanin cream to the injured skin. The cream facilitated an immune response within the first few days, by initially helping the skin’s own free radical-scavenging enzymes recover. A cascade of responses followed where healing sped up, including the preservation of the healthy layers of skin underneath the top layers. The synthetic melanin cream soaked up the free radicals and quieted the immune system. By comparison, blistering persisted in the control samples that did not have the melanin cream treatment. 

“The synthetic melanin is capable of scavenging more radicals per gram compared to human melanin,” study co-author and chemist/biomedical engineer Nathan Gianneschi said in a statement.  “It’s like super melanin. It’s biocompatible, degradable,nontoxic and clear when rubbed onto the skin. In our studies, it acts as an efficient sponge, removing damaging factors and protecting the skin.”

According to the team, the super melanin sits on the surface of the skin once it is applied and isn’t absorbed into the layers below. It sets the skin on a cycle of healing and repair that is directed by the body’s immune system. 

[Related: The lowest-effort skincare routine that will still make your skin glow.]

Protection from nerve gas

Gianneschi and Lu are studying using melanin as a protective dye in clothing. The thought is the pigment could act as an absorbent for toxins, particularly nerve gas. 

“Although it [melanin] can act this way naturally, we have engineered it to optimize absorption of these toxic molecules with our synthetic version,” Gianneschi said in a statement

They are also pursuing more clinical trials for testing their synthetic melanin cream. In a first step, they recently completed a trial showing that the synthetic melanins do not irritate human skin. Since it protects tissue from high energy radiation, it could also be an effective treatment for burns cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy often experience. 

This research was funded by the United States Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

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The government’s ongoing campaign to investigate and destigmatize unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) sightings entered its latest stage this week. A new, easy-to-use online reporting tool is available to file incidents occurring as far back as 1945—but only for those already affiliated with the US government. For now.

Announced on October 31 by the Department of Defense, the system will be overseen by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and is specifically equipped to securely handle sightings involving national security information and military intelligence. The form is only intended for “current and former military members, federal employees and contractors” with “direct knowledge” of alleged US programs related to UAPs.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomena.]

The submission portal includes specific instructions for filing, and specifically prohibits including classified information in an initial report. That said, the AARO is cleared to handle sensitive material, which can be conveyed in potential follow-up interviews.

“The information you submit in the form will be protected,” AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick said via this week’s DoD announcement, adding that any information provided in subsequent follow-up interviews will also be safeguarded according to its proper classification. Any reports must also be firsthand accounts.

Established in July 2022, AARO formed following the dissolution of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Per its official description, it is charged with “minimiz[ing] technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.” AARO released its second annual UAP report earlier this year, which dramatically increased the number of documented sightings from 144 to 510 incidents—including 247 from the previous year alone.

AARO’s latest announcement also importantly notes that, although part of its congressional mandate required collecting information regarding “any potential UAP-related programs overseen by the U.S. government in the past,” it has yet to do so.

“We do have a requirement by law to bring those [witnesses] who think that it does exist, and they may have information that pertains to that,” Kirkpatrick said, while also making clear they “do not have any of that evidence right now.”

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

As AARO currently concerns itself predominantly with classified reports, NASA is continuing its own parallel investigations into declassified and public UAP sightings. In September 2023, the 16-member panel released a new independent study report, which recommended harnessing public trust of the agency alongside artificial intelligence programs to help sift through decades’ worth of UAP incidents.

But if you’re a plainclothes civilian still needing to get that one weird sighting off your chest, take heart: AARO is also planning to launch a similar public portal sometime in the near future.

“We want to hear from you,” said Kirkpatrick.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

THE YEAR WAS 1998. The computers were blocky, the jeans were baggy, and the US military was sending Marines to Iraq to support weapons inspections. Someone, also, was hacking into unclassified military systems at places like Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. Given the geopolitical climate, investigators wondered if the cyberattack was state-on-state—an attempt by Iraq to thwart military operations there. 

Three weeks of investigation, though, proved that guess wrong: “It comes out that it was two teenagers from California and another teenager in Israel that were just messing around,” says Jake Sepich, former research fellow at the Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology. 

The event came to be known, redundantly, as Solar Sunrise. And it illustrates the importance of being able to determine exactly who’s rifling through or ripping up your digital systems—a process called cyber attribution. Had the government continued to think a hostile nation might have infiltrated its computers, the repercussions of a misplaced response could have been significant.

Both cyberattacks and the methods for finding their perpetrators have grown more sophisticated in the 25 years since the dawn of Solar Sunrise. And now an organization called IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which is the intelligence community’s high-risk-high-reward research agency and is a cousin to DARPA—wants to take things a step further. A program called SoURCE CODE, which stands for Securing Our Underlying Resources in Cyber Environments, is asking teams to compete to develop new ways to do forensics on malicious code. The goals are to find innovative ways to help finger likely attackers based on their coding styles and to automate parts of the attribution process.

Who did the hacking?

There isn’t just one way to answer the question of cyber attribution, says Herb Lin, senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. In fact, there are three: You can find the machines doing the dirty work, the specific humans operating those machines, or the party that’s ultimately responsible—the boss directing the operation. “Which of those answers is relevant depends on what you’re trying to do,” says Lin. If you just want the pain to stop, for instance, you don’t necessarily care who’s causing it or why. “That means you want to go after the machine,” he says. If you want to discourage future attacks from the same actors, you need to get down to the root: the one directing the action.

Regardless, being able to answer the whodunit question is important not just in stopping a present intrusion but in preventing future ones. “If you can’t attribute, then it’s pretty easy for any player to attack you because there are unlikely to be consequences,” says Susan Landau, who researches cybersecurity and policy at Tufts University. 

In efforts to get at any of the three attribution answers, both the government and the private sector are important operators. The government has access to more and different information from the rest of us. But companies like Crowdstrike, Mandiant, Microsoft, and Recorded Future have something else. “The private sector is significantly ahead in technological advancement,” says Sepich. When they work together, as they will in this IARPA project, likely along with university researchers, there’s potential for symbiosis.

And there might just be some special sauce behind some of the collaborations too. “It’s not an accident that many of the people who start these private sector companies are former intelligence people,” says Lin. They often have, he says, social wink-wink relationships with those still in government. “These guys, you know, get together for a drink downtown,” he says. The one still on the inside could say, as Lin puts it, “You might want to take a look at the following site.”

Who wrote this code?

The project seems secretive. IARPA did not respond to a request for comment, and a lab that will be helping with testing and evaluation for SoURCE CODE once the competing teams are chosen and begin their work declined to comment. (Update: IARPA provided a comment after this story published. We’ve added it below.) But according to the draft announcement about the program released in September, the research teams will find automated ways to detect similarities between pieces of software code, to match attacks to known patterns, and to do so for both source code—the code as programmers write it—and binary code—the code as computers read it. Their tech must be able to spit out a similarity score and explain its matchmaking. But that’s not all: Teams will also develop techniques to analyze how patterns might point to “demographics,” which could refer to a country, a group, or an individual.

The general gist of the program’s approach, says Lin, is a bit like a type of task literary scholars sometimes undertake: determining, for instance, whether Shakespeare penned a given play, based on aspects like sentence structures, rhythmic patterns, and themes. “They can say yes or no, just by examining the text,” he says. “What this requires, of course, is many examples of genuine Shakespeare.” Maybe, he speculates, part of what the IARPA program could yield is a way to identify a nefarious code-writing Shakespeare with fewer reference examples. 

But IARPA is asking performers to go beyond lexical and syntactic features—essentially, how Shakespeare’s words, sentences, and paragraphs are put together. There’s much research out there on those basic matching tasks, and attackers are also adept at framing others (for example, counterfeiting Shakespeare) and obfuscating their own identities (being Shakespeare but writing differently to throw detectives off the scent).

One kind of code, for instance, called metamorphic malware, changes its syntax each generation but can maintain the same ultimate goals—what the program is trying to accomplish. Perhaps that is why SoURCE CODErs will focus instead on “semantic and behavioral” features: those that have to do with how a program operates and what the meaning of its code is. As a nondigital example, maybe many physicists use a specific lecture style, but no one else seems to. If you start listening to someone give a talk, and they use that style, you could reasonably infer that they are a physicist. Something similar could be true in software. Or, to continue the theater analogy to its closing act, “Can you extract the high-level meaning of those plays, rather than the individual use of this word here and that word there, in some way?” says Lin. “That’s a very different question.” And it’s one IARPA would like the answer to.

Although parts of SoURCE CODE will likely be classified (since parts of the informational sessions IARPA held for potential participants were), there is also value, says Landau, in the government crowing not just about attributional achievements but also about the capabilities that made them possible. In the last few years, she says, the government has become more willing to publicly attribute cyberattacks. “That’s a decision that it is better for US national security to acknowledge that we have the techniques to do so by, for example, putting it into a court indictment than it is to keep that secret and allow the perpetrator to go unpunished.”

Why did they do it?

Whatever SoURCE CODE teams are able to do will never be the end of the story. Because cyber attribution isn’t just a technical effort; it’s also a political one. The motivation of the bad actor doesn’t emerge just from code forensics. “That’s never going to come from technology,” says Lin. Sometimes that motivation is financial, or it’s a desire to access and use other people’s personal information. Sometimes, as in the case of “hacktivists,” it’s philosophical, the desire to prove a social or political point. More seriously, attacks can be designed to disrupt critical infrastructure, like the power grid or a pipeline, or to gather information about military operations. 

Often, the finger-pointing part won’t come from technical forensics, but from other kinds of intelligence that, conveniently, the intelligence community running this program would have access to. “They intercept email, and they listen to phone conversations,” says Lin. “And if they find out that this guy who loves his program is talking to his girlfriend about it, and they listened in on that conversation, that’s interesting.”

Update on November 9, 2023. IARPA provided the following comment following the publication of this story: “Every piece of software has unique fingerprints that can be used to extract hidden information. The SoURCE CODE program is looking to leverage these fingerprints to improve cyber forensic tools and disrupt cyber attackers’ capabilities. Quickly pinpointing the attribution of malicious attacks will help law enforcement respond with greater speed and accuracy, and help impacted organizations finetune their safeguards against future attacks.”

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On October 17, Japan’s military announced it had successfully test-fired a railgun on board a ship. The test was conducted by the Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency, Japan’s rough DARPA analog, and it was carried out in conjunction with Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. The railgun is framed specifically as a protective measure: by firing high-speed bullets, the railgun is designed to stop incoming attacks through the air or on the sea.

Most bullets are fired by a chemical propellant—a sparked reaction that ignites the dense gunpowder of a shot, which rapidly expands into gasses that propel a bullet down a gun barrel at high speeds towards a target. It’s a durable design, one continuously tweaked and iterated upon for a full millennia. Railguns still aim to propel a bullet rapidly through the air, but instead of using an explosion to do it, railguns use electromagnetic force to pull and accelerate a metal slug at great speeds and long ranges.

Here’s what it looks like, as shared by the Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency:

Japan’s military has planned for a railgun since at least 2015, with the goal of a ship-mounted weapon as part of the idea from the start. A 2016 demonstration of a railgun accelerated its projectile to a speed of 4,470 mph, or 5.8 times the speed of sound. That is hypersonic speed, or the range at which a new class of missiles in development by nations like the US, China, and Russia are designed to fly. By making a gun that can shoot projectiles that fly faster than hypersonic missiles fly, a railgun could possibly be a tool that can shoot down such weapons. A proposal for Japan’s 2023 defense budget explicitly refers to railguns as “capable of firing projectiles at high muzzle velocity in rapid succession to counter threats such as hypersonic missiles.”

“Starting in fiscal year 2022, we have been conducting research aimed at establishing the overall technology necessary for early practical realization of railguns, including rapid fire performance and stability during flight, which are important for the practical application of railguns,” a spokesperson from Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency told Naval News. “At the same time, we have been carrying out demonstration tests aimed at further practical application, such as carrying a railgun on board and conducting actual offshore firing. The Ministry of Defense intends to steadily work towards the early practical use of railguns in order to accelerate the strengthening of Japan’s defense capabilities.”

For the test-firing, the railgun was mounted on the JS Asuka, an Asuka-class research ship that has been a testbed for missile and sensor technologies in the past. Janes reports that crucial details of the weapon, like muzzle velocity and projectile weight, are being kept confidential. In a 2018 test, a Japanese Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency railgun fired a projectile at a speed of Mach 6.5.

In a March 2022 video from the Agency, the design of a 2020 prototype is discussed. Part of the concern expressed is that accelerating a projectile along a rail at these speeds can cause serious erosion, which damages the weapon and limits its continued and future utility. The prototype fired a 40mm projectile, at the same 4,470 mph (or Mach 5.8) speed as in the 2016 demonstration. 

Railguns can potentially be powerful guns for ships, and they could be used to protect from incoming missiles as the Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency expresses. Such high-exit velocities also allow the bullets themselves to function as offensive hypersonic weapons in their own right, powerful slugs slamming into far-away buildings or vehicles with tremendous kinetic force. 

Before aircraft carriers, gunships with powerful cannons, ultimately known as battleships, were the dominant vessel for war at sea, with guns that could bombard inland as well as devastate foes at sea. Better long-range sensors, especially radar, and the far reach of planes launched from aircraft carriers during and after World War II, mean that from the Cold War to the present shipboard guns switched from a primary threat to more circumscribed weapons, with ship-launched cruise missiles taking over the role of inland bombardment. Railguns, with the promise of powerful long-range shots that can stop missiles, sink ships, and devastate coastal defenses, offer a path back to relevance for shipboard guns.

The United States Navy has continued to pursue the development of railguns, with the intent that a projectile fired from such could intercept incoming attacks, as well as reach targets as far away as 50 to 100 nautical miles. Part of the challenge is developing a projectile that can work in railguns, as well as from existing cannons on US Navy ships.

In the meantime, the continued development of railguns as a counter-hypersonic weapon should complicate how military planners think about missiles as the answer to ships and seaborne threats.

Watch a clip from 2022 of the railgun demonstration below:

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On October 27, the Department of Defense announced that it wants to make a new variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb. This will be B61-13, the 13th such variant of the bomb design, and like all modern nuclear weapons, it will represent a repurposing of an older nuclear warhead, rather than a wholly new construction. As a gravity bomb, the B61-13 will be designed for release from a fighter or bomber, which would result in a thermonuclear blast and fallout plume that is devastating to anyone, civilian or military, in the affected area.

Atomic bombs are an almost 80-year-old technology, and thermonuclear bombs, which use an atomic warhead’s fission reaction to spark an explosive fusion reaction, are not much younger. The design for the first B61 variant began in 1963, which means the latest variant is continuing not just a 78-year legacy of nuclear gravity bombs, but a long legacy of this specific template for a gravity bomb. (A gravity bomb, by the way, is a bomb that falls to its target, sometimes though not always navigating as it descends.) 

Of those B61 variants, five remain in service today (the B61-3, B61-4, B61-7, B61-11, and B61-12), with the B61-13 slated to replace the existing stockpile of B61-7s.

Some B61 bombs can be carried by fighter jets like the F-15E and the F-16. But the B61-7 and, presumably its replacement, the B61-13, is designed for nuclear-capable bombers only, meaning that the B61-13 will likely be carried by the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, and possibly the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, if both are in service at the same time. (The iconic B-52 no longer carries gravity bombs, in part because modern anti-air missiles make the venerable bomber too vulnerable to being shot down when in bombing range. Instead, B-52s can carry existing and future air-launched nuclear cruise missiles.)

The B61-13 is intended to have the same yield as the B61-7, but with the modern safety, security, and accuracy features common to the B61-12 line currently in production. This includes the B61-12’s inertial guidance system, for greater accuracy, though there is only so much that specific accuracy matters when it comes to guiding a bomb that will produce blasts in the tens or hundreds of kilotons. 

“The B61-13 represents a reasonable step to manage the challenges of a highly dynamic security environment,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb in a release. “While it provides us with additional flexibility, production of the B61-13 will not increase the overall number of weapons in our nuclear stockpile.”

The single most concise way to describe a nuclear bomb is in terms of yield, or the TNT equivalent of explosive force that will be unleashed when it is detonated. The B61-3, -4, -7, and -12 variants all have dial-a-yields, meaning their explosive potential can be toggled before use, at the time the bomb is loaded onto the plane. For the B61-3, -4, and -12, this yield can be as low as 0.3 tons of TNT, or a fraction of the explosive force of the bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima (Little Boy, 15 kilotons) and Nagasaki (Fat Man, 20 kilotons) in August 1945. The maximum yield of the B61-4 and B61-12 is 50 kilotons, making every dialed-up bomb greater in explosive force than the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war.

The B61-12 was already designed to consolidate the four variants of B61 into a single upgraded universal design, replacing the 3s, 4s, 7s, and 10s. The B61-7 has a yield of 10 kilotons to 360 kilotons, and B61-10 has a yield of 0.3 tons to 80 kilotons. By replacing all of these weapons with the B61-12, that would cap the maximum yield of these specific gravity bombs at 50 kilotons. The B61-13 would have a yield of 10 kilotons to 360 kilotons.

Yields are an abstract way to talk about the effects of heat, pressure, and radioactivity on cities and people. NUKEMAP, by technology historian Alex Wellerstein, offers insight into how such blasts would play out in real life. A 50 kiloton warhead set off in lower Manhattan would kill an estimated 273,000 people, injure an estimated 471,000 more, and send a radioactive plume all the way to Hartford, Connecticut. A 360 kiloton bomb, in the same location, would kill an estimated 778,000, injure an estimated 1,045,000, and send a radioactive plume almost all the way to Lowell, Massachusetts.

While US cities would obviously not be the target of US nuclear bombs—and if they were hit by a nuclear weapon, it would likely be via intercontinental ballistic missile—it’s a useful context for understanding how the weapons, as designed, would work. 

“The B61-13 will strengthen deterrence of adversaries and assurance of allies and partners by providing the President with additional options against certain harder and large-area military Targets,” reads a fact sheet shared as part of the announcement of the B61-13. The fact sheet also notes that the development of the B61-13 is “pending Congressional authorization and appropriation.”

The fact sheet and announcement both emphasize that there is no specific threat driving this development. It is, instead, a policy choice undertaken by the Biden Administration. Writing for the Federation of American Scientists, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda argue that the B61-13 is announced as a way to replace the massive B83-1 (1,200 kiloton) gravity bomb with a larger weapon than the B61-12, but not one nearly as potent as the B83-1.

“The military doesn’t need an additional, more powerful gravity bomb,” write Kristensen and Korda. “In fact, Air Force officials privately say the military mission of nuclear gravity bombs is decreasing in importance because of the risk of putting bombers and their pilots in harm’s way over heavily defended targets – particularly as long-range missiles are becoming more capable.”

At present, the United States can deliver nuclear warheads through a range of means: submarine launched missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles fired from silos, and nuclear bombs or missiles launched from planes. Taken together, these submarines, silos, and planes constitute the “nuclear triad,” a Cold War plan that spread risk and responsibility of nuclear launch across a range of means, ensuring that in the advent of the worst war humanity had ever seen, at least some nuclear weapons would be able to launch and share misery in retaliation. Deterrence, or the strategic concept of nuclear-armed nations avoiding war because of fear of nuclear retaliation, also hinges on the threat of some retaliatory nukes surviving a surprise first strike.

It is precisely because the scale and power of nuclear weapons constrains their use in all but the most existential of wars—to the point where none has so far been used in war since their devastating debut in August 1945—that the nature, design, and continued production of thermonuclear weapons is a policy question. The continued modernization of the US nuclear stockpile, which means refurbishing parts like plutonium pits and moving old warheads to newer casings, is a choice successive US presidential administrations continue to make, adapting the weapons of the past for an uncertain future.

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On October 18, beneath the Nevada desert, the National Nuclear Security Administration intentionally set off a non-nuclear explosion. The US Geological Survey registered its magnitude at 1.7, precisely recording the detonation at 8:15 am and 59 seconds. It has been over three decades since the United States has detonated a nuclear weapon in testing, but the ability to detect such tests, especially underground, informs and guides US responses to other tests. The October 18 explosion, while not nuclear in nature, took place in the bones of old nuclear testing infrastructure, because it was designed to improve detection of nuclear tests.

So far in the 21st century, only North Korea has detonated nuclear weapons, and all of those tests were underground. But should an existing nuclear power resume testing, or a country debut its new nuclear arsenal with a test, underground detection will likely be the way this is discovered.

“These experiments advance our efforts to develop new technology in support of U.S. nuclear nonproliferation goals. They will help reduce global nuclear threats by improving the detection of underground nuclear explosive tests,” said Corey Hinderstein, NNSA’s Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, in a release.

The NNSA’s test took place at the Nevada National Security Site, which has previously been known as the Nevada Proving Grounds and more recently the Nevada Test Site. When it was used for active nuclear testing, between 1951 and 1992, the site hosted 100 atmospheric and 828 underground nuclear weapons tests. The United States has adhered to a moratorium on live tests of nuclear weapons since September 1992, following the Soviet one put in place in 1991 and adhered to by Russia ever since. In the absence of live tests, simulated tests with computer models have informed the continued study and maintenance of the US nuclear arsenal, powered by supercomputing and the extensive data collected during the nearly five decades of active nuclear testing.

[Related: The world’s most powerful computer could soon help the US build better nuclear reactors]

Still, computer models are based on observed, real-world data, and setting off a non-nuclear explosion at the Nevada National Security Site allowed those algorithms and assumptions to be validated.

“The experiment will help validate new predictive explosion models and detection algorithms. Measurements were collected using accelerometers, seismometers, infrasound sensors, electromagnetic sensors, chemical and radiotracer samplers, and meteorological sensors,” reads the NNSA release.

This recent test builds on previous work done at the Nevada site. From 2010 to 2019, researchers in the US nuclear enterprise, including scientists from the NNSA as well as researchers from Sandia National Laboratory, conducted the Source Physics Experiments. These were designed to help the United States be able to distinguish earthquakes from underground explosions, improving knowledge of both weapons testing and seismic activity. Besides Sandia, other participating organizations included Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Mission Support and Test Services LLC, which manages operations at the Nevada National Security Site.

While satellite surveillance makes surface tests detectable from above, underground tests are by design harder for outside powers to observe and track. One distinction between human-caused explosions and earthquakes is in the balance of compressional waves versus shear waves. But to make sure that nuclear tests were not getting lost or misinterpreted as routine seismic data, the labs set out to collect new data, distinguishing explosions from earthquakes.

“The only way to understand that better, in our opinion, was to do actual physical experiments. We couldn’t just simply have new modeling codes without something to test those new modeling codes against,” Sandia principal investigator and geophysicist Rob Abbott told Sandia LabNews in August 2019.

Sensors involved in one series of the Source Physics Experiment included accelerometers in the borehole and on the surface, infrasound, fiber optics, seismic monitoring, a borehole microphone, radon sensors, photogrammetry, pre-and-post site surface mapping, and others. By modeling what the test should expect to find, placing sensors based on that modeling, and then conducting real-life tests with non-nuclear explosives, the researchers were able to greatly contribute to the data needed to find nuclear detonations, all without detonating a live nuke.

The science of last week’s test is straightforward. The geopolitical timing of the October 18 test is intriguing, as it occurred simultaneously with Russia’s parliament voting to un-ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a multilateral agreement that bans nuclear testing and set up an international organization to monitor for such tests. This de-ratification comes as part of an ongoing turn away from the arms control that defined the second half of the Cold War and the first couple decades after it. Russia possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, though the United States stockpile is close behind. So far, no country that entered the 21st century with a nuclear arsenal has detonated a nuclear weapon, in testing or otherwise.

The NNSA has shared the seismic data of its October 18 test with other nations and researchers across the globe. While nuclear tests remain unlikely, shared information about how those tests will appear on seismic sensors allows the rest of the world to respond from a point of familiarity and agreement.

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On Wednesday, October 18, an electric aircraft powered by a single propeller flew into, and then out of, Joint Base Andrews, the military facility famous for hosting Air Force One. That planned stop at the Maryland base was part of a long journey from Vermont to Florida.

Today, the aircraft, created by Vermont-based Beta Technologies, finally arrived in Florida, touching down at Duke Field airport, which is part of Eglin Air Force Base. The reason for the long trip from north to south is for Beta to give the US Air Force a chance to test the battery-powered aircraft and see how it handles tasks like moving cargo.

The testing the Air Force carries out will involve gathering “both ground and flight data,” says Maj. Riley Livermore, the flight commander for the 413th Flight Test Squadron. The exercises will involve “flying from point A to point B,” testing the plane at “different speeds,” simulating “different payloads,” and in general “seeing how the aircraft performs.” During these tests the aircraft will be crewed, meaning that it will be flown by a pilot who is on board the plane. The accouterments at Duke Field also include a Beta-installed charger to give the aircraft the juice it needs.

The aircraft, called Alia, has a 50-foot-long wing, seats for two pilots up front, and cargo space behind them. Beta is developing two different versions of the electric plane. One is called a CTOL aircraft, which stands for “conventional take-off and landing.” The aircraft that the Air Force will have on hand in Florida is outfitted for CTOL flight, meaning it takes off and lands by cruising down a runway, like a regular plane. A second version is designed for VTOL flight, an acronym that stands for “vertical take-off and landing.” That variant utilizes four propellers that are parallel to the ground to allow it to take off and land in that fashion. Both variants have a propeller in the back to push it through the air. Beta has a contract with UPS to eventually sell the package-carrier 10 planes, with an option for more, and also has a contract with United Therapeutics. The goal is to sell zero-emissions aircraft to companies that will use them for schlepping packages, cargo, and logistics.

[Related: Futuristic aircraft and robotic loaders dazzled at a Dallas tech summit]

Livermore says that having the aircraft for testing will allow them to compare how it stacks up against Alia’s “glossy brochure” in real-world use. “Actually doing it for months on end is gonna really give us good exposure to where it’s really strong, and where more development or investment is needed,” he adds. Part of that could involve monitoring how much it costs to charge up the aircraft’s batteries and keeping an eye on its maintenance needs. 

The arrival of this electric aircraft at an Air Force base parallels a similar development that occurred in September, when Joby Aviation delivered their electric flying machine to Edwards Air Force Base in California. That VTOL aircraft from Joby will be flown in an uncrewed, remote fashion at first, and the Air Force says they might use the Joby aircraft for tasks like keeping an eye on the base’s perimeter. The Air Force, through a program called AFWERX and Agility Prime, will be testing out both the Beta aircraft in Florida and the Joby aircraft in California. “The data we’re generating here for Beta—that same kind of data is being collected for Joby” at Edwards, says Livermore, even if it’s not precisely an “apples-to-apples comparison.” Still, information regarding how long it takes to charge up a plane like this applies to both aircraft, as does answering questions about their ranges.

Beta and Joby are not the only two companies working on electric flight, to be sure. Other notable players in the new industry include Wisk, which is part of Boeing, and Archer, which just said it had flown its Midnight aircraft for the first time. Joby has also announced that it will build a large production facility to make its aircraft in Ohio, while Beta has opened a large production facility to do the same in Vermont. That Beta facility in Vermont measures 188,500 square feet—that’s about the size of 67 tennis courts—and has solar panels on the roof for power and geothermal wells for the climate system.

To get down to Florida, the Beta aircraft made more than a dozen stops along the way, departing Burlington, Vermont on October 11 and flying 84 miles to Glens Falls, New York, a hop that took 49 minutes. It eventually left New York, flying through states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and finally ended up in Florida. The distance covered for the entire mission was 2,000 miles, according to Beta. 

Several different pilots took turns operating it, including Nate Moyer, who has military experience flying aircraft such as F-16s. He was also the pilot at the controls for when the aircraft flew in and out of Joint Base Andrews. “The responsiveness is unbelievable,” he says, describing what it’s like to fly Alia. “It’s sensitive enough that I just kind of breathe on the stick and it does exactly what I want it to do.” In that sense it’s like the control stick for an F-16, which is also known for being very sensitive to pilot inputs. 

Like a trip that this same Beta aircraft took last year out to Arkansas, this journey down south was a chance for regular people to see a neat new plane. “People come up and they ask really interesting questions that I never would have expected. We had a 5-year-old ask if we came from Mars,” Moyer mentions. “We didn’t actually remember to tell him ‘no,’ so I don’t know what he actually believes.” 

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On September 9, Marines at Twentynine Palms, California, strapped a rocket launcher to the back of a commercially available robotic goat as part of a tactical training exercise. In a video of the test, the robotic goat is set up for safety on a firing range within a little sandbagged shelter, cleared to fire, and then the rocket-propelled grenade launches off the goat’s back. (While most quadrupedal robots of this size are referred to as robot dogs, the Marine Corps referred to the robot in question as a robotic goat.) The test, one of several new and autonomy-adjacent technologies demonstrated that day, offers a glimpse into what robot-assisted combat of the present and the future could look like.

The test was conducted by the Tactical Training and Exercise Control group, together with the Office of Naval Research, and it took place at the Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command, which is the largest Marine Corps base. The rocket-propelled grenade launcher used was an M72 Light Anti-tank Weapon (or LAW). The weapon is a NATO standard, and thousands of the weapons have been delivered to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022.

The M72 LAW has been in service with US forces since 1963. Weighing just 5.5 pounds, the weapon is light, cheap enough to discard after firing, and dead simple to use. A Marine Corps guide notes that it is a standard tool of infantry battalions (which includes roughly 800 Marines). The weapon is also not specific to any line of service and “can be fired by any Marine with basic infantry skills.”

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

The rockets fired by the launcher can travel up to 3,280 feet, but are most effective at a range of 650 feet. That’s a dangerously close distance to be near a tank, as it places the person trying to destroy the tank within range of not just the tank’s big cannon but also any machine guns it may have for self-defense. This danger is exacerbated for armies fighting in open fields, but the M72 was designed for the density and obstructions of urban combat. All of those features, from simplicity to disposability to close-range firing, make it an ideal weapon to mount on a remote-controlled robot shooter.

“Instead of having a Marine handle the weapon system, manipulate the safeties, we could put a remote trigger mechanism on it that allowed it to all be done remotely,” said Aaron Safadi, in a release on the test. Safadi is the officer in charge of the emerging technology integration section of the Tactical Training and Exercise Control group. “The Marine could be behind cover and concealment, the weapon system could go forward, and the Marine could manipulate the safeties from a safe place while allowing that weapon system to get closer to its target.”

The robot goat on which the Marines tested the M72 is, as a Marine emphatically explains in the video, a tool for testing and not the intended robot for carrying it into combat. As reported by The War Zone, “the underlying quadrupedal robot is a Chinese-made Unitree Go1, which is readily available for purchase online, including through Amazon.” (The War Zone is owned by PopSci’s parent company, Recurrent Ventures.)

In the past, security concerns about using off-the-shelf robotics and drones made in China have led to the Department of Defense banning their use without explicit waivers for permission. That’s left the Pentagon in a sometimes tricky spot, as the overwhelming majority of commercial manufacture of such robots is in China, to the point that even models branded Made in USA have Chinese components.

Both Ukraine and Russia have adopted off-the-shelf commercial robots for use in their war against each other. The low price point of the Go1 goat robot suggests it could follow a similar pattern, should it prove useful as a remote-control firing platform. The Marine Corps, should it pursue a different mount for the M72, could pursue a platform like the Ghost Robotics Q-UGV. This four-legged robotic dog has already seen use patrolling an Air Force base in Florida, and in 2021 Ghost demonstrated a version of the Q-UGV with a gun mounted on its back at a defense technology exposition.

To mount the M72 on the robot goat, the robot first dons a metal box with firing controls and safety switches on its back. After firing, the box can be opened, the spent launcher discarded, and the robot is ready to take on a new round. It is easy to see the appeal of such a system in combat. With the M72 designed to punch through armor or defenses at short range, the driver could use a video-game-like controller to scout ahead, watching through the robot’s cameras as eyes. Sensors on the side of the robot help it avoid other obstacles. Once it’s in position, the robot’s rocket could be launched, and if the robot survives the encounter, it could let the Marine witness the destruction before advancing.

Bringing tanks or other armored vehicles into cities is already a fraught decision, as urban combat necessitates reduced perception. Cities, even ones reduced to rubble, can hide all sorts of waiting unpleasantness. For urban defenders and assaulters alike, the ability to mount weapons on robotic scouts, even and especially disposable robots with disposable weapons, offers a way to take a first toe into urban combat without exposing troops to excess danger.

Watch a video of the robot goat, and other items test in the training exercise, below:

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“I always build things,” says Dan Hryhorcoff. 

Case in point: Hryhorcoff has constructed an absolutely delightful giant bumper car, a project that he says began during the pandemic. The rest of us may have baked bread as COVID came down the pike, but Hryhorcoff, who lives in northeastern Pennsylvania and has also built a submarine, constructed an enormous blue bumper car. It gets its propulsion from a repurposed Chevrolet engine and is street-legal. 

Before he constructed the big bumper car, Hryhorcoff had made a different vehicle, starting on it around 2013 or so. “When I retired, I decided I kind of wanted to build a car,” he recalls. For that project, he chose to focus on a 1950s pedal car for children called a Murray “sad face.” “I decided to copy that and make a large one.” (Those Murray models have a front that does indeed look like a sad face, but anyone who sees Hryhorcoff’s work will probably smile.) 

Creating that big red vehicle provided him with further experience working with fiberglass, a material he had also worked with when building the submarine. “I had a lot of fun with that [Murray car] at car shows and things, and it got a lot of attention from a broad audience,” he says.

“Then COVID hit,” he adds. He wanted a new project. His thinking? “Another car project would be good.” 

Building the big bumper car

He settled on a bumper car. To get the source material he needed for the project, he turned to an amusement park in Elysburg, Pennsylvania called Knoebels, and the bumper cars they have there. Specifically, he focused on the 1953-model bumper car that was made by a company called Lusse. He liked that it had a “Chevrolet pickup truck sorta look” from the 1950s. 

“I decided to copy one of those,” he says. Spending some eight hours at Knoebels gave him the chance to get the information he needed. “I measured, and took photos, and made templates, and whatever I needed to, to copy the car as well as I can.” He chose to make his version of the car double the size of the base model. As the Scranton Times-Tribune noted in a story about Hryhorcoff in July, the bumper car ride at Knoebels dates back to the immediate post-World-War-II era.

[Related: This Florida teen is making a business out of rebuilding old-school auto tech]

Inside, the big bumper car’s power plant comes from a Chevrolet Aveo. “I took the front of the Aveo, and chopped it off, and put that in the back of the bumper car,” he explains. “And the front of the bumper car is a motorcycle wheel.” That single wheel up front means it can turn very sharply. The exterior is made out of fiberglass. All told, it measures 13 feet long, 7 feet wide, and 5.5 feet tall, making it twice the size of a regular bumper car. A pole in the back mimics the way actual bumper cars get their electricity, except this one connects to nothing. 

A project like this would likely be a bumpy ride for anyone without the experience that Hryhorcoff, 72, brings to the table. “I learned to run a lathe when I was 13 years old, with my dad, and he was kind of a jack-of-all-trades,” he recalls. (A lathe is a tool for forming metal into a round shape, and a wood lathe is the kind of equipment you could use to make a baseball bat.) He built a go-cart, tinkered with lawn mowers, and learned about auto repair in a garage. His interest, as he describes it, was “all around mechanical.” 

He spent four years after high school in the Navy in the early 1970s, where he worked stateside and repaired radios for F-4 jets, and then studied mechanical engineering at Penn State. After working for a drilling company, he started his own machine shop called Justus Machine. 

Always diving into something new

The submarine he built came from plans for a K350 model purchased from George Kittredge, and is called Persistence. “I knew I was building something that wasn’t gonna kill me, if I build it correctly,” he says. (Watch a video of the sub in action here.) That sub has gone as deep as 540 feet with no one on board, Hryhorcoff says, and he’s taken it down himself to about 150 feet deep. 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

Hryhorcoff describes himself as an engineer, not an artist, and prefers to follow plans and undertake projects in which he knows any challenges he might face are surmountable. “Any project I’ve ever chose was a project that I knew I can get through it, but I had something new to learn in the process,” he says. “There were always some unknowns.” But those unknowns, he adds, were within the realm of doable for him and his equipment, even if he had to learn new stuff along the way.

“I’d rather big projects, rather than a dozen little ones,” he adds. 

Watch a short video about Hryhorcoff and this project, below:

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On October 10, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary dedicated a ship called the Proteus in a ceremony on the River Thames. The vessel, which looks like someone started building a ship and then stopped halfway through, is the first in the fleet’s Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance program, and is a conversion from a civilian vessel. 

In its new role, the Proteus will keep a protective eye on underwater infrastructure deemed vitally important, and will command underwater robots as part of that task. Before being converted to military use, the RFA Proteus was the Norwegian-built MV Topaz Tangaroa, and it was used to support oil platforms.

Underwater infrastructure, especially pipelines and communications cables, make the United Kingdom inextricably connected to the world around it. While these structures are hard to get to, as they rest on the seafloor, they are not impossible to reach. Commercial vessels, like the oil rig tenders the Proteus was adapted from, can reach below the surface with cranes and see below it through remotely operated submarines. Dedicated military submarines can also access seafloor cables. By keeping an eye on underwater infrastructure, the Proteus increases the chance that saboteurs can be caught, and more importantly, improves the odds that damage can be found and repaired quickly.

“Proteus will serve as a testbed for advancing science and technological development enabling the UK to maintain the competitive edge beneath the waves,” reads the Royal Navy’s announcement of the ship’s dedication.

The time between purchase and dedication of the Topaz Tangaroa to the Proteus was just 11 months, with conversion completed in September. The 6,600-ton vessel is operated by a crew of just 26 from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, while the surveillance, survey, and warfare systems on the Proteus are crewed by 60 specialists from the Royal Navy. As the Topaz Tangaroa, the vessel was equipped for subsea construction, installation, light maintenance, and inspection work, as well as survey and remotely operated vehicle operations. The Proteus retains its forward-mounted helipad, which looks like a hexagonal brim worn above the bow of the ship.

Most striking about the Proteus is the large and flat rear deck, which features a massive crane as well as 10,700 square feet of working space, which is as much as five tennis courts. Helpful to the ship’s role as a home base for robot submersibles is a covered “moon pool” in the deck that, whenever uncovered, lets the ship launch submarines directly beneath it into the ocean.

“This is an entirely new mission for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary – and one we relish,” Commodore David Eagles RFA, the head of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, said upon announcement of the vessel in January.

Proteus is named for one of the sons of the sea god Poseidon in Greek mythology, with Proteus having domain over rivers and the changing nature of the sea. While dedicated on a river, the ship is designed for deep-sea operation, with a ballast system providing stability as it works in the high seas. 

“Primarily for reasons of operational security, the [Royal Navy] has so far said little about the [Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance] concept of operations and the areas where Proteus will be employed,” suggests independent analysts Navy Lookout, as part of an in-depth guide on the ship. “It is unclear if she is primarily intended to be a reactive asset, to respond to suspicious activity and potentially be involved in repairs if damage occurs. The more plausible alternative is that she will initially be employed in more of a deterrent role, deploying a series of UUVs [Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles] and sensors that monitor vulnerable sites and send periodic reports back to the ship or headquarters ashore. Part of the task will be about handling large amounts of sensor data looking for anomalies that may indicate preparations for attacks or non-kenetic malign activity.”

In the background of the UK’s push for underwater surveillance are actual attacks and sabotage on underwater pipelines. In September 2022, an explosion caused damage and leaks in the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. While active transfer of gas had been halted for diplomatic reasons following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the pipeline still held gas in it at the time of the explosion. While theories abound for possible culprits, there is not yet a conclusive account of which nation was both capable and interested enough to cause such destruction.

The Proteus is just the first of two ships with this task. “The first of two dedicated subsea surveillance ships will join the fleet this Summer, bolstering our capabilities and security against threats posed now and into the future,” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said in January. “It is paramount at a time when we face Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, that we prioritise capabilities that will protect our critical national infrastructure.”

While the Proteus is unlikely to fully deter such acts, having it in place will make it easier for the Royal Navy to identify signs of sabotage. Watch a video of the Proteus below:

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On October 8, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean, as part of an American response to the surprise and staggering attack on Israel’s military and civilians by the armed group Hamas. Then, on October 14, Austin sent the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean. 

The United States Navy maintains 11 carrier strike groups, which are formations including not just the namesake carrier and its aircraft, but also an escort fleet of other ships. The carriers are the most visible, tangible expression of naval power abroad, and the deployment of two carrier strike groups is both a threat of force and shows where the US most wants to attempt to deter the outbreak of further violence through that show of force.

The attack that sparked the deployment of the two US carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean started with bulldozers, drones, motorboats, and paragliders. Gaza is home to two million Palestinians, of whom about half are under the age of 18. Hamas, the militant group elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and which has not held an election since, broke through the wall maintained by Israel around the Gaza Strip, and launched attacks killing an estimated 1,400 people in Israel, including civilians. Retaliatory airstrikes, launched by Israel’s military against Gaza, have killed over 2,700 people, including civilians, and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. The death totals, especially in Gaza, continue to increase, as hospitals run out of supplies. The situation is evolving and has complex roots.

Beyond Hamas and Israel, there’s a chance that the outbreak of violence could expand to involve regional military players, like Iranian-backed Hezbollah north of Israel in Lebanon, Iran itself, or other countries in the region. President Joe Biden has traveled to Israel to meet with its government. 

An aircraft carrier, complete with escort ships and fighter firepower, is designed to fight the planes and ships of nations more than it is built to root out fighters with rifles hiding in city blocks. In the October 8 announcement of the deployment, Austin said the Ford Carrier Strike Group was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to “bolster regional deterrence efforts.” In the October 14 announcement, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group’s deployment was part of moves to “signal the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war.”

To better understand the US force projection in response to this outbreak of violence, it is important to understand aircraft carriers, and the fleets that escort them.

What is a carrier strike group?

Alone, an aircraft carrier is a powerful weapon. The size of a small town, one carrier can be a tempting target. The Nimitz-class carriers, which make up most of the US carrier fleet at present, carry around 5,000 to 5,200 people. This crew is primarily devoted to operating and maintaining the ship, which is powered by a pair of nuclear reactors, while about 1,500 of that crew is dedicated to flying and maintaining the 60 or more aircraft flown from a carrier. 

Ford-class carriers, the planned replacement for the Nimitz class, are crewed by just over 4,500 people total, and can carry and launch over 75 aircraft. (Currently there is one Ford-class carrier in the fleet, which is the USS Gerald R. Ford.) Both Nimitz and Ford-class carriers are 1,092 feet long, their decks constituting the runway for takeoff and landing of planes at sea.

Because carriers are so large—by design, they have to be—they make enticing targets for enemies at war. “Carrier Group” as a phrase first appears in the Popular Science archives in a July 1985 story called “Invisible Subs” that describes ships as either “submarines or targets.” The ship-mounted weapons on carriers are largely defensive: anti-air and anti-missile Sea Sparrow missiles, Phalanx Close-In Weapon Systems designed to intercept rockets, and other projectiles with radar-targeted bullets.

Those weapons should be seen as a last line of defense for carriers. The first lines of defense are the other ships that accompany carriers as they move about the globe.

In Secretary Austin’s announcements, he names specific ships in each carrier group. The USS Gerald R. Ford is escorted by the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy, as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt. The USS Eisenhower is escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and is carrying the nine aircraft squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 3. In general, a carrier group has between three and four surface ships escorting it, as well as an assumed (but not announced) attack submarine traveling near the fleet underwater.

Carrier Air Wing 3 includes four squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornets, jet fighters that can fly over 1,200 nautical miles; these jets can carry a range of weapons including anti-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, guided and unguided bombs, and more. These planes are the primary strike force of the carrier group, allowing the US Navy to attack and destroy vehicles, people, and buildings far from shore. In addition to the strike fighters, a carrier air wing includes E-2C Hawkeyes, which are big flying tactical radars; EA-18G Growlers, which carry electronic warfare weapons for jamming and obscuring enemy sensors; and Seahawk helicopters, which can be used to launch anti-tank missiles and for submarine hunting, among other roles.

The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers are, as the name suggests, armed with an array of missiles, including cruise missiles to hit targets on land, as well as anti-submarine missiles and torpedoes to protect against enemies underwater. Guided missile destroyers are similarly armed, with anti-air missiles as well as part of the regular complement.

Much of the equipment of a carrier strike group is built around the particular vulnerability of aircraft carriers to anti-ship missiles and submarines—threats that are unlikely to be a factor for deployments in the eastern Mediterranean. The offensive firepower, from cruise missiles to guided bombs dropped by fighter jets, enable the carrier groups to pose an outsized threat. 

The presence of a carrier strike group can be seen as a form of deterrence, and deterrence is a strategic bet that the presence of massive retaliatory power is enough to prevent an armed group from trying to advance their political aims through violence. If the actions of other armed groups in the region can be shifted, deterred, or delayed by the presence of the US Navy, this would be the force that can do it.

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On May 30, Canadian defense company Roshel Defence Solutions officially launched its new armored troop transport, the Senator model Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. Part of the launch was surviving a series of tests to prove that the vehicle can protect its occupants. 

The testing was conducted by Oregon Ballistic Laboratories and done to a standard called NATO “STANAG 4569” level 2. (STANAG means “standard agreement,” and 4569 is the numbering of that agreement.) What that means in practice is that the Senator MRAP is designed to withstand a range of the kinds of attacks that NATO can expect to see in the field. These include bullet fire from calibers up to 7.62×39mm at roughly 100 feet (30 meters). Why 7.62×39mm caliber bullets? That’s the standard Soviet bullet, which has outlasted the USSR itself and is common in weapons used across the globe.

In addition, STANAG 4569 dictates that the vehicle must survive a 13 pound (6 kg) anti-tank mine activated under any of the vehicle’s wheels, as well as survive a mine activated under the vehicle’s center. Beyond the bullets and mines, the vehicle also has to withstand a shot from a 155mm high explosive artillery shell burst landing 262 feet (80 meters) away. 

All of this testing is vital, because a troop transport has to advance through bullet fire, keep occupants safe from mines, and travel through an artillery barrage. That NATO standards are designed to withstand Soviet weapons is a convenience for any equipment exports aimed at Ukraine, but also means the vehicles are broadly useful in conflicts across the globe, as an abundance of Soviet-patterned weaponry continues to exist in the world. 

To showcase the Senator MRAP in simulated attack, Roshel released two videos of the testing. The first, published online on May 29, features a bright green checkmark in the corner, “all tests passed” clearly emblazoned on the video as clouds of destruction and detonations appear behind it.

A second video, released June 16, shows the Senator MRAP in slow motion enduring a large TNT explosive hitting it on the side. The 55 lbs (25kg) explosive is a stand-in for an IED, or Improvised Explosive Device. IEDs were commonly used by insurgent forces in Iraq against the United States, and in Afghanistan against the NATO coalition that occupied the country for almost 20 years. While anti-tank mines tend to be mass-produced industrial tools of war, IEDs are built on more of a small scale, with groups working in workshops generally assembling the explosives and then placing them on patrol routes.

It was the existence of IEDs, and their widespread use, that prompted the United States to push for, develop, and field MRAPs in 2006. Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles were not a new concept. South Africa was one of the first countries to develop and field MRAPs in the 1970s, putting essentially a V-shaped armored transport container on top of an existing truck pattern. The resulting “Hippo” vehicle was slow and cumbersome, but could protect its occupants from explosives thanks to the V-shaped hull deflecting blasts away. 

MRAPS did not guarantee safety for troops on patrol, but they did drastically increase the amount of explosives, or the intensity of attack, needed to ambush armored vehicles.

“The presence of the MRAP also challenged the enemy, since the insurgents had to increase the size of their explosive devices to have any effect on these more survivable vehicles. The larger devices, and longer time it took to implant them, increased the likelihood that our troops would detect an IED before it detonated,” Michael Brogan, head of the MRAP vehicle program from 2007 to 2011, told the Navy’s CHIPS magazine in 2016.

The Senator MRAP features, like its predecessors, a V-shaped hull. It also benefits from further innovations in MRAP design, like mine-protected seats, which further reduce the impact of blast on their occupant. Inside, the Senator can transport up to 10 people, and Roshel boasts of its other features, from sensor systems to weapon turrets. For as long as IEDs and mines remain a part of modern warfare, it is likely we can expect to see MRAPs transporting soldiers safely despite them.

Watch one of the tests, below:

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Last week at a ranch outside Dallas, Texas, hundreds of people gathered to hobnob and discuss topics like transportation, aviation, drones, and more. Some were clad in cowboy hats. The event, called the UP.Summit, included investors, politicians, business leaders, representatives from large companies like Airbus, Bell, Boeing, as well as relatively newer players like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation that are working on electric aircraft. 

On display was gear and hardware from companies like Wisk, Zipline, Jedsy, and much more.  

Take a look at some of the flying machines and other gadgets and equipment that were at the event, which is put on by investment firm UP.Partners.

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On the second floor of the Walter E. Washington convention center in the District of Columbia sits a robot tanklet, designed to hunt drones. The uncrewed vehicle is the TRX SHORAD, and it is part of the display from defense giant General Dynamics Land Systems, assembled alongside the wares of over 650 other exhibitors for the annual Association of the United States Army meeting and exhibition. The TRX SHORAD suggests a future of robot-assisted combat, where attacks by drones are met with the automated speed and power of a companion robot built to destroy quadcopters.

TRX SHORAD is a composite name. TRX is the category name for General Dynamics 10-ton tracked robots, a platform that can accommodate a range of payloads including cargo and weapons. SHORAD is a military acronym for “Short Range Air Defense,” a category that is somewhat vague but broadly includes finding and destroying threats such as drones, helicopters, low-flying planes, and more.

“The TRX SHORAD is designed to bring a new dimension of combat power in SHORAD battalions and provides autonomy within a tiered, layered air defense,” reads the description from a General Dynamics video of the vehicle. 

[Related: The Army’s new 42-ton assault vehicle has a compelling backstory]

In the video, a blurred-out quadcopter with the rough contours of a DJI Phantom is spotted moving over a field. The TRX SHORAD tracks the drone across the sky, then pivots its turret, aiming what appears to be rockets and a large caliber gun at the drone. With a powerful “ka-thunk,” the robot’s turret fires on the quadcopter, and the still-blurred drone falls after a cloud of smoke. In a second demonstration, a similarly blurred-out quadcopter erupts into a smoke cloud and plummets. Unblurred, in the background of the video, is a drone that appears to be patterned like a DJI Inspire, which was likely used to capture much of the mid-air footage.

This is a kind of aerial warfare, but it takes place in the low sky, the space immediately above the heads of soldiers and vehicles. It’s a space previously occupied largely by projectiles, rockets and mortars and missiles. Drones, which offer greater scouting possibilities while also carrying weapons and facilitating attacks, change the fundamental dynamic of aerial threats to armies.

What is most crucial about the range of threats these weapons are designed to stop is that they exist at a cost, operational profile, and likely even altitude that is hard for the jet fighters of the Air Force to intercept and destroy in a timely way. In other words, a quadcopter can launch, scout, and return before a jet can be launched to respond. The Army used to maintain dedicated units called Air Defense Artillery to protect against aerial threats, but, as a report from the Congressional Research Service notes, “in the early 2000s, these ADA units were divested from the Army to meet force demands deemed more critical at that time. Decisionmakers accepted the increased risk that threat aircraft might pose to ground forces and other critical assets because they believed the U.S. Air Force could maintain air superiority.”

What has changed since the early 2000s is the preponderance of drones used by militaries. “Since 2005, potential threats from air and missile platforms that could threaten U.S. ground forces have significantly increased. The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) has increased, and UASs have been used successfully by both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” the CRS report notes.

These drones come in a range of sizes and variable threats. Small, hobbyist or commercial drones, like the DJI Phantom models used for anti-drone target practice, can carry cameras and be flown by anyone in minutes. In the summer of 2022, Russian infantry reported that moving in battle without quadcopters was like “fighting as ‘blind kittens.’” These drones can also be adapted to carry small bombs, the size of grenades or so. With a first-person view, or cameras allowing remote pilots to steer the drone as though they are on board, cheap drone bombers have been used to devastating effect in battle.

While commercial drones are commonly used in battle, drone scouts the size of small planes can fulfill a role once taken on by human-piloted aircraft, carrying weapons and intelligence missions at a greater distance than the short-range drones flown by infantry squads. Self-detonating drones, used as cheaper alternatives to cruise missiles, are abundant and deadly enough to constitute yet another new threat on the battlefield.

All of these threats pose a risk that is hard for an air force to directly address. This is the layer of layered defense that vehicles like the TRX SHORAD, or other SHORAD vehicles, are designed to fill. With bullets for small drones, larger projectiles for bigger and faster threats, and sensors to detect and track the movements of aircraft, TRX SHORAD could accompany soldiers, trucks, and tanks on maneuver, offering another line of defense against the crowded low skies of modern warfare.

Watch a video of TRX SHORAD below:

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The F-35 is built for a war fought with missiles. The United States’ newest stealth fighter comes in three flavors: F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy. All variants are built around a shared architecture and mission: to destroy enemy targets, while evading detection long enough to return and fly another day. These missions are, thanks to the specific nature of stealth, at cross-purposes: weapons carried externally by a plane make it more visible to radar, undermining stealth, while only storing weapons internally limits what a fighter can bring to battle. 

On September 25, the Air Force publicly stated it had earlier that month awarded a contract to defense giant Northrop Grumman Defense Systems to start work on the Stand-in Attack Weapon, or “SiAW.” The contract, with a value of up to $705 million, is for “an advanced air-to-surface missile providing stand-in platforms the ability to rapidly strike a wide variety of targets.”

“Air-to-surface” encompasses virtually everything not in the sky or orbit as a potential target, and given that the F-35 is designed to fight at sea as well as over land, it includes ships, tanks, buildings, and anything else below. Northrop Grumman, in a September 25 release, emphasized that the SiAW will “provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets as part of an enemy’s anti-access/area denial environment.”

“Anti-access/area denial” is modern military jargon for an old concept. The terms essentially mean weapons that will attack and threaten to destroy planes, boats, and other enemies that move too close to the defenses. Because weapon technologies adapt, the military uses a catch-all term, though some specific examples are useful for understanding these techniques. On land and in the sea, mines are a kind of denial technology, as they threaten anyone attempting passage with an abrupt and explosive end. For aircraft, anti-air missiles can deny aircraft safe flight, as can jammers that interfere with sensors like radar or GPS. For marines advancing up a beach, or soldiers fighting through a forest, artillery fire is an attempt to deny access. Anti-ship missiles, like their anti-air counterparts, threaten any ship that advances within range, promising a watery death should they hit a vulnerable enough spot.

In peacetime, these defenses serve as a warning, as an ominous threat of what a country could threaten should hostilities break out. Should the United States go to war against a country with such defenses, it will want to destroy as many of them as it can, while allowing its own forces to get close enough. This is where a weapon like the SiAW comes into play. 

The SiAW is designed to be carried internally by the F-35, Janes reports. That means the stealth fighters can use the weapon without compromising their stealth, as weapons carried externally make the planes more visible on radar. Stealth is largely a material and structural technology, where the specific shape and texture of a plane are used to minimize how few radio waves are reflected back towards the radar that emitted them. Earlier in September, the efficacy of this stealth was clearly on display, after an F-35B pilot ejected and the Marine Corps turned to the public for help tracking down the missing plane.

Stealth ensures that the F-35s can get closer to their targets than they would without it. Air and Space Forces Magazine reports that the Air Force is setting the targets for the SiAW as air defense radars, command posts, ballistic and cruise missile launchers, GPS jamming systems, anti-satellite systems, and “other high-value or fleeting targets.”  Destroying any and all of those targets make it easier for other parts of the military to advance and survive, including jets with more weapons that aren’t stealthy. 

The Air Force has declined to give the range for the new SiAW weapon, though the operating assumption is that it will be longer range than the High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) air-to-surface missiles in use today. Those missiles have a stated range of over 30 miles. The Air Force aims to have the SiAW at an initial operational capability by 2026; it expects to buy 400 of the missiles by 2028, with up to 3,000 eventually.

Should the missile deliver as promised, it will allow F-35s to launch attacks on targets at useful ranges, giving the military more options than just long-range cruise missiles to destroy important targets in advance of an assault. Unlike cruise missiles, SiAWs fired from F-35s or other planes will be able to catch more mobile vehicles, ensuring that if there’s a weapon that can be relocated, the missile is a tool to destroy it before it disappears.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

IF A BUILDING COLLAPSES or a bomb goes off, there are often more people who need medical treatment than there are people who can help them. That mismatch is what defines a mass casualty incident. The military’s most famous R&D agency, DARPA, wants to figure out how to better handle those situations, so more people come out of them alive.

That’s the goal of what the agency is calling the DARPA Triage Challenge, a three-year program that kicks off November 6 and will bring together medical knowledge, autonomous vehicles, noninvasive sensors, and algorithms to prioritize and plan patient care when there are too many patients and not enough care—a process typically called triage. Teams, yet to be named, will compete to see if their systems can categorize injured people in large, complex situations and determine their need for treatment.

A sorting hat for disasters

Triage is no simple task, even for people who make it part of their profession, says Stacy Shackelford, the trauma medical director for the Defense Health Agency’s Colorado Springs region. Part of the agency’s mandate is to manage military hospitals and clinics. “Even in the trauma community, the idea of triage is somewhat of a mysterious topic,” she says. 

The word triage comes from the French, and it means, essentially, “sorting casualties.” When a host of humans get injured at the same time, first responders can’t give them all equal, simultaneous attention. So they sort them into categories: minimal, minorly injured; delayed, seriously injured but not in an immediately life-threatening way; immediate, severely injured in such a way that prompt treatment would likely be lifesaving; and expectant, dead or soon likely to be. “It really is a way to decide who needs lifesaving interventions and who can wait,” says Shackelford, “so that you can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

The question of whom to treat when and how has always been important, but it’s come to the fore for the Defense Department as the nature of global tensions changes, and as disasters that primarily affect civilians do too. “A lot of the military threat currently revolves around what would happen if we went towards China or we went to war with Russia, and there’s these types of near-peer conflicts,” says Shackelford. The frightening implication is that there would be more injuries and deaths than in other recent conflicts. “Just the sheer number of possible casualties that could occur.” Look, too, at the war in Ukraine. 

The severity, frequency, and unpredictability of some nonmilitary disasters—floods, wildfires, and more—is also shifting as the climate changes. Meanwhile, mass shootings occur far too often; a damaged nuclear power plant could pose a radioactive risk; earthquakes topple buildings; poorly maintained buildings topple themselves. Even the pandemic, says Jeffrey Freeman, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, has been a kind of slow-moving or rolling disaster. It’s not typically thought of as a mass casualty incident. But, says Freeman, “The effects are similar in some ways, in that you have large numbers of critically ill patients in need of care, but dissimilar in that those in need are not limited to a geographic area.” In either sort of scenario, he continues, “Triage is critical.”

Freeman’s organization is currently managing an assessment, mandated by Congress, of the National Medical Disaster System, which was set up in the 1980s to manage how the Department of Defense, military treatment facilities, Veterans Affairs medical centers, and civilian hospitals under the Department of Health and Human Services respond to large-scale catastrophes, including combat operations overseas. He sees the DARPA Triage Challenge as highly relevant to dealing with incidents that overwhelm the existing system—a good goal now and always. “Disasters or wars themselves are sort of unpredictable, seemingly infrequent events. They’re almost random in their occurrence,” he says. “The state of disaster or the state of catastrophe is actually consistent. There are always disasters occurring, there are always conflicts occurring.” 

He describes the global state of disaster as “continuous,” which makes the Triage Challenge, he says, “timeless.”

What’s more, the concept of triage, Shackelford says, hasn’t really evolved much in decades, which means the potential fruits of the DARPA Triage Challenge—if it pans out—could make a big difference in what the “greatest good, greatest number” approach can look like. With DARPA, though, research is always a gamble: The agency takes aim at tough scientific and technological goals, and often misses, a model called “high-risk, high-reward” research.

Jean-Paul Chretien, the Triage Challenge program manager at DARPA, does have some specific hopes for what will emerge from this risk—like the ability to identify victims who are more seriously injured than they seem. “It’s hard to tell by looking at them that they have these internal injuries,” he says. The typical biosignatures people check to determine a patient’s status are normal vital signs: pulse, blood pressure, respiration. “What we now know is that those are really lagging indicators of serious injury, because the body’s able to compensate,” Chretien says. But when it can’t anymore? “They really fall off a cliff,” he says. In other words, a patient’s pulse or blood pressure may seem OK, but a major injury may still be present, lurking beneath that seemingly good news. He hopes the Triage Challenge will uncover more timely physiological indicators of such injuries—indicators that can be detected before a patient is on the precipice.

Assessment from afar

The DARPA Triage Challenge could yield that result, as it tasks competitors—some of whom DARPA is paying to participate in the competition, and some of whom will fund themselves—with two separate goals. The first addresses the primary stage of triage (the sorting of people in the field) while the second deals with what to do once they’re in treatment. 

For the first stage, Triage Challenge competitors have to develop sensor systems that can assess victims at a distance, gathering data on physiological signatures of injury. Doing this from afar could keep responders from encountering hazards, like radioactivity or unstable buildings, during that process. The aim is to have the systems move autonomously by the end of the competition.

The signatures such systems seek may include, according to DARPA’s announcement of the project, things like “ability to move, severe hemorrhage, respiratory distress, and alertness.” Competitors could equip robots or drones with computer-vision or motion-tracking systems, instruments that use light to measure changes in blood volume, lasers that analyze breathing or heart activity, or speech recognition capabilities. Or all of the above. Algorithms the teams develop must then extract meaningful conclusions from the data collected—like who needs lifesaving treatment right now. 

The second focus of the DARPA Triage Challenge is the period after the most urgent casualties have received treatment—the secondary stage of triage. For this part, competitors will develop technology to dig deeper into patients’ statuses and watch for changes that are whispering for help. The real innovations for this stage will come from the algorithmic side: software that, for instance, parses the details of an electrocardiogram—perhaps using a noninvasive electrode in contact with the skin—looking at the whole waveform of the heart’s activity and not just the beep-beep of a beat, or software that does a similar stare into a pulse oximeter’s output to monitor the oxygen carried in red blood cells. 

For her part, Shackelford is interested in seeing teams incorporate a sense of time into triage—which sounds obvious but has been difficult in practice, in the chaos of a tragedy. Certain conditions are extremely chronologically limiting. Something fell on you and you can’t breathe? Responders have three minutes to fix that problem. Hemorrhaging? Five to 10 minutes to stop the bleeding, 30 minutes to get a blood transfusion, an hour for surgical intervention. “All of those factors really factor into what is going to help a person at any given time,” she says. And they also reveal what won’t help, and who can’t be helped anymore.

Simulating disasters

DARPA hasn’t announced the teams it plans to fund yet, and self-funded teams also haven’t revealed themselves. But whoever they are, over the coming three years, they will face a trio of competitions—one at the end of each year, each of which will address both the primary and secondary aspects of triage.

The primary triage stage competitions will be pretty active. “We’re going to mock up mass-casualty scenes,” says Chretien. There won’t be people with actual open wounds or third-degree burns, of course, but actors pretending to have been part of a disaster. Mannequins, too, will be strewn about. The teams will bring their sensor-laden drones and robots. “Those systems will have to, on their own, find the casualties,” he says. 

These competitions will feature three scenarios teams will cycle through, like a very stressful obstacle course. “We’ll score them based on how quickly they complete the test,” Chretien says, “how good they are at actually finding the casualties, and then how accurately they assess their medical status.” 

But it won’t be easy: The agency’s description of the scenarios says they might involve both tight spaces and big fields, full light and total darkness, “dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds.” Victims may be buried under debris, or overlapping with each other, challenging sensors to detect and individuate them.

DARPA is also building a virtual world that mimics the on-the-ground scenarios, for a virtual version of the challenge. “This will be like a video-game-type environment but [with the] same idea,” he says. Teams that plan to do the concrete version can practice digitally, and Chretien also hopes that teams without all the hardware they need to patrol the physical world will still try their hands digitally. “It should be easier in terms of actually having the resources to participate,” he says. 

The secondary stage’s competitions will be a little less dramatic. “There’s no robotic system, no physical simulation going on there,” says Chretien. Teams will instead get real clinical trauma data, from patients hospitalized in the past, gathered from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center and the University of Pittsburgh. Their task is to use that anonymized patient data to determine each person’s status and whether and what interventions would have been called for when. 

At stake is $7 million in total prize money over three years, and for the first two years, only teams that DARPA didn’t already pay to participate are eligible to collect. 

Also at stake: a lot of lives. “What can we do, technologically, that can make us more efficient, more effective,” says Freeman, “with the limited amount of people that we have?” 

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A crewed submarine is, at its most elemental level, a machine designed to preserve a bubble of air underwater and keep the rest of the ocean out. The complexities of submarine design— everything from propulsion to sensors to controls—have to be designed with this overriding purpose in mind. Because the whole of the submarine needs to maintain this careful containment at all times, what might otherwise be a nothing part, like a deck drain assembly, is crucial to the longer-term viability of the submarine. On September 25, shipbuilders General Dynamics Electric Boat, along with Huntington Ingalls Industries, announced that they had successfully used additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to create a part for the Virginia-class submarine Oklahoma.

The part printed is a deck-drain, and it was manufactured on land out of copper-nickel. The part still needs some machining to refine it before it is installed, but the printing of a replacement piece is a big step forward towards easier, on-demand parts for submarine repair in the future.

“This collaborative project leverages authorizations made by the Navy that streamline requirements for low-risk additive manufacturing parts. It is possible due to the foresight and longer-term development efforts by our engineers to deploy additive manufacturing marine alloys for shipbuilding,” said Dave Bolcar in a release. Bolcar is the vice president of engineering and design at the Newport News Shipyard, the Huntington Ingalls Industries division that worked on the 3D printed part.

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

Additive manufacturing has appeal and utility across the hobbyist, commercial, and industrial spaces for a host of reasons. The ability to rapidly prototype parts, and then produce physical approximations to refine, is useful. It’s still a major step to go from exploring a part through a printed design to a printed part being up to the task required of a completed piece.

Printing parts on land for repair allows naval suppliers to prove the technology is workable, and apply it to immediate needs.

On a ship, and on a submarine more than most other kinds of ships, every part needs to fit precisely, within set parameters so that the vessel can continue to remain watertight and airtight where it needs to be. Ships are also deeply constrained in space on board, so the availability of spare parts stockpiled for emergency or even just routine repair is finite and based on estimates before vessels embark. Onboard printers would allow repair underway, while printers at ports can ensure new parts are ready for docked vessels.

Just print it out

The Navy operates in confined spaces and on a global stage. With bases and ports scattered across the globe, managing the resupply of ships and planes means overseeing supply chains in places as far apart as Spain and Guam, and ports in-between. For the past decade, the US Navy has explored 3D printing as a way to ease that logistical load.

The premise of 3D printing is straightforward. If the raw material for many parts can be stored in undifferentiated form, and then produced as needed for repairs, that raw material and printer becomes far more flexible than having already assembled pieces stockpiled. Printers can produce errors in manufacturing, so the Navy has spent years working on how to create stuff with a minimum of error.

“We’re at the front end of this. There are parts that require airworthiness for approval and the non-air worthiness, the non-airworthiness are easier to do,” Lieutenant General Steven Rudder of the Marine Corps told USNI News in 2018. “You’re going to see additive manufacturing, both in industry and in our FRC’s [Fleet Readiness Center]. The Air Force is ahead of us on metal printing; you’re going to see that really take off. That’s just at the beginning of stages.”

The Navy also explored not just having 3D printers at ports of call, but also having printers onboard ships, ready to print spare parts while under way. 

In 2021, the Navy tested a large, almost room-sized, 3D printer from Xerox, which could create parts in aluminum at a base on land. In 2022, the Navy also installed an identical printer on board the USS Essex, a ship that in any other navy would count as a full-sized aircraft carrier, but for the US is classified as a Landing Helicopter Dock. The parallel trials of printers at sea and on land was to see if the conditions of being on the ocean, with the humidity and rocking waves, would produce different results than the same parts made on land. (Xerox ultimately sold its 3D printing division to another company in the additive manufacturing space.)

When it comes to printing parts for the submarine, space is already at a premium, even more so than on a surface vessel. Making the drain parts by additive manufacturing shows that, while submarines may not be able to print their own parts, the small, mundane yet vital pieces needed for ship operation can still be made to order. Every part of a ship seems mundane until it doesn’t work and needs to be replaced, and then suddenly it becomes crucial.

The post Shipbuilders 3D-printed a part for a nuclear submarine appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

This investigation was co-produced with New Lines Magazine and supported in part by a grant from The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. 

Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. 

Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have carried down from the mountains. A gritty wind stings their chapped cheeks as they load the heavy trucks beside them. In these parts of Achin, nothing else moves in the bleached landscape. For years, locals say this harsh terrain has been haunted by a deadly, hidden hazard: chemical contamination.

In April 2017, the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional bomb ever used in combat here: the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known unofficially as the “mother of all bombs,” or MOAB. 

Before the airstrike, Qudrat Wali and other residents of Asad Khel followed as Afghan soldiers and U.S. special forces were evacuated from the area. Eight months after the massive explosion, they were finally allowed to return to their homes. Soon after, Wali says, many of the residents began to notice strange ailments and skin rashes.

“All the people living in Asad Khel village became ill after that bomb was dropped,” says Wali, a 27-year-old farmer, pulling up the leg of his shalwar kameez to show me the red bumps stretched across his calves. “I have it all over my body.” He says he got the skin disease from contamination left by the MOAB.

When Wali and his neighbors returned to their village, they found that their land did not produce crops like it had before. It was devastated, he says, by the bomb’s blast radius, that reached as far as the settlement of Shaddle Bazar over a mile and a half away.

“We would get 150 kilograms of wheat from my land before, but now we cannot get half of that,” he says. “We came back because our homes and livelihoods are here, but this land is not safe. The plants are sick, and so are we.” 

The bomb residue plaguing the village is but one example of the war’s toxic environmental legacy. For two decades, Afghans raised children, went to work and gave birth next to America’s vast military bases and burn pits, and the long-term effects of this exposure remain unclear. Dealing with the consequences of the contamination will take generations.

“Devastated by toxic exposures”

America’s 20-year military occupation devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens and genotoxins—toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA—into the environment without accountability. 

Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits—some reported to be the size of three football fields—inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.

Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.

From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases—and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them—say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer.

In his 2022 State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden was unequivocal about such causality, but only as it related to U.S. veterans. He described “toxic smoke, thick with poisons, spreading through the air and into the lungs of our troops.” He called on Congress to pass a law to “make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care they deserve.”

A few months later, Congress passed a bill known as the Pact Act, adding 23 toxic burn pit and exposure-related health conditions for which veterans could receive benefits, including bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and nine newly eligible types of respiratory cancers, at a cost of more than $270 billion over the next decade. The law represented the largest expansion of veterans’ benefits in generations. 

But neither Biden nor Congress said anything, or promised any assistance, to the Afghans who lived near those U.S. military bases or worked on them and still suffer from many of the same illnesses and cancers. 

Under Section 120 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, the Department of Defense is required—for U.S. sites on home turf—to take responsibility for all remedial action necessary to protect human health and the environment caused by its activities in the past. However, a DOD regulation prohibits environmental cleanups at overseas military bases that are no longer in use, unless required by a binding international agreement or a cleanup plan negotiated with the host country before the transfer. 

In 2011, the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan reached a peak of about 110,000 personnel—NATO forces contributed an additional 20,000—generating roughly 900,000 pounds of waste each day, the bulk of which was burned without any pollution controls, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, a U.S. watchdog agency. Afghan laws forbidding burn pits were not applicable to U.S. and other international forces, and according to soldiers and residents, the U.S. military persisted in its use of burn pits until its withdrawal in August 2021, despite efforts to limit their use that began in 2009 and a 2018 prohibition on burn pits “except in circumstances in which no alternative disposal method is feasible.”

What America left behind 

My father came from Nangarhar, and I have wanted to tell this story for years. Although I was adopted and grew up overseas, when I returned to the country as a journalist, in 2019, I began to understand the true scale of the damage that America’s military inflicted on Afghanistan. Some bases were like small cities, belching round-the-clock smoke that tainted the skyline while processions of waste-filled trucks flooded out of them. 

When I learned about the millions of pounds of hazardous waste that the bases produced, I filed a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to SIGAR to obtain photographs of active burn pits. Using GPS coordinates embedded in the photo’s metadata, I mapped and measured the sizes of the burn pits at bases across the country. I saw the rusting hulks of Soviet-era planes and American military vehicles piled up on the bases. A 2011 photograph of the scrap in Shindand base in the western province of Herat looks exactly the same on satellite today. According to satellite imagery designed to monitor active fires and thermal anomalies, several burn pit locations at Bagram were last active in mid-June of 2021.

In the summer of 2022, I visited the sites of three of the largest former U.S bases in Afghanistan—in the provinces of Nangarhar, Kandahar and Parwan—to document what was left on the ground by America.

A year earlier, I spent months traveling across Iraq to report on the effects of pollution and military contamination on Iraqis and the environment. I knew that the American military’s effect on Afghanistan and its people mirrored problems in Iraq but was far less documented. 

It was only after the Taliban moved back into power, ending the American war in August 2021, that I had the opportunity to dig deeper into the issue. On my fourth journey back to the country since the takeover, I landed on the airstrip at Kabul airport and spotted a stub of cement “T-wall” with “Clean up your fucking trash” graffitied in English, presumably by a member of the international forces during their chaotic evacuation. But the Americans had left more than just garbage: They had filled the air with toxic pollutants and dumped their raw sewage in fields and waterways across Afghanistan.

No longer facing the same threat, the enormous former U.S. bases still hold an array of poisonous detritus and sit silently against the majestic landscape, with one or two Taliban guards lazing in watchtowers on their phones. 

The skies, too, have changed since the Taliban takeover. The burn pits’ noxious black plumes, the surveillance blimps and the buzz of helicopters are all but a memory now. New faces occupied the driver’s seats of the police and military vehicles. And for many, particularly in rural areas of the country, the end of the airstrikes and night raids was long overdue and a welcome relief. There were, however, new problems to contend with under the Taliban government, including an extreme clampdown on women’s rights and a severely weakened economy. 

Over the course of six months, I traveled across the country and spoke with 26 medical practitioners and 52 Afghan residents living near those bases about their health problems, which they believe are a direct result of waste from the bases.

Farmers told me that they witnessed U.S. military contractors dump sewage and waste into their fields. Residents described how, for years, they had bathed in sewage-clogged streams that flowed from inside the base walls and breathed in the billowing clouds of poisonous pollutants from the open-air burn pits. I saw young children making a living scavenging scrap metal from the bases who are now suffering from eye infections and persistent skin diseases, according to the doctors treating them. 

I also spoke with Afghan and American soldiers who believe their health problems and diseases are directly related to their work on the American military bases in Afghanistan. One former Afghan soldier I spoke with, who didn’t give his name for fear of repercussions from the Taliban, trained new recruits at the Kandahar airfield for 13 years. He said he was close to the burn pits for the entirety of his service and had respiratory problems as a result. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Medical professionals with years of experience treating those affected, including military doctors who worked on U.S. bases caring for both Afghan and U.S. soldiers, told me that there was, categorically, no way that the burning and dumping of waste did not affect the health of everyone in the surrounding areas—and still does.

The “mother of all bombs”

In Achin in Nangarhar, Wali hides his rash and leans over the counter in the small shop where he sells snacks and drinks, on a bridge near Momand Dara village. Below him, a stream burbles quietly. 

“I know my skin disease is from the bomb because there were no such diseases before it,” he says pointedly. 

He looks out at the silent Mohmand Valley ahead of him. Fields thick with shrubs and trees fill the valley floor. As it narrows, the hills on either side merge into mountains. In the distance, the magnificent Spin Ghar, or White Mountains, mark the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby is the Tora Bora cave complex, built with CIA assistance for the mujahedeen, after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the late 1990s, it became an al-Qaida stronghold. It was also the site of the U.S. government’s failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at the start of America’s war in Afghanistan. 

The MOAB was dropped about 550 yards from Wali’s home—a seven-minute walk from his shop, he says, as he hops from stone to stone across a narrow brook leading the way. 

Containing nearly 19,000 pounds of Composition H6, a powerful mix of TNT, RDX, aluminum, and nitrocellulose explosives, the MOAB’s destructive force is roughly equivalent to the smallest of the Cold War-era tactical nuclear devices in the American arsenal. It was pushed from the rear of an MC-130 cargo plane and dropped on a cave complex used by Islamic State militants, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said at the time. President Donald Trump, who had promised during his 2016 campaign to go after the Islamic State and “bomb the shit out of ’em,” called the strike “another very, very successful mission.” Afghan defense officials claimed that 36 Islamic State fighters were killed in the attack.

When Wali returned home months later, the bomb’s destruction was hard to see. There was no obvious massive crater; only some scorched stones and a few burned trees marked the site of the bombing. 

His home still stands, though not all dwellings in Asad Khel survived, the rubble now inhabited by straying goats. Ten families are living in the village in rebuilt homes, Wali says. His neighbors have the same itchy red rash.

“All but two or three people in each home have the skin rash,” he says, “and everyone thinks that their skin diseases are from the bomb.”

His mother, Wali Jana, 60; his wife, Nafisa, 20; and their two children, Mir Hatam, 3, and Qasim, 2, all have the same skin condition. 

“Whatever medicine the doctors are giving us is not making us better,” Wali says. 

The rashes don’t heal. They itch constantly and continue to leak a pus-like liquid, he tells me. After dozens of trips to the doctor and many tests, he has yet to find any relief or explanation for the rash. 

“All we can do is try to take measures to stay away from this disease,” he says. “I wash twice a day and change my clothes daily.”

This was not the first bomb to hit this area, he says. “But this one was different.”

In Nangarhar, “everything is poisoned” 

The Jalalabad airfield sits southeast of the city. For 20 years, it was home to Afghan and U.S. soldiers. Its eastern and southern walls are surrounded by agricultural land and mechanic and scrap metal shops packed with everything from gas masks to tools with the American flag printed on them, medical equipment, treadmills and a framed poster of the film “The Terminator.” Just down the road, there are warehouses with busted Humvees waiting to be dismantled into parts for sale. To the north is the Jalalabad-Torkham highway leading to the Pakistani border. The streams that run out of the base and under the highway flood through a cluster of villages whose residents use the water to drink from and wash in.

“The water was very clean before the Americans came,” says 36-year-old Mohammed Ajmal, pointing to a milky gray stream flowing from a hole in the high wall surrounding the base. Casting a broad shadow over the murky water, he adds, “Some people in this area have kidney problems. Others have breathing problems and skin diseases. I am not sure if these diseases came from the chemicals in the missiles from the base or from the polluted waste they put in the stream.”

“Everything is poisoned,” he says. 

Dr. Mohammad Nasim Shinwari, who has worked from his small clinic near the base for the past 17 years, says that pollution from the base is responsible for the most common health problems he sees. Only a small dried-up field separates his clinic from the burn pits that were blazing at least once a week, he says. “Now imagine breathing that for your whole life.” 

Residents filed complaints that U.S.-hired contractors from the base were unloading the tankers of waste in front of their houses and in their fields, Sadullah Kakar, a former employee of the Ministry of Border and Tribal Affairs, told me weeks earlier. Shinwari says that up until the Americans’ exit from the base, the contractors were dumping waste “secretly” in some locations. “Other times, they were just dumping it in the fields right here, by the base. No one could stop them.”

As patients crouch on the curb outside the two-room clinic, grasping plastic folders of medical documents in their hands, Shinwari scribbles down the location where tanker trucks from the base would dump raw sewage in farmers’ fields. 

Like Ajmal, Shinwari also attributes many of the illnesses he has seen to the chemicals from the bombs, missiles and other munitions that fell on fields and villages. The doctor described how, in his home district of Shinwar and neighboring Achin, few plants have grown on the land in the five years since the MOAB was dropped. 

“People thought that the Americans had sprayed chemicals in the air or added something to the source of water,” Shinwari says. “But it was the MOAB bomb.”

For Ajmal, the polluted waterway flowing from the base is a lingering reminder of America’s longest war. 

“The wells in our homes are also contaminated,” he says, his brow furrowed. “Every week they would bring the sewage tankers from the base and empty them in the stream and in the land around. The water would get very dark and would have a very bad smell. Many people here have kidney problems, and if you look at the trees growing in the river, they are also damaged,” he says, pointing to a row of trees along the bank, half-submerged in the murky water. 

Then there were the missiles and rockets, Ajmal says, pointing toward the heavily fortified concrete walls of the Jalalabad airfield, looming over the low-rise homes. 

“You could smell the chemicals. We were breathing them.” He wipes the tip of his nose at the memory. The U.S. military deployed its High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, and Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, both guided surface-to-surface weapons, in Afghanistan. 

A wide range of rockets and missiles contain propellants with hazardous components, including perchlorate, the main ingredient of rocket and missile fuel, which can affect thyroid function, may cause cancer and persists indefinitely in the environment. U.S. forces have also been accused of using potentially toxic depleted uranium munitions in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, although they have denied the claim. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says exposure to DU from friendly fire has had no effect on the kidneys of American soldiers but that there is a possible link to lower bone density. 

One of the weapons misfired and struck a relative’s home next to his, Ajmal tells me, destroying both homes. His wife was pregnant with their son, Mohammed Taha, at the time. The boy, now 10, has been ill since birth and has a rash on his scalp that leaves bald itchy patches. 

Ajmal, his three brothers and their families live just 160 yards from the airfield, in an area called Qala-e-Guljan. Nine members of Ajmal’s extended family have serious health issues. His two sons have suffered from heart problems since birth—medical records show that one has a hole in his heart. His 15-year-old daughter, Soma, also has a chronic skin rash that stretches across her back, chest and thighs. 

Similar accounts of rampant, unusual health issues afflicting entire families are commonplace in the villages around the base. 

Wali Ur Rahman, 26, takes a rest from the sweltering 108 degrees Fahrenheit June heat under a concrete gazebo in the center of his field, which sits next to Ajmal’s home. Rahman and his father, brother, sister-in-law, uncle and nephew, have lived here for the past 22 years. All have kidney problems, according to doctors’ reports that I reviewed, from kidney calcification and kidney stones to renal failure. His son and his nephew also have respiratory problems. 

Doctors told Rahman that without treatment he will need a kidney transplant, which he cannot afford. 

The family eats the food they grow in their field, which is irrigated by the stream—there are no other options. He suspected that the sewage-infested stream by their home was the cause of his family’s health problems, so he dug a well inside their home for drinking water. Now, he thinks the well is supplying dirty water; shortly after his young nieces and nephews began using it, they also became sick.

Groundwater wells are the main source of drinking water in Afghanistan. A report from 2017 in the scientific journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment mapped water quality for half of the country, finding a range of potentially toxic substances, including boron, as well as high levels of arsenic and fluoride in several areas. Although some of these substances can be naturally occurring, they are also associated with industrial use. Other water quality studies conducted at select locations in Afghanistan found nickel, mercury, chromium, uranium and lead—heavy metals that can cause serious harm to the body, from impairing children’s mental and physical development to kidney damage. 

Dumped in Jalalabad’s fields, “Tankers full of American toilet waste”

A few minutes’ drive from Rahman’s field is a wide dirt road that runs parallel to the Jalalabad-Torkham highway. On the other side are open fields. Here, I meet Khan Mohammad as he navigates his way through a carefully landscaped field in District 9 of Jalalabad, about 100 yards from the base. Mohammad stops under the shade of a small almond tree and sits down, folding his legs beneath him. He has been working in these fields for 20 years and remembers how the contractors’ trucks from the base would carry two types of waste and dump them where he was planting crops.

“One was colored green-blue, which would destroy the plants. The other was a white-gray milky substance, which had a very bad smell, like acid. Sometimes they would dump a mix of both,” he tells me. 

A group of six farmers from neighboring fields joined us under the tree. “These were tankers full of American toilet waste. At one time, the tankers were dumping twice a day, in the morning and evening,” says 30-year-old Omar Hiaran, recalling how this continued until the Americans left the base in 2021. “It was white soapy water and had toilet paper in it.” 

Hiaran’s father, also a farmer, has had health problems for the past nine years. 

“After he became ill, he told me to wear gloves when I was working in the field so that I didn’t touch the sewage like he had,” Hiaran says.

While waste from local residents is also dumped into the city’s canals and smaller landfills along the roads, it cannot compete with the sheer amount of hazardous waste that came from the airfield. 

The blue liquid Mohammad saw was a dye used in the portable toilets at the base. The chemicals used in these toilets can be toxic to human health in high doses. According to an article by Matthew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who advised on environmental cleanups, the washroom facilities at the American bases generated both gray and black water. The gray wastewater came from sinks and showers, carrying soap residue that contains phosphates and other chemicals. Black water pollution came from the toilets. While the American military has to adhere to strict rules regarding the disposal of toilet waste on home turf, he said that it faced no restrictions in Afghanistan.

When Mohammad and other villagers confronted the contractors driving the tankers, they were told that the sewage would “benefit the crops and would bring a good harvest, and they reminded us that using the sewage was cheaper than buying fertilizer and was good to use as water also,” he says.

A 2021 report by the Sierra Club and Ecology Center found that even the sewage sludge found in American fertilizers can contain a harmful array of chemicals, including dioxins, microplastics, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and alarming levels of toxic PFAS—also known as “forever chemicals”—that can take decades or even centuries to break down naturally. PFAS are also present in several substances that were used by the U.S. military, including foams used to combat petroleum-based fires. 

By mid-2022, the U.S. military had reportedly still not begun cleanups at any of the hundreds of DOD sites across the United States identified as highly contaminated with PFAS.

Studies have linked higher levels of PFAS exposure to an array of health problems, including liver damage, cardiovascular diseases, increased risk of kidney cancer, increased risk of thyroid disease and immune system dysfunction. A federal study published in July established, for the first time, a direct link between PFAS and testicular cancer in thousands of U.S. service members. Pregnant women exposed to PFAS have an increased risk of high blood pressure and diabetes. Babies in the womb and infants are also vulnerable, as studies have found that PFAS can affect placental function and be present in breast milk. PFAS exposure has also been linked to decreased infant birth weight, developmental dysfunction among infants and increased disease risk later in life.

Even if such sewage goes through a treatment process, research has shown that PFAS and other toxic chemicals cannot be removed. 

In 2017, Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, or NEPA, said that 70 percent of the underground water in Kabul was contaminated with harmful bacteria, microbes and chemicals and was not safe for human consumption. Other major cities, including Jalalabad, faced the same problem, the agency said. 

Afghanistan’s capital had one public facility for sewage treatment, the Makroyan Wastewater Treatment Plant, which processed at least 21,000 gallons of raw sewage each month from portable toilets at the U.S. Embassy and 12,000 gallons from those used by U.S. and coalition troops. All of this was piped into the Kabul River, according to Afghan officials and Malika and Refa Environmental Solutions, the company that serviced the NATO headquarters in Kabul and at Bagram airfield. The plant stopped working in 2018, and the untreated wastewater was dumped into the river before flowing into the city drains, endangering the health of thousands of residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey notes that pollutants found in wastewater include phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, which promote excessive plant growth—something that Mohammad and the other farmers saw in their fields. The sewage dumped in the fields around Jalalabad airfield did not go through treatment processes on the base, according to an Afghan engineer named Faridun (he gave only his first name) who had worked on the base for 12 years. 

“They have infected every part of Afghanistan”

At his home on the edge of the field he farms, Mohammad explains that his two youngest sons are suffering from serious kidney issues. “But we do not know about the exact cause of their diseases, whether it’s pollution or something else,” he says. He suspects the sewage dumping.

His eldest son Farooq, who has issues with his bladder, emerges from the home with a thick stack of papers and folders cradled in his slim arms. Mohammad combs through the mountain of documents—there are 44 doctor reports alone for his 7-year-old son, Umar, who sits crouched at his feet. 

Umar has had kidney problems since he was 1 year old, Mohammad says. I look through the reports: Doctors in Afghanistan and Pakistan had diagnosed him with a pleural effusion (fluid around the lungs), moderate ascites (fluid in the abdomen) and chronic kidney and liver disease. His 5-year-old brother, Ameen, has kidney damage, and his blood tests show he is also anemic. Both boys help their father work the land every day along with Mohammad’s mother, Bibi Haro, 60, who shows me her skin condition, which she has had for eight years. At first, it was red and leaking pus, but it has now settled into a permanent itch. 

Umar has been going to the doctor for four years, his grandmother says. “He is still in pain now. Every day he is suffering. Last year he went to a kidney center hospital in Pakistan. And just a week ago, we returned to the doctor with him,” she says. 

His cousins Bibi Ameena and Hamidullah, who also work the fields by the home, have both had kidney problems for the past five years.

Mohammad looks down at Umar, nestled under his arm. “When he coughs, there is blood,” he says. “The only thing I owned was a tractor, and I sold it for his treatment. Now, the doctors in Peshawar say they need 5 million Pakistani rupees [about $16,000] to replace his kidneys, but I don’t have that much money.”

As tears of anger stream down her face, Bibi Haro tells me how her brother is deaf as a result of an American drone crash in the field by the home. “They would fly low every night and scare us while we slept,” she says. “They bombed Nangarhar for years, and their smoke filled our sky. They have infected every part of Afghanistan.” 

Jalalabad doctors: Diagnosing the contaminants of war 

Doctors at the public hospital in Jalalabad attribute many of the health problems their patients face to water, air and soil pollution from the American base. I meet one of them, Dr. Latif Zeer, in a deserted restaurant in the city center. As soon as we sit down at a long table, the power cuts out. The ornate gold fans above us slow to a stop, letting the hum of the city outside flood into the room.

He explains how heavy metal poisoning in “all the water” may be related to contamination from chemicals used on military installations or chemical residue from weapons and ammunition. In his view, this has led to the hospital’s many cases of kidney problems and gastroenteritis, an inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract including the stomach and intestine, usually caused by viruses, bacteria or other microbes. Gastroenteritis can also be caused by food or water contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals such as arsenic, lead, mercury or cadmium. “Anywhere they dropped bombs or the airstrikes were conducted, definitely, the water would be contaminated,” he adds. 

Over the years, the DOD has faced a string of lawsuits over contaminated water on its bases at home and abroad, including claims of contamination from jet fuel and depleted uranium. In response to my emailed questions, the U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM denied that the U.S. military had dumped wastewater, black or gray, in waterways in Afghanistan, saying that specially designed “lagoons/settling ponds and leach fields” were used instead that “did not directly discharge onto the land.” Wastewater was “gathered and hauled off” by contractors to a host nation’s treatment and disposal facility, it added. 

CENTCOM also said it last operated an open-air burn pit in Afghanistan on December 28, 2020, refuting what dozens of residents told me.

Zeer, who has spent two decades at the hospital in Jalalabad, tells me the gastroenteritis cases he saw were unusual. At one point, the national Ministry of Public Health sent a team from Kabul to observe patients and test the water, he says. The infectious disease specialists could only explain the cause as “chemical substances.” 

Patients usually got better after a few days or with antibiotics, he says, “but we were seeing patients with AGE [acute gastroenteritis] symptoms and respiratory problems [who were] dying, and so I thought this was some kind of chemical poisoning of the water caused by chemicals used in the fighting.” 

But it is difficult to definitively diagnose chemical poisoning as the cause of gastroenteritis, he says. Doctors in Afghanistan lack the resources and equipment to deduce the primary causes of many of the illnesses they see daily. Adding to their woes is a record-keeping system that is largely analog and often does not include basic details, such as home district and age. 

“People don’t know their family medical history, and we often cannot do follow-ups with patients because they are moving due to fighting or they cannot afford to come back,” Shinwari told me. 

In the last four years of the war, Zeer treated a flood of patients from Nangarhar and neighboring Kunar, mostly suffering from acute gastroenteritis. Most of these cases came from districts that had seen prolonged fighting over the years, including Achin, Khogyani and Shirzad in Nangarhar.

The head of the Jalalabad hospital’s pulmonary department for 14 years, Dr. Sabahuddin Saba, cites multiple causes for an array of respiratory illnesses suffered across the region. He says that the air pollution can come from working with materials like silicon or coal, for example: “Some farmers have what we call ‘farmer’s lung’ because they work in the dust.”

But he also notes that Afghanistan has been devastated by bombs and airstrikes that “left chemicals that would spread to the surrounding areas and would be breathed by people all around.”

“We see many patients with chronic coughs, and when we took chest CT scans, we found lung cancer,” Saba says. “Many other patients have bronchial asthma, COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], bronchiolitis and emphysema.” 

He believes that some of these patients were exposed to “irritating or chemical dust”  residue from the bombs. In 2018, patients traveling from Kunar arrived at his hospital in Jalalabad suffering from shortness of breath and coughing up blood. Some died. The hospital had no comprehensive system for managing patients’ records or advanced toxicology equipment that would have enabled doctors to identify what chemicals were responsible for the apparent poisoning; they only had drug test kits provided by the United Nations Population Fund. Other patients, Saba says, arrived at the hospital with mysterious eye infections and nosebleeds, both of which he believes were caused by a chemical substance. 

An Afghan oncologist who has worked in Nangarhar for more than 20 years tells me that he and other doctors in the province see many cancer cases, mostly lung and pancreatic, followed by breast cancer. He says that the majority of patients go to Pakistan and India for treatment because Afghanistan does not have chemotherapy and other medicines readily available. The patients mostly have stage 3 or 4 cancer “because they are not getting regular checkups, we do not catch the cancer sooner. I have treated many soldiers who have lung cancer,” he says.

“If we have good facilities and a good system in place, we would do lots of research but we don’t have technical people here now,” he adds. “This is Afghanistan, if people die from cancer, who will record it? There is no one counting how many have died. This is the first time that someone came here and asked such things.”

In Kandahar, “deadly” burn pits and contaminated water

A badly beaten 300-mile stretch of road links Kabul with Kandahar, passing south through the provinces of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni and Zabul. Post-apocalyptic dust storms blur the pockmarked road ahead. The drive takes 12 hours, and the route is choked with overloaded trucks trudging along with little attempt to avoid the potholes. Strewn along the sides of the highway are bullet-riddled police cars and Humvees, the remnants of the Taliban’s triumphant storm across the country toward the capital in 2021. 

At the regional NEPA office in Kandahar city, staff member Matiullah Zahen describes his struggles with waste burning and sewage dumping by contractors at the giant 3,633-acre Kandahar airfield used by American and Afghan forces. 

“One and a half years ago, we went to the base and told them what they can and can’t burn and where—that it had to be a specific place, not just dumping and burning everywhere,” he says. 

But waste disposal was not high on the list of priorities for the commanders at the base, he says, and nothing changed. 

“The kind of thinking of the base commanders was: ‘It’s the contractor’s job to handle the waste, I don’t care how he does it, just get it out of my face. I got other problems, I’m fighting a war,’” Zahen says. 

Zahen accompanies me to the airfield and we drive out, my letters of permission from several ministries and the governor in hand. We wait for the base commander to show us where one of the burn pits was, behind a now-padlocked gate that leads to the international side of the airfield. Two hours later, we are told to leave. 

After we leave the maze of high blast walls winding out of the base, we turn off the main road into the Khoshab area, just to its west, home to about 15,000 people who earn a living from the surrounding agricultural land. Khoshab is the closest village to the airfield.

Here, I find 22-year-old Laal Mohammed working his land in the shadow of the airfield’s walls. Despite the brutal hazy midday heat, he doesn’t break a sweat. His wheat and vegetable fields are less than 100 yards from the base’s perimeter. 

His family’s home is surrounded by a carefully kept garden with rows of vegetables and a burst of blossoming flowers. Inside is a 60-foot-deep well dug 15 years ago where they get their drinking water. They moved here eight years ago from neighboring Zabul province. 

Five years ago, both he and his sister Nazaka, 21, started having kidney problems. “The doctors found kidney stones many times,” he tells me. “The doctors we went to see told us to stop drinking the water here,” he says, adding that they can’t use their neighbors’ water as they have the same wells. “And we cannot afford to buy bottled water.” 

He takes me to a site across from the base that locals call Qazi Qarez, where he says the tankers used to dump sewage and trash once or twice a week. From 2014 until the Americans left, they would burn the waste in five locations here, he says, pointing to the spots. Today, it’s an open, empty stretch of land, but just a year and a half ago, he says, plumes of thin smoke could be seen trailing upward to the sky.

“Indefensible” burn pits

Although U.S. military waste management guidance from as far back as 1978 specifies that solid waste should not be burned in an open pit if an alternative is available, burn pits persisted in Afghanistan. DOD officials stated that the management of solid waste is not always a high priority during wartime, according to the Government Accountability Office. 

CENTCOM regulations specified that when an installation exceeds 100 U.S. personnel for 90 days, it must develop a plan for installing alternatives to open-air burn pits for waste disposal. CENTCOM officials told SIGAR that “no U.S. installation in Afghanistan has ever complied with the regulations.”

The U.S. military used open-air burn pits almost exclusively to dispose of its solid waste during its first four years in Afghanistan. Only in 2004 did the DOD begin introducing new disposal methods, including landfills and incineration, a year after soldiers returning from deployment complained of shortness of breath and asthma. 

And while CENTCOM attempted to limit the use of burn pits beginning in 2009, reliance on them continued: In April 2010, the Pentagon reported to Congress that open-air burning was the safest, most effective and expedient manner of solid waste reduction during military operations until research and development efforts could produce better alternatives. Shortly afterward, CENTCOM estimated that there were 251 active burn pits in Afghanistan, a 36.4 percent increase from just four months earlier. That same year, health studies raised concerns that the burn pits’ smoke, contaminated with lead, mercury and dioxins, could harm the adrenal glands, lungs, liver and stomach. In 2011, guidance finally stated that burn pits should be placed far away from areas near troops. 

The DOD hired contractors such as KBR Inc., formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, to manage the burn pits. Over the years, KBR has faced numerous lawsuits related to the burn pits and the water treatment plants it operated in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The waste burned in the open-air pits, according to multiple reports, including one in 2010 by Nasuti, the former U.S. Air Force captain, included petroleum and lubricants; paints, asbestos, solvents, grease, cleaning solutions and building materials that contain formaldehyde, copper, arsenic and hydrogen cyanide; hydraulic fluids, aircraft de-icing fluids, antifreeze, munitions and other unexploded ordnance; metal containers, furniture and rubber, Humvee parts and tires; and discarded food, plastics, Styrofoam, wood, lithium-ion batteries, electrical equipment, paint, chemicals, uniforms, pesticides and medical and human waste. Animal and human carcasses, including body parts, were also thrown in. 

Though CENTCOM regulation prohibits a host of materials and hazardous chemicals from being burned, these and other discarded items were set on fire using JP-8 jet fuel, which released benzene, a known carcinogen. Plumes of the burnt waste hovered over the base and seeped into soldiers’ sleeping, working and dining quarters, often less than a mile away. The smoke included heavy metals, dioxins, particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons and hydrochloric acid, among numerous other toxic substances. 

Kandahar airfield generated more than 100 tons of solid waste per day in 2012 and more than 5 million gallons of sewage water from 30,000 portable toilets. The DOD first brought 23 incinerators to Kandahar that year at a cost of almost $82 million, but the machines proved extremely unreliable and costly to operate. One incinerator was delivered two years late and required $1 million of repairs before it could even be turned on. An inspection by SIGAR from 2012 to 2014 found serious mechanical problems and a reliance on burn pits instead. In 2015, SIGAR’s inspector general called the use of open-air burn pits “indefensible.” 

A few weeks before I headed to Kandahar, I spoke with an American official familiar with burn pits who had witnessed all manner of toxic waste being burned in the massive pits on U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

The official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, told me that the trash at the base in Kandahar “was all over the place” and that no one was paying attention to the specifications on what could be burned in the pit and when. The contractors “would just burn everything,” the official said. “I expected to see a big pile of ash, but all you saw was things that were blackened. It didn’t effectively burn everything down to nothing. I was like, why bother?”

They said the enormous burn pits would be dug deep enough to be used many times and “when it got to a level where they couldn’t burn anymore, they would just shovel dirt over it and dig another one in another spot. They smelled horrible.” 

Most of the incinerators did not work properly or at all and wouldn’t be fixed, the official told me. At other times, personnel weren’t trained properly on how to use them, “so what all the bases did was go back to what they did before,” which was to either use burn pits or dump waste. 

The military doctors

Abdul Sami, 32, and Zabiullah Amarkhil, 31, Afghan doctors, know well the damage from the burn pits. The pair studied medicine together before working as trauma surgeons in military hospitals inside bases in Kunduz, Nangarhar, Kabul and Balkh as well as Kandahar, where they still work today. 

“I have seen patients with skin problems and eye infections. Others had kidney problems because of the contaminated water, American soldiers also. We also had patients with acute gastroenteritis,” says Amarkhil as we bundle into the back of a beat-up taxi. I had collected the doctors from the airfield after they finished their shift.

On all the bases, they treated soldiers and civilians with the same array of pulmonary and respiratory problems witnessed by the doctors in Jalalabad. Most of their patients were those who were working close to the burn pit, they say.

In Jalalabad, Sami recalls at one point registering up to 200 patients a day with respiratory isssues, skin diseases and stomach problems. 

“Most of these patients were from the military base,” he says. The military quarters, he adds, were just 650 yards west from one of the pits.

Amarkhil says the waste at Kandahar airfield was dumped and burned both inside and outside the base. He drew a map marking the base’s biggest burn pit, between the American and Afghan sides of the airfield, and another location where trash and other refuse were dumped in a landfill. Up until 2016, he said, “they were doing burn pits once a week, always on Wednesday. The flames were about 4 meters high.”

The burn pit was very close to the military training center that housed new trainee soldiers, who were not used to the heavy air pollution, Amarkhil tells me. In 2016, he would see as many as 10 trainee soldiers a day with respiratory problems. An additional 10 to 15 had skin issues, he says. He adds that waste from Forward Operating Base Gamberi, in Laghman province near Jalalabad, was dumped at the Darunta Dam to the west of the city, where it polluted the water. But in Kandahar everything would go to the burn pits, Amarkhil says, including a specific container used for medical waste and equipment. 

“When it was full, the container would be burnt also,” he says.

Momand Khosti, a military doctor, called the burn pits “deadly.” Khosti worked in senior positions in both the Afghan and American hospitals at Kandahar airfield and five other airfields since 2007, and as the deputy director for health affairs in the Ministry of Defense until the Taliban takeover. 

When we met weeks earlier in Kabul, sitting in the back corner of a restaurant, he marked the location of a Kandahar burn pit on a napkin, about a mile from the hospital on the Afghan side of the base. 

“We also burned medical waste and equipment in a smaller burn pit, 100 meters from the hospital,” he says.

The last time he saw active burn pits was in June 2021, he says.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the cause of the respiratory problems, cancers, skin conditions and kidney problems that patients at Kandahar airfield were suffering, Khosti believes that “many” of the cases were directly linked to military activities and the bases themselves. 

“One night, 30 soldiers came into the hospital with diarrhea and vomiting,” he says. “In the days following, more came in.” Staff members at the hospital then found that the water on the base had been contaminated.

Khosti, who specializes in cancers of the liver, gallbladder and bile duct, described how a soldier with late-stage lung cancer had come to see him just two days earlier. “I asked him about his lifestyle and work background. He told me he worked on the bases or on the battlefield. He was coughing up a black-colored mucus. Because he worked as a soldier for so many years, I believe his cancer is because of the pollution from the burn pits.” 

U.S. service members exposed to burn pit pollution in Afghanistan also coughed up black mucus they called “plume crud” or “black goop,” studies later revealed. They reported suffering from severe chronic respiratory disease, including constrictive bronchiolitis, a rare and often fatal lung disorder for which there is no cure. Other symptoms included unexplained diarrhea, severe headaches, weeping lesions, chronic skin infections and rashes, severe abdominal pain, leukemia, lung cancer, nosebleeds, severe heart conditions, sleep apnea, anemia, ulcers, unexpected weight loss and vomiting.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insisted until 2021 that there was conflicting and insufficient research to show that long-term health problems have resulted from burn pit exposure, and denied most benefit claims related to toxic exposure. The VA estimates that more than 3.5 million veterans and service members were exposed to the toxic fumes from burn pits during overseas deployments since 1990, according to a 2015 VA report.

The Khoshab clinic

In Kandahar, Afghan doctors allege that toxic substances from the burn pits harmed the development of fetuses. At a small clinic in Khoshab about 100 yards from the Kandahar airfield, Dr. Suhela Muhammadi, 40, bustles through a crowd of mothers and children in the clinic’s small waiting room. She tells me about heart anomalies, genetic disorders and other birth defects in babies whose mothers lived near the base, saying these were not seen at such high levels 20 years ago. 

“I think that most of them were caused by the war, when their mothers were pregnant,” she says.

The number of congenital birth defects in Afghanistan per 1,000 people is more than twice as high as that in the U.S., according to 2017 research published by the Royal Tropical Institute in the Netherlands. The paper also notes that increased maternal exposure to certain chemicals may affect development of the fetus and contribute to congenital anomalies. Increased risk of congenital anomalies was reported in Afghan women working in agriculture sectors and those living near hazardous waste sites. 

While the environmental toxicologist Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani was working at the University of Michigan, she published several studies on Iraq, where birth defects have been better studied than in Afghanistan. She found infants and children had been exposed to potentially toxic metals such as tungsten, titanium, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, thorium and uranium that are heavily used in weaponry and military hardware. 

“The most common resulting anomalies are heart defects and neural tube defects,” she told me.

Abdul Wali Abid, the Khoshab clinic’s manager for more than a decade, tells me that in the weeks before the Americans left the base, the staff saw smoke billowing from burn pits every week. An engineer working inside the Kandahar airfield for the past eight years said that right before the U.S. military left the base, they burned a lot of things, “even cars.” There was a river at the back side of the base coming out the wall “where they were dumping sewage until the end.” 

As I leave the clinic, I meet 35-year-old Abdul Raziq, a clinic guard who has lived in the area all his life. He knows the “river” that the engineer had told me about, he says, leading me out of the clinic to show me the three places where the water was coming out of the airfield walls. 

We head out and drive around the southern side of the base, bumping over dry agricultural land. A metal grate covered the outflow to one of the pipes, which emptied into a 26-foot-wide trench carved out in front of it. Not long ago, water would flow out of the base, flooding into smaller streams, which fed nearby agricultural lands, Raziq tells me. 

“It was dirty, soapy water, with rubbish in it,” he says. “But when the Americans left the base, it stopped.” 

Kandahar airfield’s scrap metal collectors

Along the road on the northeast side of the base is a string of makeshift shops stuffed with a random assortment of scrap, from Humvee seats to car engines and ammunition boxes. I had seen the same in Nangarhar, where shop owners had once built a bustling economy on the waste from the base. 

Here, I find Fida Mohammad, 17, and Esanullah, 15, hiding from the midday sun inside their ramshackle hut, surrounded by piles of metal. They are originally from Ghazni province, but after their father died of a heart attack seven years ago, they moved to Kandahar with their mother and three younger brothers, hoping to make a living from scrap metal trading. 

When the U.S. soldiers were still at the base, the boys could earn as much as 15,000 to 20,000 afghanis ($185 to $250) a month from collecting scrap that came from the base, they say. 

“Some things were burned by the people at the base, like TVs, radios, computers, mobile phones and all sorts of electronics, but we would go through it and collect the metal that survived the fire,” Fida Mohammad tells me. 

For the past five years, Esanullah has suffered from breathing problems, and his hands are riddled with a rash that started two years ago. 

“Our younger brother got sick also. He was small, so my mother told me to bring him with us to our work. He was playing with all the things and then he got the same skin problems as Esanullah,” says Fida Mohammad.

Two years ago, Esanullah traveled to Quetta in Pakistan to see a doctor with his mother. “I couldn’t talk properly or stand,” he says. “The real problem was my chest. I was there for two and a half months. But even now, I have problems with my breathing.”

The doctors in Pakistan didn’t give a diagnosis for the cause, but the boys believe that the source of Esanullah’s health problems is the airfield. 

The two would collect everything from plastic bottles to vehicle engines to “the bad things” like live grenades, as well as ammunition and shell casings, says Fida Mohammad. 

He leads me outside and points to these deadly remnants of the American occupation: unexploded artillery shells and a box filled with 40 mm grenades.

Khosti had told me that around Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province, people suffered from eye infections. There were even cases of children, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, developing eye tumors, he said. “They were collecting scrap metal from the base, and areas around where the U.S. military was conducting weapons testing, and sometimes they would take the explosive materials, so I believe their eye tumors were related to this.”

Bagram, “Everyone is sick here” 

Anyone who lives near Bagram airfield knew the burn pits by the smell of the raging barbecue of trash, usually overseen by Afghan employees, few of whom bothered to wear masks to protect themselves from the smoke and ash spewing from the pits.

“When you are doing this kind of work for 10 years, 15 … there is nothing that can keep you safe,” one of the former base employees tells me. 

The enormous U.S. stronghold, about 15 miles north of Kabul, was home to 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors at its peak, with airplanes and helicopters taking off and landing at all hours of the day and night. There were underground bars, a private airstrip, a Burger King and other fast-food joints, an Oakley sunglasses store and, until 2014, a secret detention facility. A giant diesel generator farm powered the base 24 hours a day, emitting a constant stream of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulfur. 

A 13-building waste management complex built in 2014 to house the base’s new incinerators seemingly had little effect on the discharges. Until the U.S. exit in the middle of a July night two years ago, a haze of aerosolized garbage would emerge every week from what the American soldiers called “the shit pit” and mix with the already dust-clogged air in Parwan province, residents told me.

A half-hour drive away from Bagram, southeast of the provincial capital of Charikar, a graveyard of rusting trucks, tanks and helicopter engines used by the Soviet Union lay baking in the summer sun, the vehicles’ corroding residue leaching into the soil and water. Lining the road below were trucks belonging to scrap dealers, waiting to take the debris on to Pakistan. A few weeks later, it was all gone.

While I had permission letters from the relevant Taliban ministries, I needed the authorization of Obaidullah Aminzada, Parwan’s new governor, to visit the sprawling base. As a member of the Taliban, Aminzada had been a prisoner at Bagram for four years while it was under the control of the U.S. military. Now, he was effectively in charge of what had been the Pentagon’s largest military base in Afghanistan. 

“When the blasts started, we knew it was a Friday,” the governor tells me coolly in his office, surrounded by his assistants, in the heart of Charikar. While he was a detainee, he was kept in darkness but knew from the sound “and that smell” that the military was conducting controlled detonations of military equipment and ordnance at Bagram. “We knew what day of week it was by the detonations,” he laughs, turning to one of his assistants, who nods in agreement.

Aminzada invites me to lunch with the governor of Bagram district. I had been promised access to the sprawling base and I’m eager to see inside, post-American control. So I accept the invitation despite my reservations. The lunch involves me, the only woman, sitting alone in one room for an hour and a half, with the men in another, their rollicking laughter floating across the courtyard. Finally, we say our goodbyes and head out to the base. We make it to the gates, but no further. The commander, from whom I need permission, was not at the base, I was told — the same thing that had happened to me at the bases in Nangarhar and Kandahar.

I watch as the gates to the base open to let a Ford Ranger roll in. Children carrying sacks larger than themselves stuffed with an array of scrap try to sneak in, only to get chased away by a Taliban guard perched atop a rundown Humvee decorated with plastic flowers. 

Almost all of the waste “was still going to the burn pit”

The moment is a far cry from the scene that greeted the bioenvironmental engineer and U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel Kyle Blasch when he arrived at Bagram in the summer of 2011. The commander of the security forces at Bagram had contacted his team about researching the base’s burn pit. Blasch’s team conducted the only occupational sampling study on U.S. personnel near the military’s burn pits in Afghanistan. 

At the peak of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, Bagram was burning between 2,300 and 4,000 cubic yards of refuse per day—enough to fill 175 to 300 dump trucks. Smoke from the burn pits, mixed with dust and other pollution, choked the guards as they worked 12-hour shifts at the base’s checkpoints and 10-yard-high guard tower. 

New rules from the DOD had come in prohibiting the burning of specific materials, but it didn’t matter, as the researchers found that 81 percent of waste was still going to the burn pit, including prohibited items such as plastic bags, packaging materials, broken construction materials and aerosol cans.

The purpose of the study was to see what the soldiers were actually breathing. Blasch’s team outfitted members of the security forces with personal sampling monitors. He was able to outfit the study subjects with four monitors each, which included pumps, filters and breathing tubes. Blasch said they were eager to help. 

The results were unequivocal. The levels of airborne pollutants registered by the monitors worn by each soldier exceeded the short-term military exposure guideline level. Those near the burn pit and waste disposal complex exceeded the U.S. EPA’s air quality thresholds by a factor of more than 50. 

“Right now, we have a lot of question marks,” said Blasch, who is now associate regional director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northwest-Pacific Islands.

In 2011, an Army memo stated that the high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram airfield were likely to affect veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. The memo noted that the amount of pollutants in Bagram’s air far exceeded the levels permitted under U.S. government guidelines.

 “Everyone breathed the same air” 

The day after I was denied access to Bagram by the Taliban authorities, Noor Mohammad Ahmadi, 41, a village head, leads me down a narrow maze of walkways to his home, just outside the base. 

He lives in the village of Gulai Kali, where streams meander through tightly packed homes and the roads that encircle the base. Driving around the perimeter, I count 16 locations where water flowed into or out of the base from small culverts in the high walls. Families use the doors of shipping containers as gates to their compounds and shops. Above them, the white Taliban flag flutters in the wind. 

The neighborhood is abuzz with activity. A pair of girls carrying their baby sisters walk alongside a stream, deep in chatter. Men stride across nearby wheat fields, hands clasped behind their backs, as children run past, their heads cocked to the pink sky, eyes locked on their kites above.

In 2011, Ahmadi and 17 other village leaders from the area wrote an application to the Parwan governor, Abdul Basir Salangi, saying that the Bagram base was destroying their drinking water, he tells me. 

His ancestors had lived in Gulai Kali for years, but when the Taliban first came to power in the 1990s, the villagers left. “When the new government came in, we came back, so we have been here now for 20 years,” he says.

“We sent two applications to the governor. One was about our property; the Americans took our lands and expanded the base here. And the second was about our water problem,” he says. The base had stopped the Panjshir River from reaching their fields for agriculture, he says. “They were also dumping lavatory water into our waterways and fields.” 

He pulls out a stack of carefully organized papers in plastic sleeves. “I have all the letters.” 

Streams from the Panjshir River enter the base from the north and depart from it in the south and east. The airfield was diverting the water, he says. “Nine hundred families are living here in Gulai Kali village, and they were without water.”

The governor promised to talk to the military and send a team to examine the water. Two weeks later, a team made up of the district’s representative from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water, a representative from the Ministry of Public Health, an Afghan translator and “two international military people from the base” came to the villages and took samples from the wells, Ahmadi says.

“After this, the governor called a big meeting at his office with the international military people, a representative from each village, an Afghan commander named Safiullah Safi and the team who took the samples,” he says. “They told us the water is clean and there were no problems with it, but they did not show us any results in documents or reports.” 

The governor instructed the airfield personnel to dig a well 100 yards deep for the villagers, but it never happened, he says. 

Three men from the village join us in Ahmadi’s home. One man, Ajab Gul, says he has respiratory problems and has had multiple surgeries to remove recurrent kidney stones. “In our area, we do not have clean water,” he says. “Maybe this is the cause.” 

“Everyone is sick here,” Mohammad Salim, a farmer, speaks up. “When the international community came to Afghanistan, my problems started.” He says he has had issues with his lungs for the past 17 years. The base was burning waste at least three times a week, he says, and the winds would blow it over his village and the lands he farms, about 50 yards from the base.

“When we saw the smoke, we took our children inside the home and still had to cover our mouths and noses because of the bad smell,” Salim adds. “It was a big problem for us.”

Salim traveled to see a doctor in Pakistan three times between 2012 and 2019. 

“The doctors took my blood, did a lot of tests and gave me medicine, but I am still not well. If there is any smoke, I can’t breathe again, and I cannot control my coughing. My eyes cry when I cough. I’m coughing a mucus that stings my throat.”

“Lots of farmers from this area are sick,” Salim says. They call it ‘Bagram Lung.’ Just knock on any door and you will find it. … The Americans who were on the base are sick, but so are we. Everyone breathed the same air.” Over the years, the international aid workers, journalists and diplomats stationed in Kabul came up with their own name, “Kabul cough,” to describe the chronic hacking, bronchitis and sinus infections. The symptoms were particularly persistent in the winter months, when the smog from coal and oil burning heaters enveloped the Kabul basin. 

 While the cause of Salim’s problem has not been determined, his description of “Bagram Lung” brought to mind tests performed in the U.S. on soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division. 

While they all tested normal on conventional pulmonary function, a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center performed surgical lung biopsies on more than 50 and found that nearly all of them had constrictive bronchiolitis, a narrowing of the smallest and deepest airways in the lungs—an irreversible and chronic condition. Other medical studies have found a host of other toxic substances, including partially combusted jet fuel, in the lungs of veterans serving near burn pits.

Then there was the sewage dumping. In Gulai Kali, everyone says the water is as dirty as the sky. Every day, American contractors from the base “were bringing seven to 10 tankers carrying the lavatory water and dumping it in the canals [and we still] cannot even wash there,” says Salim, the farmer.

“I have kidney and bladder problems and I feel very weak,” says Zia ul Haq, a villager sitting next to Salim. For days at a time, he was too tired to stand, he says.

He has lived next to Bagram for the past 15 years and has been unwell for seven of them. “I worked inside the base for two years in the big refrigerator where food and energy drinks were stored,” he says. “I have a big pain in my kidneys and I cannot control my bladder. The doctor told me I have not been drinking clean water, but we are using water from our well.”

Every other house outside Bagram’s walls has a water pump well because the river no longer flows to the village. 

“The people don’t drink the canal water now; it’s too dirty,” he says. 

The people in Gulai Kali heard explosions, loud and frequent, coming from the base in June 2021, not realizing that the Americans were getting ready to depart once and for all  and were destroying ordnance, weapons and military vehicles so the Taliban couldn’t make use of them. 

Even Zainul Abiden Abid, head of NEPA, was kept away. “Our staff were not allowed inside the base that month,” but “we could see the clouds of smoke rising,” he told me.

As the Americans in Kabul frantically packed up in late August 2021, an Afghan worker at the U.S. Embassy took a video of a burn pit being used by embassy staffers right in the heart of Kabul. “We were told to take everything out of the office and go to this designated area and throw everything in there where it was set alight,” he told me. “On the top of the burn pit was a picture of John Sopko”—the American inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

Using EPA-approved sampling equipment provided by the U.S.-based Eurofins Environment Testing, the journalist Kern Hendricks and an Afghan scientist specializing in water sampling collected water, soil and blood samples from villages around the Jalalabad, Bagram and Kandahar airfields where the journalist Lynzy Billing conducted interviews and obtained medical records from residents.

The sampling equipment traveled from the United States to Afghanistan via the United Kingdom and Turkey. The coolers containing the samples are now on their way back to Eurofins Environment Testing in the U.S. for lab analysis, via Pakistan.

We plan to test these samples for the presence of PFAS, which were present in materials used by the U.S. military and do not naturally occur in the environment.

The post America’s war in Afghanistan devastated the country’s environment in ways that may never be cleaned up appeared first on Popular Science.

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Aerospace companies that create a new stealth aircraft as their signature achievement face a conundrum. They put years if not decades of work into its aerodynamic and industrial design and its state-of-the-art technology, creating a machine that carries terrible destructive power. And after all that, the contours of the design can be public but the details must remain somewhat obscured. This is true especially when it comes to the physical shape of the plane itself, as the exterior form of a stealth plane is part of what makes stealth possible. All of these concerns made it an unexpected surprise, and a planespotter’s delight, when the United States Air Force released two new photos of the stealthy B-21 Raider on September 12.

On the military media repository platform DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service), the new photos are dated July 31. One shows the Raider, head-on, in the hangar. The other has the Raider outside the hangar, at sunset.

The details revealed in the photographs are remarkable, but it is important to start with what is left out of these images. The rear of the bomber, and especially the exhaust ports, are not visible. Stealth, as a family of technologies, is primarily designed to hide aircraft from detection by refracted radar waves. Jet engines, full of spinning blades at a sharp angle to the world, are refractive, so in stealth design the turbines are tucked away behind inlets. Exhaust ports, while not as radar-revelatory, will show up on sensors that look for infrared and heat. Missiles that seek heat are decades old, and looking for exhaust is one tried and true way to see what a low-visibility design on radar obscures.

The available angles on the B-21, including these new photographs as well as photos from the initial flashy December roll-out, all largely serve to obscure the control surfaces on the Raider’s flying wing body. One photo taken March 7 offers an angle somewhat from above, but that photo is at a much lower resolution than the others.

But while it’s easy to focus on what the new photos of the Raider don’t show, what’s at least as compelling is the new evidence contained in these latest releases. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone focused in part on the “ejection hatch panels.” He observed: “They sit far back and are another indicator of just how limited the pilots’ visibility will likely be in this aircraft. They also speak to the challenge that is judging the proportions on the alien-like B-21. The cockpit is either very small or very tall. We are leaning toward the former. We also see the aerial refueling markings peeking out from atop the aircraft’s bulged spine.” (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

Other hidden gems abound, and Rogoway’s analysis offers insight. One that is pertinent to future observations of the bomber is that the B-21 on display, serial number 0001, has a large probe affixed to it. This will collect data in-flight for testing purposes, whenever the Raider makes its first test flight later this year.

In addition to the two photos released by the Air Force on September 12, Northrop Grumman, makers of the B-21, released a photo of the bomber on the same day. This photo was paired with an announcement that the Raider is undergoing engine runs, part of the testing to ensure that the plane’s power plant works as intended in the aircraft. 

“Engine testing is an essential milestone for the program as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft continues on the path to flight test,” reads the Northrop Grumman announcement. “The B-21’s first flight will remain a data driven event that is monitored by Northrop Grumman and the United States Air Force.”

Airplane generations vary depending on the exact counting, but it is important to note that the B-21 is not just a stealth flying wing, but a successor stealth flying wing to the B-2 Spirit. In more than most senses, this means the plane represents an era shift in design, even as it draws from similar lessons about form.

Rogoway notes that the quarter view of the Raider reveals “Just how deeply ‘buried’ the Raider’s [engine] inlets — one of the most exotic and challenging low-observable features of the design — truly are.” He added: “This is a good reminder of just how the Raider will conceal its engine inlets from adversary radars, especially those emitting from any aspect below the aircraft.”

Until the Air Force flies the B-21 for the first time, analysis and understanding of the plane will come in bits and pieces as new filtered images trickle out. That is, unless details about the bomber end up leaked to the War Thunder forums, as has already happened with classified documents about two different military aircraft this month.

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A white-hulled MQ-4C Triton accelerated down a runway in Guam before lifting off into dark clouds. The video, captured August 18 by the US Navy, was recorded to mark a modest milestone in the drone program. The Navy’s Tritons have now reached “initial operating capability,” meaning that enough aircraft, spare parts, and crew are available to use the vehicles as intended. The Triton, the Navy’s version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk flown by the Air Force since 2001, is an eye in the sky, tasked with watching the ocean.

Located over 3,700 miles west from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and just over 1,800 miles east from the coast of China, Guam is a centerpiece literally and figuratively in the plans and ability of the United States to operate in the Pacific Ocean. The Triton is a flying sensor platform, built for long endurance and maritime domain awareness, or watching and tracking action on the sea below. The Navy’s P-8 Poseidon, a crewed maritime surveillance plane based on the Boeing 737 airline airframe, flies with a nine-person team on board. Being able to have drones perform some of this type of observation, with fresh human crews on the ground swapping out multiple times mid-flight, means that the Navy can maintain surveillance for an extended time.

It takes a team of five to operate the Triton. That means someone to manage the drone’s flight, two people to manage its different sets of sensors, one person in charge of the signals it sends and collects, and a coordinator in charge of the whole operation. The Triton has a wingspan of 130 feet, meaning that its wings stretch wider than those on a 737. It flies at a cruising cruising speed of about 368 mph.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“We have been successfully operating Triton in Guam for several years, and now we have expanded this platform’s capabilities far beyond those it started with,” said Josh Guerre, MQ-4C Triton program manager, in a release.

Two Tritons were first deployed to Guam, as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Patrol Squad 19 (shortened to VUP-19), in January 2020 through October 2022. That time allowed for significant observations to be made in how the drones operated, and meant that when the Navy redeployed them this summer to Guam, the drones’ sensors had received a major upgrade. 

Those sensors are likely the signals intelligence (SIGINT) sensor upgrades boasted about earlier by Triton maker Northrop Grumman: “Triton Multi-INT gets its name from the addition of two new SIGINT sensors: one that gathers electronic intelligence and one that gathers communications intelligence. We’ve also removed an older electronic support measures sensor and installed a new, more capable version of the electro-optical infrared sensor flying on Triton today, said Rob Zmarzlak, chief engineer for Northrop Grumman’s Autonomous ISR and Targeting Programs, in a release.

One of the distinct challenges of watching for activity on the ocean, as compared to scanning for action on the ground, is that the vast and largely uniform expanse of the sea can be especially devoid of human activity, outside of major sea lanes. By listening for the signals given off from boats and ships, the Triton can more reliably find useful activity onto which it can train its cameras.

Northrop Grumman boasts that the Triton can, from an altitude of 50,000 feet and on a mission lasting 24 hours, survey four million nautical miles. That’s a major delivery on the promise of the Triton, which first flew in 2013. As Popular Science said at the time, its high altitude flights will allow it to take in “a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction” and then “it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine–from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton’s strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.”

Even as the Navy prepares for Tritons to become a regular part of operations, USNI News reports that the Navy is looking to halt the production of Tritons at just 27 total units, down from the original plan of 70. The Triton is useful for extensive watching of the sea, especially in conjunction with other tools, but it comes with a serious price tag. For 2022, the unit cost of each Triton was roughly $141 million.  Even as the US Navy scales down the number of Tritons it is looking to buy and maintain, Australia is looking to expand the number of Tritons it will use and operate from three to four.

Watch the Triton’s ascent in Guam below:

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The Central Intelligence Agency confirmed it is building a ChatGPT-style AI for use across the US intelligence community. Speaking with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise, described the project as a logical technological step forward for a vast 18-agency network that includes the CIA, NSA, FBI, and various military offices. The large language model (LLM) chatbot will reportedly provide summations of open-source materials alongside citations, as well as chat with users, according to Bloomberg. 

“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced. Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost,” Nixon said.

“We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Nixon continued, adding, “We have to find the needles in the needle field.”

[Related: ChatGPT can now see, hear, and talk to some users.]

The announcement comes as China’s make their ambitions to become the global leader in AI technology by the decade’s end known. In August, new Chinese government regulations went into effect requiring makers of publicly available AI services submit regular security assessments. As Reuters noted in July, the oversight will likely restrict at least some technological advancements in favor of ongoing national security crackdowns. The laws are also far more stringent than those currently within the US, as regulators struggle to adapt to the industry’s rapid advancements and societal consequences.

Nixon has yet to discuss  the overall scope and capabilities of the proposed system, and would not confirm what AI model forms the basis of its LLM assistant. For years, however, US intelligence communities have explored how to best leverage AI’s vast data analysis capabilities alongside private partnerships. The CIA even hosted a “Spies Supercharged” panel during this year’s SXSW in the hopes of recruiting tech workers across sectors such as quantum computing, biotech, and AI. During the event, CIA deputy director David Cohen reiterated concerns regarding AI’s unpredictable effects for the intelligence community.

“To defeat that ubiquitous technology, if you have any good ideas, we’d be happy to hear about them afterwards,” Cohen said at the time.

[Related: The CIA hit up SXSW this year—to recruit tech workers.]

Similar criticisms arrived barely two weeks ago via the CIA’s first-ever chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani. Speaking at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit, Mulchandani contended that while some AI-based systems are “absolutely fantastic” for tasks such as vast data trove pattern analysis, “in areas where it requires precision, we’re going to be incredibly challenged.” 

Mulchandani also conceded that AI’s often seemingly “hallucinatory” offerings could still be helpful to users.

“AI can give you something so far outside of your range, that it really then opens up the vista in terms of where you’re going to go,” he said at the time. “[It’s] what I call the ‘crazy drunk friend.’” 

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Today, members of the military and an executive from Joby Aviation used a giant pair of scissors to cut a ribbon in front of an electric flying machine parked at Edwards Air Force Base in California. 

The moment is significant because, with the exception of small electric drones, the other aircraft that the Department of Defense have on hand are powered by fossil fuels. Cargo planes, fighter jets, helicopters, and other flying machines that can carry people or hefty cargo all burn petroleum products. But the flying machine behind the ribbon, an air taxi from a company called Joby Aviation, is a different kind of craft—like an EV, it’s powered by batteries. The aircraft has now taken up residence at Edwards Air Force Base in California, a facility famous as a flight testing center, where it might patrol or inspect the rugged landscape. 

The electric aircraft sports six large propellers that can tilt, enabling the machine to take off and land vertically and also fly horizontally, like a regular plane. Think of it as something like a small version of the military tiltrotor aircraft that already exist, such as the V-22 Osprey or the V-280 Valor. It has space for four passengers (or 1,000 pounds of cargo), one pilot, and can fly at speeds of 200 miles per hour.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

Joby has been testing and developing electric aircraft for years; it flew a “subscale demonstrator,” or small version of the plane, back in 2015. The full-sized aircraft that Joby has delivered to the Air Force is the first production prototype to come off the company’s line in Marina, California, in June. “It’s massive” as a moment, JoeBen Bevirt, the company’s CEO, tells PopSci. “This is like a dream come true.” 

There are a couple ways that the Air Force might use the aircraft. One is to patrol the Edwards Air Force Base’s sprawling footprint, which spans more than 400 square miles. (It’s an area bigger than New York City.)  Because the base is so big, says Maj. Philip Woodhull, who focuses on emerging technologies in the Air Force, the people who guard it “have quite a time doing perimeter security management.” 

“One of the ideas that we’re thinking of—an experiment we can do—is using a Joby aircraft for security forces purposes to do these perimeter sweeps,” he says. Their plan is to fly the aircraft remotely at first, meaning that a pilot would be operating it from the ground, without humans inside. 

The Joby craft could also monitor a giant lake bed at the base, which Woodhull says measures 12 by 20 miles in size. That area “is a great resource for doing emergency landings, but it is a natural landscape,” he says. The weather can alter the condition of the designated runways in the lake bed, and so, Woodhull says, “we always have to check whether the runways that we have designated out there are actually usable.” The Joby aircraft could help with that inspection process, as opposed to taking pickup trucks out to the site, although the initial plan is to fly the aircraft without anyone in it. If the Air Force becomes comfortable putting crew inside, though, the aircraft could also help transport people or supplies from one part of the base to another. The testing at the base will involve NASA, as well.

An aircraft that flies on electric power will be quieter than one that uses loud engines powered by fossil fuels, and that attribute could also have military appeal for other purposes. “There’s been significant interest across not only the other services,” such as the Army and Marine Corps, says Col. Thomas Meagher, who works with an Air Force program called AFWERX Agility Prime, but also “on the special forces side.”

“Low acoustic signature has lots of benefits for the DOD in some of those scenarios,” he adds. 

While delivery of the Joby air taxi to the Air Force represents a milestone, Bevirt notes that it remains “a Joby asset” even in DOD hands. And another Joby aircraft should be delivered to the base next year. Joby’s long-term plan is to eventually operate an air-taxi service for regular people to hail via an app like they would an Uber, and they’ve announced plans to partner with Delta.

Meagher says that this is the first electric aircraft “of this class”—specifically, it can carry several people, has tiltrotors, and a fixed wing—that the Air Force will use for an extended period. Meagher notes that they have previously experimented with a machine from a company called Lift by remotely flying it—that aircraft is a wild-looking contraption designed to carry one person. The Air Force also has experience with flying an electric aircraft from Vermont’s Beta Technologies. Beta has started to build an electric aircraft charging station at Duke Field near Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. 

At the ribbon cutting ceremony today, Col. Douglas Wickert, who commands the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, commented about the aircraft behind him: “Just looking at that, I mean you’re looking at the future—that is obvious.” 

Watch the event below.

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At the DSEI international arms show held in London earlier this month, German defense company FFG showed off a tank-like vehicle it had already sent to Ukraine. The Mine Clearing Tank, or MCT, is a tracked and armored vehicle, based on the WISENT 1 armored platform, designed specifically to clear minefields and protect the vehicle’s crew while doing so. As Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine continues well into its second year, vehicles like this one show both what the present need there is, and what tools may ultimately be required for Ukraine to reclaim Russian-occupied territory.

The current shape of the war in Ukraine is largely determined by minefields, trenches, and artillery. Russia holds long defensive lines, where mines guard the approaches to trenches, and trenches protect soldiers as they shoot at people and vehicles. Artillery, in turn, allows Russian forces to strike at Ukrainian forces from behind these defensive lines, making both assault and getting ready for assault difficult. This style of fortification is hardly unique; it’s been a feature of modern trench warfare since at least World War I. 

Getting through defensive positions is a hard task. On September 20, the German Ministry of Defense posted a list of the equipment it has so far sent to Ukraine. The section on “Military Engineering Capabilities” covers an extensive range of tools designed to clear minefields. It includes eight mine-clearing tanks of the WISENT 1 variety, 11 mine plows that can go on Ukraine’s Soviet-pattern T-72 tanks, three remote-controlled mine-clearing robots, 12 Ahlmann backhoe loaders designed for mine clearing, and the material needed for explosive ordnance disposal.

The MCT WISENT 1 weighs 44.5 tons, a weight that includes its heavy armor, crew protection features, and the powerful engines it needs to lift and move the vehicle’s mine-clearing plow. The plow itself weighs 3.5 tons, and is wider than the vehicle itself.

“During the clearing operation, the mines are lifted out of the ground and diverted via the mine clearing shield to both sides of the lane, where they are later neutralized by EOD forces. If mines explode, ‘only’ the mine clearance equipment will be damaged. If mines slip through and detonate under the vehicle, the crew is protected from serious injuries,” reports Gerhard Heiming for European Security & Technology.

One of the protections for crew are anti-mine seats, designed to divert the energy from blasts away from the occupants. The role of a mine-clearing vehicle is, after all, to drive a path through a minefield, dislodging explosives explicitly placed to prevent this from happening. As the MCT WISENT 1 clears a path, it can also mark the lane it has cleared.

Enemy mine

Mines as a weapon are designed to make passage difficult, but not impossible. What makes mines so effective is that many of the techniques to clear them, and do so thoroughly, are slow, tedious, time-consuming tasks, often undertaken by soldiers with hand tools. 

“The dragon’s teeth of this war are land mines, sometimes rated the most devilish defense weapons man ever devised,” opens How Axis Land Mines Work, a story from the April 1944 issue of Popular Science. “Cheap to make, light to transport, and easy to install, it is as hard to find as a sniper, as dangerous to disarm as a commando. To cope with it, the Army Engineers have developed a corps of specialists who have one of the most nerve-wracking assignments in the book.”

The story goes on to to detail anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, which are the two categories broadly in use today. With different explosive payloads and pressure triggers, the work of min-clearing is about ensuring all the mines are swept aside, so dismounted soldiers and troops in trucks alike can have safe passage through a cleared route. 

The MCT WISENT 1 builds upon lessons and technologies for mine-clearing first developed and used at scale in World War II. Even before the 2022 invasion by Russia, Ukraine had a massive mine-clearing operation, working on disposing of explosives left from World War II through to the 2014-2022 Donbass war. The peacetime work of mine clearing can be thorough and slow.

For an army on the move, and looking to break through enemy lines and attack the less-well-defended points beyond the front, the ability of an armored mine-sweeper to clear a lane can be enough to shift the tide of battle, and with it perhaps a stalled front.

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For roughly 24 hours, between the afternoon of September 17 and the evening of September 18, the United States Marine Corps couldn’t find one of its F-35B stealth fighter jets. The pilot had ejected, but it took the military a spell to find the jet, and in the process it put out a call for the public to keep their eyes peeled for the plane. Joint Base Charleston confirmed Monday evening that a debris field was found two hours northeast of the base, believed to be the crashed plane. 

So how does the military lose a stealth jet? That’s the $100-million question. F-35 unit prices vary by model and the lot in which they are purchased; recent F-35B purchases have cost a high of $108 million per jet and a low of $78.3 million. On the other hand, F-35A models, which the Air Force fly, cost around $69.9 million now, though older lots cost up to $89.2 million. 

The nature of stealth helps explain how it’s possible, in 2023, for the Department of Defense to lose track of one of its own jets, prompting a call for citizens to help search. Stealth is a technology designed to hide planes from radar, so that stealth fighters and bombers can attack buildings, ships, vehicles, and other targets in war with less fear of getting detected and shot down by enemy aircraft and anti-air missiles. To achieve this sort of radar-invisibility, stealth planes have physical shapes that reduce radar signature, along with special coatings that dampen the reflectivity of radio waves.

Because the stealth characteristics are built into jets like the F-35 series, as well as the F-22 fighter, and the B-2 and B-21 bombers, they are just harder for radars to track. One way to keep track of where planes are is a transponder, which sends out a signal announcing the aircraft’s location. Transponders are useful for commercial and military aircraft, and required for almost all flights in US skies, as they allow aircraft to avoid each other. The Washington Post reported that the F-35B’s transponder was not working at the time the pilot ejected, leading the military to ask the public for help locating the plane.

Another way to make stealth jets more visible, and to conceal the true ability of their radar-avoiding shape, is to include high-radar-visibility augmentation, as is sometimes done at air shows. The military sometimes augments the F-35′s cross-section during public or semi-public flights so they will look different on a radar from how it would during an actual combat mission, retired Air Force General Hawk Carlisle told Defense News.

Public transponder records, as reported by the War Zone (which is owned by PopSci’s parent company, Recurrent), show the search pattern the Air Force used to try to locate the lost F-35B before finding the debris field. If other techniques were used to find the plane beyond visual search, it is likely the military will want to keep those secret, as details about how to find a stealth plane could undermine the massive investment already put into stealth jets.

Even if it briefly created a flurry of media attention, the case of the temporarily missing F-35B is just the latest incident of the US military losing control of something powerful and important. Here are several others.

Lost drones

For as long as the military has operated drones, some of those drones have gotten lost. Both of these instances have some similarity to this week’s wild F-35 hunt.

A plane called the Kettering Bug was built during World War I as an “aerial torpedo,” or a flying uncrewed bomb that would, in the fixed trench combat of the time, travel a set distance and then shed its wings to crash into an enemy position with explosive force. The war ended before the Bug could see action, but this predecessor of both drones and cruise missiles was tested as a secret weapon in the United States. 

On October 4, 1918, the biplane bomb took off, and then flew off track. The US Army searched the area near its Dayton, Ohio launch site, asking the public if they had seen a missing plane. Several of the witnesses reported what appeared to be a plane with a drunk pilot, and the Army went along with those stories, saying the pilot had jumped out and was being treated. The plane, as an uncrewed weapon, had no human pilot on board. Rather than reveal the secret weapon, the Army let witnesses believe they had seen something other than the aerial torpedo. The Army found the wreckage of the Bug, recovered its reusable mechanical parts, and burned the wrecked fuselage on the spot.

Almost a century later in 2017, the US Army lost an RQ-7B Shadow drone, which was launched from a base in southern Arizona on January 31, then discovered over a week later on February 9, having crashed into a tree outside of Denver. The Shadow drone has a stated range of under 80 miles, though that range is how far it can fly while remaining in contact with the ground station used by human operators. Shadow drones can also fly for nine hours, with a cruising speed of 81 mph, so the 630-mile journey was within the distance the drone could technically cover. While drones like the Shadow are programmed to search for lost communications signals, autonomous flight features mean that a failure to connect can lead to unusual journeys, like the one the Shadow took.

Lost jets

The F-35B that went missing in South Carolina is just the latest such plane to crash and require search and recovery. In November 2021, a British F-35B operating from the HMS Queen Elizabeth crashed into the Mediterranean. The pilot ejected safely, but the sunken stealth jet, once found, required a maritime salvage operation. 

Then, in January 2022, the US Navy lost an F-35C in the South China Sea. The plane approached too low on a landing, skidded across the deck, and then fell off the deck’s edge into the ocean after the pilot had ejected. The incident injured seven sailors, including the pilot.  The sunken stealth jet had to be recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet, using a specialized remotely operated vessel.

While in both cases these crashes featured witnesses in the general vicinity who knew where the lost planes ended up, the recovery took on a similar sense of importance, as even a crashed and sunken jet could reveal crucial details of the aircraft’s design and operation to another country, had one of them gotten there first.

Lost nukes

While jets are often the most expensive piece of hardware lost in a crash, there’s also the cargo to consider. In February 1958, the US Air Force lost a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, following a mid-air collision with an F-86 fighter jet. To date, the bomb has not yet been found in its watery resting place, despite extensive searching by the US Navy for the months after the incident.

In January 1961, a B-52 bomber transporting two nuclear bombs started to fall apart in the sky above North Carolina. The two bombs crashed into the ground, either as part of the plane or released independently (accounts vary), and neither bomb detonated. But both bombs did come close to detonation, as several safety triggers were activated in the fall, and the whole incident prompted a change to how easy it was to arm US nuclear bombs.

The incident over North Carolina was just one of several nuclear near-misses that came from the transport and failure of systems around US nuclear bombs. In January 1966, a US bomber collided with the tanker refueling it above the village of Palomares in Spain, releasing one nuclear weapon into the sea and three onto land, where two of them cracked open and dispersed the bomb’s plutonium into the wind. The three bombs on land were found and recovered quickly, and the fourth bomb was recovered from the sea after an extensive underwater salvage operation. Cleanup work on the site where the bombs scattered plutonium continued into the 2010s.

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UPDATE: Sept. 18, 2023, 6:50 p.m. ET: On Monday night, the Joint Base Charleston released a statement on X, formerly Twitter, stating: “Personnel from Joint Base Charleston and @MCASBeaufortSC, in close coordination with local authorities, have located a debris field in Williamsburg County. The debris was discovered two hours northeast of JB Charleston. We would like to thank all of our mission partners, as well as local, county, and state authorities, for their dedication and support throughout the search and as we transition to the recovery phase.”

The US military is asking you to help them find their very expensive, very missing jet. According to Joint Base Charleston’s public statement posted on September 17 to Facebook, officials are still searching for an F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter jet after a “mishap” resulted in its pilot safely ejecting somewhere near South Carolina’s Lake Moutrie. Talking with The Washington Post, Joint Base Charleston spokesperson Jeremy Huggins explained the jet’s transponder, usually employed to find aircraft in such situations, has malfunctioned “for some reason that we haven’t yet determined… that’s why we put out the public request for help.”

[Related: Air Force declares F-35 ready for combat.]

Although it is certainly possible one of the military’s most expensive and high tech jets has crashed, Huggins confirmed to NBC News that the pilot (who is in “stable condition”) left their plane in autopilot mode before ejecting—meaning it could actually still be airborne.

“How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” Rep. Nancy Mace posted to X, formerly Twitter Sunday night.

Although the missing plane’s exact cost isn’t confirmed, estimates put a single F-35B Lightning’s worth at somewhere around $78 to $81 million. (The F-35 also comes in an A variant for the Air Force and a C variant for the Navy.) The F-35B is first-and-foremost a stealth craft, featuring different “coatings and designs” that make it much more difficult to detect than standard planes,” according to Huggins. An F-35B can also take off and land vertically, thus requiring much shorter runways than those aboard aircraft carriers. According to Lockheed-Martin’s official description, an F-35B equipped with a full weapons load capacity of 15,000 lb clocks in at Mach 1.6 (around 1,200 mph) while also pulling upwards of 7 G’s during flight. It is currently used within the US Marine Corps, as well as the UK and Italian Air Forces.

The USMC finally declared the F-35B “operational” in 2015 after a decades’ long funding and development saga. At the time, a squadron of 10 jets were estimated to cost somewhere between $1.04 billion and $1.34 billion.

“The public is asked to cooperate with military and civilian authorities as the effort continues,” Joint Base Charleston’s Facebook post explains, adding that any information that could help them be relayed to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Public Affairs Office at 252-466-3827.

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On September 5, Swedish defense giant Saab announced a new feature for its existing camouflage netting. This netting is thrown over military positions, like artillery equipment or spots where soldiers are waiting in a forest, to conceal them from detection by hostile forces. Modern nettings are designed to hide not just the appearance of what’s underneath, but the radar signatures and radio signals, too, although that can make sending out communications hard. Saab is taking a stab at solving that problem with the “Frequency Selective Surface technology” for its Barracuda Ultra-lightweight Camouflage Screen. The netting, as promised, lets people underneath send out low-frequency radio signals, while preventing them from being seen on radar.

Camouflage is the technique of hiding in war. Netting is among the most basic forms, and it works along the same general principle as kids making a blanket fort in the living room—only instead of an opaque sheet concealing both occupants and outsiders from each other, the looser material of the netting, along with the way fabric and other material is hung off it, allows those inside to look out, and watch without being seen.

Initial camouflage netting was a response to visual observation by eyes and cameras, using the visual light spectrum. Radar, which sends out radio waves and then discerns where objects are located by how those radio waves are reflected back, can see through netting designed only to conceal visually. Infrared cameras, looking at heat instead of reflected visible light, can also see through netting.

Multispectral approaches

Newer solutions designed to take these sensors into account are called multispectral camouflage netting.

“Multispectral camouflage is a counter-surveillance technique to conceal [an] object from detection along several waverange of the electromagnetic spectrum,” reads a NATO study of multispectral nets published in 2020. “Traditionally, military camouflage has been designed to conceal an object in the visible spectrum. Multi-spectral camouflage advances this capability by contra measure to detection methods in the infrared and radar domains.”

Hiding from sensors is an evolving science—part of the constant interplay between defensive and offensive tactics and tools in military science. Militaries have interests in developing both better ways to conceal their own forces, and tools for revealing hidden enemies.

One major limit of existing multispectral netting is that, while it can protect people hiding underneath it from detection, the same netting interferes with communications sent out. Soldiers waiting in ambush, or artillery crews concealed and waiting to strike, would prefer to be in communication with their allies. Having to leave the netting to relay commands undermines the point of the netting itself.

Here’s where Saab’s solution comes into play. “Thanks to our expertise within signature management, we are taking camouflage to the next level with this novel feature. It changes how soldiers communicate while keeping multispectral protection, and so introduces a new era of tactical communication flexibility, offering unparalleled capabilities,” Henning Robach, head of Saab’s business unit Barracuda, said in a release.

To facilitate this communication, the Frequency Selective Surface technology “allows selected radio frequencies to pass easily either way through the camouflage net, while protecting against the higher frequencies of electromagnetic waves used by radar systems.”

Those facilitated frequencies could still be detected, but they represent a much less likely slice of the electromagnetic spectrum for foes to monitor, and it rules out entire categories of other sensors used today. The point of camouflage is not perfect concealment, though that certainly would be nice. What it needs to do to work in battle is confound enemies, confusing them about where the threat really is, and thus encourage foes to make mistakes or target incorrectly.

The roots of camouflage

While camouflage as a technique is so ancient it is regularly found in nature, the word itself was so new to English that Popular Science ran an article in August 1917 entitled “A New French War Word Which Means “Fooling the Enemy.””

The term gained familiarity and widespread use thanks to the hurdles of describing combat in World War I. (The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the first use of the word that it knows about occurred in the 1880s, and traces its first usage in a military context to around 1915 or 1917.) Here’s Popular Science on the popularization of the term.

“Since the war started the Popular Science Monthly has published photographs of big British and French field pieces covered with shrubbery, railway trains ‘painted out’ of the landscape, and all kinds of devices to hide the guns, trains, and the roads from the eyes of enemy aircraft,” read the article. “Until recently there was no one word in any language to explain this war trick. Sometimes a whole paragraph was required to explain this military practice. Hereafter one word, a French word, will save all this needless writing and reading. Camouflage is the new word, and it means “fooling the enemy.”

The article went on to describe a specific use of camouflage, wherein a dead horse was dragged out of the no-man’s-land between British and German trenches, and then replaced by an imitation horse with a soldier inside, allowing him to spy on and fire at the enemy from what had been just a grim feature of the terrain.

In July 1941, before the United States had formally entered World War II, Popular Science covered the work of camouflaging industrial plants from the possibility of bombing. A July 1944 story on artillery illustrated a 4.5-inch gun dug into a foxhole and covered with netting. In 1957, Popular Science showcased a Matador cruise missile under camouflage netting, concealing the weapon and its 50 kiloton nuclear warhead (more potent than both atomic bombs dropped on Japan combined). And an August 2001 story on hyperspectral imaging titled “Nowhere to Hide” showcased how satellites could see through camouflage, thanks to the different wavelengths at which actual vegetation and decoys reflected light. 

At present, it’s the tension between powerful sensors and advanced concealment techniques that make multispectral camouflage important for militaries. In the meantime, ensuring that the people under the netting can communicate with allies outside of it is a boon.

Watch a video about Saab’s camouflage netting below:

The post Saab says it has solved a modern camouflage conundrum appeared first on Popular Science.

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The biggest hot air balloon in the United States is designed to fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet or higher, carrying seven people in its rattan basket over New Mexico. Five of those people are then planning to jump out of it (wearing parachutes), plunging from an icy altitude where airliners typically fly but balloons rarely travel. Update on September 28: The team successfully carried out the jump.

Hot air balloons do not typically float up to such great heights. “Balloons don’t normally fly above 18,000 feet,” says Andrew Baird, the general manager of Cameron Balloons US, the balloon-making company behind this specific vessel. In fact, he notes, riding a hot air balloon up to 30,000 feet represents a special kind of milestone for anyone who does it. “It’s hard on the body,” he says. “You have to approach the mission scientifically, and with great caution.” 

Flying up to 30,000 feet in a balloon may be rare, but carrying so many people when doing so and even hitting 35,000 feet is “extremely unusual, let alone jumping out of the aircraft.” The purpose of the jump (which aims to break a world record) is to raise money for an organization called the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. 

Here’s what to know about the balloon that will carry these people to such a lofty place, by the numbers.

560,000 cubic feet

This specific balloon is known as the A-560, with the 560 standing for 560,000 cubic feet. That’s the volume of the fabric part of the balloon. 

The fabric that it’s made out of is a kind of nylon known as Hyperlast, and it’s coated on both sides with silicone, says Baird. That silicone keeps the material from being porous.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“The purpose of a balloon fabric obviously is to trap air—we want to trap all that hot air because that’s what generates the lift,” he says. “We want it to be lightweight and flexible, but we also need it to be rugged, and slightly elastic.” 

“It’s the biggest balloon that Cameron Balloons US has ever made,” he says, although “a few” bigger ones exist in Europe. The company says it will measure about 113 feet tall when it’s inflated all the way.

1,069 pounds

All of that fabric and other related gear weighs more than 1,000 pounds, a figure that doesn’t include the weight of the basket and its burners. And of course, creating that fabric portion takes careful engineering and construction. A hot air balloon is not made out of one piece of fabric, but hundreds. One key component is called a gore, and these segments run longitudinally up and down the balloon. (This page has a helpful image.) “A gore is kind of like a segment of an orange—slightly bulbous, thin at the top, wider in the middle, and thin at the bottom again,” he says. This balloon has 20 gores. “And each one of those gores is made up of a number of panels that run horizontally.” 

The hundreds of panels comprise a type of “jigsaw puzzle,” Baird says.

“You have to know where each piece goes, you have to know which way up it goes, you have to know which way around it goes, and then you have to sew all of those together,” he adds. That sewing is done by people operating industrial sewing machines and joining the segments together with nylon thread, using a special seam. After the panels come together to form a gore, the team will begin to join the gores to one another. 

4 burners

A hot air balloon needs burners to make the air in the fabric nice and toasty. This specific balloon has four. Two of those are “absolutely standard,” he says, and the other two have been “modified specifically for high-altitude operation.” If you want to float up to around 30,000 feet, the standard burners could do the trick, but going north of that altitude demands the special burners. 

The air in the fabric needs to be hot, of course, because that’s the reason the whole thing can fly. The process of launching a balloon starts with just regular air, on the ground, propelled in with fans. 

“Then we turn the burners on, and we heat that air up, and that air expands,” he continues. “And because the balloon is a fixed volume, as the air inside the balloon expands, some of it is forced out of the mouth—and the mass of air that’s forced out of the mouth is exactly equal to the lift that you generate.” An airplane gets its lift from its wings, a helicopter from its spinning top rotor, and in this case the lift comes from burning propane to heat the air. The less dense air in the balloon is lighter than the surrounding air. 

The basket that hangs below the balloon is made from rattan, and the floor of the basket is constructed out of a kind of synthetic plywood. He says it also has a “jump platform.” 

“They will congregate on this platform; they will link up, and they will all go out together,” he says. The initiative is called the Alpha 5 Project and the jump could happen towards the end of this month, although the window for the flight technically spans September 15 to October 15, and, of course, requires nice weather. 

1,000 feet

This special jump involves traveling up very high. But when it comes to regular hot-air ballooning, Baird says that the magic number for having fun is much lower: “The fun way to fly is 1,000 feet or less—once you get above 1,000 feet, everything looks the same, just smaller.”

Being close to the ground in an open basket makes for a special kind of flight. 

“From a sightseeing perspective, the fun way to fly in a balloon is to be down low—if you’re out in the countryside, to come low, to dip down, get your feet wet in a lake, brush through the tops of the trees,” he adds. “Ballooning is unlike any other form of aviation, in that you are really part of the environment.” 

Update: The team successfully pulled off the jump on September 28. Watch a video of the plunge from the balloon, below.

The post The biggest hot air balloon in the US was built to carry skydivers appeared first on Popular Science.

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On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning. 

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions. 

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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On April 18 in New York City, a parking garage in lower Manhattan collapsed, killing one person—the garage’s manager, Willis Moore. Much of the media coverage surrounding that event focused on a robotic dog that the New York City Fire Department used on the scene, a mechanical quadruped painted like a dalmatian and named Bergh. But another robot explored the collapsed structure that spring day—an exceptionally tiny and quiet drone flown by militaries that looks exactly like a little helicopter.

It’s called the Black Hornet. It weighs less than 1.2 ounces, takes off from its operator’s hand, and streams back video to a screen so people can see what the drone sees and make decisions before approaching a structure that might have hostile forces or other hazards inside it. 

Here’s how this 6.6-inch-long drone works, what it’s like to fly it, and how it was used that April day following the deadly structural collapse. 

Restaurant reconnaissance

Popular Science received a demonstration of the drone on August 10, and had the chance to fly it, in a space on the ground floor of a New York City hotel near Central Park. 

Rob Laskovich, a former Navy SEAL and the lead trainer for the Black Hornet with Teledyne FLIR, the company that makes the diminutive drone, explains that the drone’s low “noise signature” makes it virtually undetectable when it’s more than 10 feet away from people and 10 feet in the air. “It almost disappears,” he says. “And the size of this thing—it’s able to get into very tight corners.” 

Because it’s so quiet and so maneuverable, the itty bitty drone offers a way to gather information about what’s in a space up to a mile away or further and stream that video (at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels) over encrypted radio link back to the base station. This latest version of the Black Hornet also doesn’t need access to GPS to fly, meaning it can operate inside a building or in other “GPS-denied” spaces. It carries no weapons. 

Laskovich removes one of the toy-sized Black Hornets from a case; there are three of them in this kit, meaning two can be charging while another one is flying. The drone has a nearly invisible wire antenna that requires a flick of the finger to make it hang out down off the back. The Black Hornet, he says, is “almost like a mini Black Hawk helicopter.” It is indeed just like a miniature helicopter; it has a top rotor to give it lift and a tail rotor to prevent it from spinning around in circles—the anti-torque system. 

Mission control for the little bird involves a small non-touchscreen display and a button-filled controller designed to be used with one hand. Laskovich selects “indoor mode” for the flight. “To start it, it’s a simple twist,” he says, giving the Black Hornet a little lateral twist back and forth with his left hand. Suddenly, the top rotor starts spinning. Then he spins the tiny chopper around a bit more, “to kind of let it know where it’s at,” he says. He moves the aircraft up and down. 

“What it’s doing, it’s reading the environment right now,” he adds. “Once it’s got a good read on where it’s at, the tail rotor is going to start spinning, and the aircraft will take off.” And that’s exactly what happens. The wee whirlybird departs from his hand, and then it’s airborne in the room. The sound it makes is a bit like a mosquito. 

On the screen on the table in front of us is the view from the drone’s cameras, complete with the space’s black and white tiled floor; two employees walk past it, captured on video. A few moments later he turns it so it’s looking at us at our spot in a corner booth, and on the screen I see the drone’s view of me, Laskovich, and Chris Skrocki, a senior regional sales manager with Teledyne FLIR, standing by the table. 

Laskovich says this is the smallest drone in use by the US Department of Defense; Teledyne FLIR says that the US Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force have the drone on hand. Earlier this summer, the company announced that they were going to produce 1,000 of these itty bitty aircraft for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense, who would send them to Ukraine, adding to 300 that had already been sent. Skrocki notes that a kit of three drones and other equipment can cost “in the neighborhood of about $85,000.”

Eventually Laskovich pilots the chopper back to him and grabs it out of the air from the bottom, as if he was a gentle King Kong grabbing a full-sized helicopter out of the sky, and uses the hand controller to turn it off. 

Kitchen confidential 

The demonstration that Laskovich had conducted was with a Black Hornet model that uses cameras to see the world like a typical camera sensor does. Then he demonstrates an aircraft that has thermal vision. (That’s different from night vision, by the way.) On the base station’s screen, the hot things the drone sees can be depicted in different ways: with white showing the hot spots, black showing the heat, or two different “fuse” modes, the second of which is highly colorful, with oranges and reds and purples. That one, with its bright colors, Laskovich calls “Predator mode,” he says, “because it looks like the old movie Predator.”

Laskovich launches the thermal drone with a whir and he flies it away from our booth, up towards a red EXIT sign hanging from a high ceiling and then off towards an open kitchen. I watch to see what the drone sees via the screen on the table in front of me. He gets it closer and closer to the kitchen area and eventually puts it into “Predator mode.” 

A figure is clearly visible on the drone’s feed, working in the general kitchen area. “And the cool part about it, they have no idea there’s a drone overhead right now,” he says. He toggles through the different thermal settings again: in one of the drone’s modes, a body looks black, then in another, white. He descends a bit to clear a screen-type installation that hangs from the ceiling over the kitchen area and pushes further into the cooking space. At one point, the drone, via the screen in front of me, reveals plates on metal shelving. 

“There’s your serving station right there,” he says. “We’re right in the kitchen right now.” He notes that thanks to “ambient noise,” any people nearby likely can’t detect the aircraft. He flies the drone back to us and I can see the black and white tile floor, and then the drone’s view of me and Laskovich sitting at our table. He cycles through the different thermal settings once more, landing on Predator mode again, revealing both me and Laskovich in bright orange and yellow. 

In a military context, the drone’s ideal use case, Laskovich explains, is to provide operators a way to see, from some distance away, what’s going on in a specific place, like a house that might be sheltering hostile forces. “It’s the ability to have real-time information of what’s going on on a target, without compromising your unit,” he says.

Flight lessons

Eventually, it’s my turn to learn to fly this little helo. The action is all controlled by a small gray hand unit with an antenna that enables communication to the drone. On the front of the control stick are a bunch of buttons, and on the back are two more. Some of them control what the camera does. Others control the flight of the machine itself. One of them is a “stop and hover” button. Two of the buttons are for yaw, which makes the helicopter pivot to the left or right. The two on the back tell the helicopter to ascend or descend—the altitude control. The trick in flying it, Laskovich says, is to look at the screen while you’re operating the drone, not the drone itself. 

I hold the helicopter in my left hand, and after I put the system in “indoor mode,” Laskovich tells me, “you’re ready to fly.” 

I twist the Black Hornet back and forth and the top rotor starts spinning with a whir. After some more calibration moves, the tail rotor starts spinning, too. I let it go and it zips up out of my hand. “You’re flying,” Laskovich says, who then proceeds to tell me what buttons to press to make the drone do different things. 

I fly it for a bit around the space, and after about seven minutes, I use my left hand to grab onto the bottom part of the machine and then hit three buttons simultaneously on the controller to kill the chopper’s power. And suddenly, the rotor and tail stopped spinning. The aircraft remains in my left hand, a tiny little flying machine that feels a bit like it flew out of a science fiction movie. 

Flying this aircraft, which will hold a stable hover all on its own, is much easier than managing the controls of a real helicopter, which I, a non-pilot, once very briefly had the chance to try under the watchful tutelage of an actual aviator and former Coast Guard commander. 

The garage collapse

On April 18, Skrocki was in New York City on business when he heard via text message that the parking garage had collapsed. He had the Black Hornet on hand, and contacted the New York Police Department and offered the drone’s use. They said yes, and he headed down to the scene of the collapse, and eventually sent the drone into the collapsed structure “under coordination with the guys there on scene,” Skrocki says. 

He recalls what he saw in there, via the Black Hornet. “There were some vehicles that were vertically stacked, a very busy scene,” he says. “It just absolutely appeared unstable.” When the flight was over, as Skrocki notes on a post on LinkedIn that includes a bit of video, he landed the drone in a hat. The Black Hornet drone doesn’t store the video it records locally on the device itself, but the base station does, and Skrocki noted on Linkedin that “Mission data including the stills/video was provided to FDNY.”

Besides the robotic dog, the FDNY has DJI drones, and they said that they used one specific DJI model, an Avata, that day for recon in the garage. As for the Black Hornet, the FDNY said in an emailed statement to PopSci: “It was used after we were already done surveying the building. The DJI Avata did most if not all of the imagery inside the building. The black hornet was used as we had the device present and wanted to see its capabilities. We continue to use the DJI Avata for interior missions.” The FDNY does not have its own Black Hornet. 

Beyond military uses, Skrocki says that the Black Hornet can help in a public safety context or with police departments, giving first responders an eye on a situation where an armed suspect might be suicidal or have a hostage, for example. The drone could provide a way for watchers to know exactly when to try to move in.

In New York state, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office has a Black Hornet set that includes three small aircraft. And Teledyne FLIR says that the Connecticut State Police has the drone, although via email a spokesperson for that police force said: “We cannot confirm we have Black Hornet Drones.” 

The New York City Police Department has controversially obtained two robotic dogs, a fact that spurred the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union to tell The New York Times in April: “And all we’re left with is Digidog running around town as this dystopian surveillance machine of questionable value and quite potentially serious privacy consequences.” 

Stuart Schrader, an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Africana Studies, highlights the potential for military-level technology in civilian hands to experience a type of “mission creep.”

“It seems quite sensible to not put humans or [real] dogs in danger to do the [parking garage] search, and use a drone instead,” Schrader says. “But I think that the reality is what we see with various types of surveillance technologies—and other technologies that are dual-use technologies where they have military origins—it’s just that most police departments or emergency departments have very infrequent cause to use them.” And that’s where the mission creep can come in. 

In the absence of a parking garage collapse or other actual disaster, departments may feel the need to use the expensive tools they already have in other more general situations. From there, the tech could be deployed, Schrader says, “in really kind of mundane circumstances that might not warrant it, because it’s not a crisis or emergency situation, but actually it’s just used to potentiate the power of police to gain access for surveillance.”

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On September 6, the Department of Defense announced $175 million in military aid to Ukraine. Included in this drawdown of existing US military equipment is “120mm depleted uranium tank ammunition for Abrams tanks,” making the United States the second country after the United Kingdom to not just supply Ukraine with tanks (due mid-September), but with depleted uranium ammunition for them. The ammunition, derived from nuclear refining processes, has immediate military applications as well as potential health impacts as an environmental pollutant after it’s been expended. 

The drawdown fact sheet includes the Abrams ammunition alongside rockets for HIMARS launchers, anti-tank missiles, artillery rounds, and over 3 million bullets for small arms (rifles and the like). It’s a list that largely matches the state of the war, where demolition munitions are paired with weapons designed to crack open enemy armor, and it reflects Ukraine’s longer goal of retaking territory occupied and held by Russia since the February 2022 invasion.

“We want to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs not only to succeed in the counteroffensive but has what it needs for the long term to make sure that it has a strong deterrent, strong defense capacity so that, in the future, aggressions like this don’t happen again,” said Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ahead of his meeting in Kyiv with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. 

Depleted uranium tank ammunition, built and designed for the Abrams tanks the United States is sending Ukraine, factors into this calculus. Depleted uranium has several properties that make it appealing as an ammunition. It is denser than lead, it sharpens in flight, and it is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites easily under high pressures and at temperatures between 1,100 and 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, which it reaches when fired as a round. All of this combines to create a dense, potent, incendiary armor-piercing round, useful for tanks fighting other tanks.

Where does depleted uranium come from?

The first time Popular Science covered depleted uranium, it was in 1953, as part of a story on nuclear reactors. Uranium occurs in nature, but to get to the most useful isotopes for weapons or reactors, uranium has to undergo a process of enrichment. As the useful isotopes get sifted out of the mix, the remainder is depleted. Some of this depleted uranium is used in breeder reactors to create plutonium. It can also be combined with plutonium oxide to create another kind of reactor fuel. 

Uranium naturally occurs in three kinds of isotopes: U-234, U-235, and U-238. Uranium for nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons is enriched, increasing its concentration of the U-235 isotope from a natural level of 0.72% by mass to “between 2% and 94% by mass,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The unenriched by-product is the depleted uranium, defined as having a U-235 concentration of less than 0.711 percent. “Typically,” states the IAEA, “the percentage concentration by weight of the uranium isotopes in DU used for military purposes is: U-238: 99.8%; U-235: 0.2%; and U-234: 0.001%.”

Finding other uses (besides reprocessing it to create more nuclear fuel) for depleted uranium took a while. In 1969, Popular Science called depleted uranium an “ugly duckling” with limited uses, saying, “Extra-heavy, it makes compact counterweights for aircraft linkage systems, and ballast for the launch-escape tower of the Apollo spacecraft.” It’s in ammunition and armor plating that depleted uranium really found its military use. In 1982, Popular Science included the Phalanx anti-missile system in a feature on smart missiles, emphasizing the weapons’ “radar-guided, computer-driven Gatling gun” that “blasts incoming missiles at a rate of 3,000 rounds a minute. Its ammunition is more potent than most because the core of each round is made of depleted uranium, the heaviest metal available, for maximum impact.” 

Tungsten is a heavier metal, but it’s specifically worse for armor-piercing projectiles because, as Scientific American noted in 2001, “Like its slightly denser cousin, tungsten, uranium can penetrate most heavy armor. But whereas tungsten projectiles become rounded at the tip upon impact, uranium shells burn away at the edges. This ‘self-sharpening’ helps them bore into armor.”

The Environmental Protection Agency records that the Department of Defense started making bullets and mortar shells out of depleted uranium in the 1970s, which was then expanded to making armor for tanks and weights for balancing aircraft. This was all possible, in part, because depleted uranium was an abundant byproduct of nuclear weapons production and nuclear reactors, making depleted uranium “plentiful and inexpensive.”

Cleanup costs and concerns

The EPA has a page on depleted uranium specifically because it can be an environmental hazard that requires cleanup. 

“Like the natural uranium ore, [Depleted Uranium] DU is radioactive. DU mainly emits alpha particle radiation. Alpha particles don’t have enough energy to go through skin. As a result, exposure to the outside of the body is not considered a serious hazard,” reads the fact sheet. “However, if DU is ingested or inhaled, it is a serious health hazard. Alpha particles directly affect living cells and can cause kidney damage.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency emphasizes that while depleted uranium poses some risk from radiation if ingested, the primary harms come from it being a heavy metal absorbed into a human digestive, circulatory, or respiratory system. The main way depleted uranium gets into such a system is through inhalation, when the uranium becomes aerosolized in the process of an explosion. That means the most immediate health effects will be borne by the people on the receiving end of weapons fire, but also on people who immediately go into a tank that’s been hit to try to rescue people inside.

After a battle, farmers returning to a field could possibly encounter depleted uranium in the environment, though the IAEA notes that the “risk will be lower because the re-suspended uranium particles combine with other material and increase in size and, therefore, a smaller fraction of the uranium inhaled will reach the deep part of the lungs. Another possible route of exposure is the inadvertent or deliberate ingestion of soil. For example, farmers working in a field where DU ammunitions were fired could inadvertently ingest small quantities of soil, while children sometimes deliberately eat soil.”

On June 23, 2022, compromised 30mm rounds of depleted uranium ammunition were found at the Tooele Army Depot in Utah. Cleaning up the rounds was the task of an Explosive Ordnance Demolition (EOD) team, who worked to separate the depleted uranium projectile from the explosive part of the round. In photographs of the work, the team can be seen wearing masks and protective gear to avoid ingestion and inhalation of uranium.

“Handling DU rounds is especially dangerous, so we take extra precautions and follow our procedures 100 percent,” said EOD technician Derin Creek at the time. “We have to ensure not only the safety of everyone in the area and my team, but to also protect the environment and eliminate radioactive contamination.” 

Depleted uranium rounds, like the tanks that will fire them, are part of Ukraine’s growing arsenal to repel the Russian forces that have invaded the country since February 2022. The ammunition will need to be handled with care, as the Tooele Depot demonstrates, and cleaning up afterwards will take some special attention, once the battlefields are no longer active. Ukraine has already received cluster munitions, which are a unique cleanup challenge, from the United States. With that hurdle already cast into the future, cleaning the same fields from depleted uranium should just be an incremental hardship on top of the long work of restoration that may come, when the war finally ends.  

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD of the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence organization whose existence wasn’t declassified until 1992, but you have perhaps come across some of its creepy kitsch: patches from its surveillance-satellite missions. Consider the one that shows a yellow octopus strangling the globe with its tentacles, with the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” stitched beneath. Yikes.

The office, known as the NRO, is in charge of America’s spy satellites. The details of its current capabilities are largely classified, but we, the people, can get hints about it from public information—like the fact that the NRO donated two telescopes to NASA in 2012. The instruments were obsolete as far as the spies, who point their scopes at Earth instead of space, were concerned, but they were more powerful than the space agency’s Hubble.

But how the NRO came to build such capable watchers isn’t just the story of a secret government organization; it’s the result of that secret government organization’s collaboration with academics and corporate engineers—a story that Aaron Bateman, assistant professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, lays out in an article published in June 2023 in the journal Intelligence and National Security called “Secret partners: The national reconnaissance office and the intelligence-industrial-academic complex.” 

Although the phrase military-industrial complex has become common since Dwight D. Eisenhower coined it in 1961, academia’s role in that same complex often gets left out. So, too, does the intelligence side of the shiny national-security coin. 

That gap in the historical literature is what made Bateman decide to dig into the National Reconnaissance Office’s early connections to scholars and private companies. And while the collaborations he traces are decades old, they echo into today. Companies, universities, and colleges all still contribute to intelligence agencies—the latter’s needs sometimes shaping the trajectory of scientific inquiry or technological development. Wonky advances from academics and corporate types, meanwhile, still make spies lift their eyebrows in interest. 

California and the Corona project

The story Bateman tells begins in Sunnyvale, California, a town in what is now, but was not then, Silicon Valley. In the 1950s, as the country was looking toward orbit, Lockheed—today Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defense contractor—took notice of the government’s gaze. “Lockheed already had considerable presence in aerospace but wanted to carve out a space for itself—no pun intended—in space,” says Bateman.

Lockheed execs began contemplating what they would need to do to make that happen. Number one, carving out that space in space required…well…space. “During the 1950s, the Bay Area was full of just unused land that was fairly cheap,” says Bateman. But it wasn’t just the area’s wide-openness that appealed to Lockheed. “Most importantly, Stanford University was located there,” he continues. The defense contractor could siphon smart engineers from the school. Those variables locked down, Lockheed set up its Sunnyvale shop a few years before the NRO was founded, and it had won an Air Force satellite design contract by 1956.

This Bay Area facility soon became key to the NRO’s aptly named National Reconnaissance Program. Within big Bay Area buildings, Lockheed snapped together the components for the Corona project—the first satellite program to take pictures from space—and other nosy spacecraft. Once satellites were in orbit, industrial-academic collaborators helped the government operate and troubleshoot them. The feds couldn’t handle those tasks on their own, not having made the spacecraft themselves. 

Importantly to the development of these eyes in the sky, there was also “a free flow of knowledge,” according to Bateman’s research, among Stanford, Lockheed, and the people in trenchcoats who worked for the government.

Starting in the late 1950s, Stanford created the Industrial Affiliates Program, through which Lockheed employees taught university courses—ensuring students’ education would benefit future intelligence-industrial contributors—and also attended university classes, so they could stay up on the latest developments. 

Stanford grad students, meanwhile, waxed poetic about their research in presentations to the corporate suits. Lockheed recruited students whose work had relevance to their Secret Squirrel pursuits. 

The school also ran the Stanford Electronics Laboratory, a location fit for collaboration. Its academic environment supported a riskier, more experimental mindset than a deliverables-driven office might. For instance, a laboratory employee once installed a radar receiver in a Cessna plane and flew around San Francisco just to prove the instrument would work at high altitude—a “told you” that led to a satellite instrument that mapped the USSR’s air defense network. 

What developed on the East Coast 

Not to be left behind, the eastern part of the US had its own members-only meetings with the government. In Rochester, New York, Kodak created film that could survive the inhospitality of space, so it could be used to snap shots up there from a satellite. The film then fell back down through the atmosphere to Earth, where it was, incredibly, caught midair by a plane. 

The film had to capture clear pictures even as the camera peered through the entire atmosphere, survive the cosmic vacuum, and not break apart during the shaky, vibrating ride between here and there. 

Creating such kinds of film pushed photographic science along. As Bateman’s paper points out, “Technology is not just ‘applied science.’ Rather, technological needs can also lead to scientific advances.” 

In this case, those advances included not just image-taking but image analysis. And for that, the NRO turned to the Rochester Institute of Technology—where, by virtue of it being next to Kodak, photographic-science scholars had amassed. Amping that up, a CIA organization dedicated to image analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, started a grant program at the university, funding projects whose results would curve the path of scientific inquiry in a favorable direction for spies. One project, for instance, proposed new ways to pick up camouflage in photos. Scientists who got grants were then sometimes recruited into full-time espionage-focused employment.  

But it’s not as if the government and academia were peaceful partners all the time. “There’s widespread opposition on college campuses across the United States to any kind of classified research,” says Bateman. But in the late 1960s, the negativity was “fairly extreme” at Stanford, where “students tried to break in and vandalize facilities that were actually doing classified work for the National Reconnaissance Program.” They tossed rocks into the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Stanford Electronics Lab was occupied by protestors for nine days. 

“In New York, it’s kind of a different story,” says Bateman, speaking of the same era in the Northeast. “There isn’t really this wave of anti-government sentiment.” Partly, perhaps, because the Rochester Institute of Technology trended more conservative, and partly, Bateman’s work posits, because “the intelligence community offered photographic science students access to some of the most advanced technologies in their field.” That’s a pretty tasty carrot. 

After the general wave of opposition, Stanford ceased its super-official classified work, but progress continued just outside the school at a place called the Stanford Research Institute. 

Surveillance and scholarship

The intelligence-industrial-academic triad is alive and well today, says James David, curator of National Security Space at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Many military and intelligence organizations, for instance, have scientific advisory boards made up of scholarly experts. 

And just look at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he says—a NASA center that’s managed by Caltech and does classified work alongside its more press-releasable development of rovers for Mars. Both kinds of missions require commercial contractors. 

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, meanwhile, was designed to do classified work on behalf of the school, which itself prohibits secret projects. The Draper Laboratory, formerly housed by MIT, announced a separation from the school in 1970 when the university tried to separate itself from military work. Now, though, the lab offers the Draper Scholar Program to fund the work of masters and PhD students. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, meanwhile, is still under the university’s umbrella, and has an entire “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” research division. 

“It’s just continued to this day,” says Davis. 

But Bateman does see a big difference between past and present: “The level of openness,” he says. Whereas the NRO did not acknowledge its own existence when Stanford kids were throwing rocks, the spy agency now has an Instagram account. 

The agency’s reps show up at conferences too. “They go to universities and they talk about what they can do,” he says. 

The openness goes both ways: Companies in the commercial space industry reach out to spies and say, “‘Hey, I’m doing this thing over here,’” imitates Bateman, “‘and we think you might be interested in that.’ And sometimes the government says, ‘Yeah, actually, that’s really interesting. That could be a good thing for us, so we’re going to throw money your way.’” 

Previously, it wasn’t so. “If I can be a little reductive and Hollywood-esque here,” Bateman continues, describing the way it used to be, “guys in trenchcoats show up and knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re from the US government. We’re not gonna tell you where, but we’d like to collaborate with you.’”

These days, collaborations like those still happen, just minus the trenchcoats. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the earth has been shaking—not from natural earthquakes, but from bombings and other wartime explosions. By harnessing seismic data from sensors within Ukraine, international scientists have used the ground-rocking tremors after explosions to track the events of the war. 

This is the first time such data have been used to monitor explosions in an active combat zone in almost real-time. The results, published in the journal Nature, show far more explosions than previously reported: more than 1,200 explosions in the war’s first nine months, throughout Kyiv, Zhytomyr, and Chernihiv.

“Seismic data provide an objective data source, which is important for understanding what is happening in the war, for providing potential evidence where there are claims of breaches of international law, or for verifying individual attacks,” explains lead author Ben Dando, a seismologist at the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR).

[Related: Ukraine claims it built a battle drone called SkyKnight that can carry a bomb]

Dando and his colleagues’ data comes from an array of 23 seismic sensors outside of Kyiv. From the signals recorded by these seismometers, the researchers were able to pinpoint the time, location, and intensity of each explosion. Smaller disruptions, like the blast that accompanies a gunshot, are too weak for these sensors to detect; what they can observe are almost certainly large impacts, such as those from missiles and bombs.

Such detections can bring clarity to the confusion of armed conflict. It’s especially vital in Ukraine, which has been flooded with disinformation and propaganda. Accurate and timely information on the events of a battle are key for other countries and watchdog organizations to intervene—especially if it seems like international laws are being broken. Marco Bohnhoff, a seismologist at the GFZ Potsdam German Research Center who was not involved in the study, told German magazine SPIEGEL that this kind of seismic monitoring could be used to confirm events and expose deliberate misinformation in war reporting.

Seismic data “can provide insight into how certain locations are being targeted and at what intensity,” Dando says. For example, the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine was destroyed in June 2023, causing widespread flooding and a humanitarian crisis. Ukrainian officials claimed the damage was due to Russian bombing. If true, the destruction of civilian infrastructure would be considered a war crime under several international protocols. The hope is that seismic monitoring, like that done by Dando and colleagues, will provide further insight into situations like these and enable international responses.

[Related: The terrible history behind cluster munitions]

This is not the first time that scientific Earth-monitoring technology has overlapped with a conflict. Other techniques, namely satellite imaging, have also been used for this kind of surveillance in recent history, including during the Russia-Ukraine war. Satellites have captured images of destroyed infrastructure and large-scale movement of war materiel. A space-based NASA project intended to track human-made light sources at night, known as Black Marble, has even identified war-related power outages in Ukraine. Such satellite data “proves invaluable in identifying vulnerable populations deserving of immediate assistance,” says Ranjay Shrestha, a remote sensing expert involved with the Black Marble project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Remote sensing techniques have their limitations. They work best when coupled with on-the-ground information and context to produce accurate interpretations. “Consider, for example, instances in Ukraine where residents intentionally turned off their lights to reduce the risk of aerial attacks,” says Shrestha. “Without corroborating ground truth information, we might misinterpret the situation as a power outage resulting from infrastructure damage.”

Dando’s organization, NORSAR, was founded on the principle of using seismic data to study nuclear explosions as part of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The 23 sensors outside Kyiv that powered this study are part of that system, which had been used to detect nuclear tests across the world that violate international law. Usually, though, there aren’t suitable high-quality seismic sensors so close to an active military conflict. “We’re now seeing that with the right sensors in the right place,” Dando says, “there is significant value that seismic and acoustic data can provide for active conflict monitoring.”   

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In late summer, in the deserts of southern New Mexico, a truck fired a rocket that then traveled 93 miles. Made and tested by defense giant Lockheed Martin, the Extended-Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System is a weapon with more than twice the range of the existing Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System used by the US and other countries. Should the rocket continue to perform well in tests, it could lead to a massive expansion of range and firepower for rocket artillery, especially the HIMARS system used by Ukraine. (The HIMARS in use by Ukraine have a range of 43 miles.)

Lockheed Martin announced the successful test on September 1. Its test took place at White Sands Missile Range, which is most famous for hosting the world’s first detonation of an atomic bomb, and also regularly hosts regular tests of weapons in its vast and open space. At 3,200 square miles, White Sands Missile Range is vast enough to be larger than Rhode Island. It’s a good place to see if weapons fly as expected in the open and unencumbered skies of a test range.

Test variables

To add realism to the test, “the rocket pod underwent Stockpile to Target Sequence (STS) testing. This effort simulates cumulative effects ER GMLRS will meet in the field between factory and launch for the life of the system and demonstrates durability of the missile and launch pod container,” Lockheed Martin stated in a release.

This kind of testing, which dates back at least to the 1960s, is designed to reflect real-world conditions. That can mean changes in temperature, jostling in transit along roads, rail, or air, humidity (or the lack thereof), and other such conditions encountered in the course of operations. A rocket that can perform in laboratory settings is a good start, but a rocket that will be mass produced and used in battle needs to work in the conditions it will actually encounter.

Lockheed Martin boasts it has already produced 60,000 rounds of the existing Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, with ongoing contracts to continue production. A second test of the new Extended Range GLMRS is expected in September, after which the Army may make the call to start including these longer-range rockets into its regular production of GMLRS.

In traditional artillery, explosive charges are loaded before the artillery round, allowing the crew to calibrate range on the fly. The blast from the charges propels the round. In rocket artillery, the explosive round comes with a rocket engine and guidance fins included, as one big unit. This allows for quick launch and long-range accuracy. The Extended-Range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System that Lockheed Martin just tested is an example of rocket artillery—a self-propelled rocket that launches from a tube.

A range of options 

The HIMARS, or High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, is the expected launch platform for these extended range rockets, with testing of the integrated systems taking place at White Sands. With its existing regular guided rockets, HIMARS can hit targets up to 43 miles away. That’s well beyond the range of non-rocket artillery, which can be around 18 miles for towed howitzers. HIMARS proved especially crucial to the surprising success of Ukraine’s fall offensives in 2022. 

The arrival of HIMARS, and their judicious use against Russian leadership and ammunition depots, changed the contours of the war, and affected where the front lines settled. Now, as Ukraine’s spring offensive grinds through a long summer and dense Russian defenses over occupied Ukrainian territory, HIMARS still plays a role, but a less drastic one. 

There is another missile that Ukraine has sought to aid in its attempt to strike Russian forces far beyond their defensive lines. That’s the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a maximum range of up to 186 miles. On August 7, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba again requested that the United States include ATACMS in its aid to the country. Larger than rockets, the ATACMS is a ballistic missile, and could be used to reach Russian targets not just in occupied Ukraine but deeper into Russia.

Russian forces have long since bombed the interior of Ukraine, and Ukraine has already launched attacks into Russia, like using local operatives and drones to destroy a parked bomber used for such bombings.

Whether or not the United States ultimately sends ATACMS to Ukraine, the existence of a longer-range rocket for the HIMARS—the ER GMLRS that just traveled 93 miles in the test—could still prove useful as a middle-range option between the two. 

If the war continues into 2024 or longer, which it shows all signs of doing, an artillery weapon that can outmatch and outrange other artillery could give new options to Ukraine, if the US were to provide it. In US use, too, having the extended range on HIMARS rockets would allow this type of ground-based artillery to play a more meaningful role in fights on islands, as might happen in any Pacific war.

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An ongoing smart apparel project overseen by US defense and intelligence agencies has received a $22 million funding boost towards the “cutting edge” program designing “performance-grade, computerized clothing.” Announced late last month via Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the creatively dubbed Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems (SMART ePANTS) endeavor seeks to develop a line of “durable, ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data” for use by personnel within DoD, Department of Homeland Security, and wider intelligence communities.

“IARPA is proud to lead this first-of-its-kind effort for both the IC and broader scientific community which will bring much-needed innovation to the field of [active smart textiles],” Dawson Cagle, SMART ePANTS program manager, said via the August update. “To date no group has committed the time and resources necessary to fashion the first integrated electronics that are stretchable, bendable, comfortable, and washable like regular clothing.”

Smart textiles generally fall within active or passive classification. In passive systems, such as Gore-Tex, the material’s physical structure can assist in heating, cooling, fireproofing, or moisture evaporation. In contrast, active smart textiles (ASTs) like SMART ePANTS’ designs rely on built-in actuators and sensors to detect, interpret, and react to environmental information. Per IARPA’s project description, such wearables could include “weavable conductive polymer ‘wires,’ energy harvesters powered by the body, ultra-low power printable computers on cloth, microphones that behave like threads, and ‘scrunchable’ batteries that can function after many deformations.”

[Related: Pressure-sensing mats and shoes could enhance healthcare and video games.]

According to the ODNI, the new funding positions SMART ePANTS as a tool to assist law enforcement and emergency responders in “dangerous, high-stress environments,” like crime scenes and arms control inspections. But for SMART ePANTS’ designers, the technologies’ potential across other industries arguably outweigh their surveillance capabilities and concerns. 

“Although I am very proud of the intelligence aspect of the program, I am excited about the possibilities that the program’s research will have for the greater world,” Cagle said in the ODNI’s announcement video last year.

Cagle imagines scenarios in which diabetes patients like his father wear clothing that consistently and noninvasively monitors blood glucose levels, for example. Privacy advocates and surveillance industry critics, however, remain incredibly troubled by the invasive ramifications.

“These sorts of technologies are unfortunately the logical next steps when it comes to mass surveillance,” Mac Pierce, an artist whose work critically engages with weaponized emerging technologies, tells PopSci. “Rather than being tied to fixed infrastructure they can be hyper mobile and far more discreet than a surveillance van.”

[Related: Why Microsoft is rolling back its AI-powered facial analysis tech.]

Last year, Pierce designed and released DIY plans for a “Camera Shy Hoodie” that integrates an array of infrared LEDs to blind nearby night vision security cameras. SMART ePANTs’ deployment could potentially undermine such tools for maintaining civic and political protesters’ privacy.

“Wiretaps will never be in fashion. In a world where there is seemingly a camera on every corner, the last thing we need is surveillance pants,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director for the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, tells PopSci.

“It’s hard to see how this technology could actually help, and easy to see how it could be abused. It is yet another example of the sort of big-budget surveillance boondoggles that police and intelligence agencies are wasting money on,” Cahn continues. “The intelligence community may think this is a cool look, but I think the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.”

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The Pacific Ocean is vast, strategically important, and soon to be patrolled by another navy with nuclear-powered submarines. Earlier this year, Australia finalized a deal with the United States and the United Kingdom to acquire its own nuclear-powered attack submarines, and to share in duties patrolling the Pacific. These submarines will be incorporated into the broader functions of Australia’s Royal Navy, where they will work alongside other vessels to track, monitor, and if need be to fight other submarines, especially those of other nations armed with nuclear missiles. 

But because the ocean is so massive, the Royal Australian Navy wants to make sure that its new submarines are guided in their search by fleets of autonomous boats and subs, also looking for the atomic needle in an aquatic haystack—enemy submarines armed with missiles carrying nuclear warheads. To that end, on August 21, Thales Australia announced it was developing an existing facility for a bid to incorporate autonomous technology into vessels that can support Australia’s new nuclear-powered fleet. This autonomous technology will be first developed around more conventional roles, like undersea mine clearing, though it is part of a broader picture for establishing nuclear deterrence in the Pacific.

To understand why this is a big deal, it’s important to look at two changed realities of power in the Pacific. The United States and the United Kingdom are allies of Australia, and have been for a long time. A big concern shared by these powers is what happens if tensions over the Pacific with China escalate into a shooting war.

Nuclear submarines

In March of this year, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom announced an agreement called AUKUS, a partnership between the three countries that will involve the development of new submarines, and shared submarine patrols in the Pacific. 

Australia has never developed nuclear weapons of its own, while the United States and the United Kingdom were the first and third countries, respectively, to test nuclear weapons. By basing American and British nuclear-powered (but not armed) submarines in Australia, the deal works to incorporate Australia into a shared concept of nuclear deterrence. In other words, the logic is that if Russia or China or any other nuclear-armed state were to try to threaten Australia with nuclear weapons, they’d be threatening the United States and the United Kingdom, too.

So while Australia is not a nuclear-armed country, it plans to host the submarine fleets of its nuclear-armed allies. None of these submarines are developed to launch nuclear missiles, but they are built to look for and hunt nuclear-armed submarines, and they carry conventional weapons like cruise missiles that can hit targets on land or at sea.

The role of autonomy

Here’s where the new complex announced by Thales comes in. The announcement from Thales says that the new facility will help the “development and integration of autonomous vessels in support of Australia’s nuclear deterrence capability.” 

Australia is one of many nations developing autonomous vessels for the sea. These types of self-navigating robots have important advantages over human-crewed ones. So long as they have power, they can continuously monitor the sea without a need to return to harbor or host a crew. Underwater, direct communication can be hard, so autonomous submarines are well suited to conducting long-lasting undersea patrols. And because the ocean is so truly massive, autonomous ships allow humans to monitor the sea over great distances, as robots do the hard work of sailing and surveying.

That makes autonomous ships useful for detecting and, depending on the sophistication of the given machine, tracking the ships and submarines of other navies. Notably, Australia’s 2025 plan for a “Warfare Innovation Navy” outlines possible roles for underwater autonomous vehicles, like scouting and assigning communications relays. The document also emphasizes that this is new technology, and Australia will work together with industry partners and allies on the “development of doctrine, concepts and tactics; standards and data sharing; test and evaluation; and common frameworks and capability maturity assessments.”

Mine-hunting ships

In the short term, Australia is looking to augment its adoption of nuclear-powered attack submarines by modernizing the rest of its Navy. This includes the replacement of its existing mine-hunting fleet. Mine-hunting is important but unglamorous work; sea mines are quick to place and persist until they’re detonated, defused, or naturally decay. Ensuring safe passage for naval vessels often means using smaller ships that scan beneath the sea using sonar to detect mines. Once found, the vessels then remain in place, and send out either tethered robots or human divers to defuse the mines. Australia has already retired two of its Huon-class minehunters, surface ships that can deploy robots and divers, and is set to replace the remaining four in its inventory. 

In its announcement, Thales emphasized the role it will play in replacing and developing the next-generation of minehunters. And tools developed to hunt mines can also help hunt subs with nuclear weapons on them. Both tasks involve locating underwater objects at a safe distance, and the stakes are much lower in figuring it out first with minehunting.

Developing new minehunters is likely an area where the Royal Australian Navy and industry will figure out significant parts of autonomy. Mine hunting and clearing is a task particularly suited towards naval robots, as mines are fixed targets, and the risk is primarily borne by the machine doing the defusing. Sensors developed to find and track mines, as well as communications tools that allow mine robots to communicate with command ships, could prove adaptable to other areas of naval patrol and warfare.

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On August 19, a Russian Tu-22M bomber was reportedly destroyed while it was parked in an airfield in northwestern Russia. Russia’s defense ministry, while downplaying the damage to the bomber, stated that it was hit by a copter-style drone. Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) has since claimed credit for the attack. The targeted bomber itself, a venerable Cold War design, has a long history, with its use against Ukraine only the latest chapter.

Evidence of the attack comes from multiple sources. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence has been watching and offering public commentary on the war in Ukraine ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and on August 22 the Ministry tweeted that the “Tu-22M3 BACKFIRE medium bomber of Russia’s Long Range Aviation [LRA] was highly likely destroyed at Soltsky-2 Airbase in Novgorod Oblast, 650 km away from Ukraine’s border.” (The Tu-22M’s NATO designation, or the term used by NATO countries to distinguish between Soviet-made planes, is “Backfire.”)

That strike, just over 400 miles away from Ukraine, is beyond the range of most Ukrainian weapons, unless someone were nearby to launch a close-in attack. It also illustrates the range that Russia’s bombers have been able to cover in order to attack people and places in Ukraine.

As the BBC notes, Russia has a fleet of 60 Tu-22M bombers, meaning the country can absorb the loss of one bomber while still operating at regular effectiveness. Nevertheless, photographic and satellite evidence indicate that despite claims from the Russian military otherwise, the bomber was almost certainly a complete loss. 

“Aside from showing the burned aircraft, the satellite images also show that Russia has since evacuated all other Backfires that had been parked at Soltsy-2” on August 16, reports The War Zone. (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.) While the attack did not destroy all 10 bombers visible on satellite photography on August 16, it did destroy one, and likely forced the others to further interior air bases for safekeeping. 

Cold War origins

The Tu-22M is the second class of bomber under the Tu-22 name. The original Tu-22, named “Blinder” by NATO, was an early Cold War supersonic bomber, the first bomber capable of dashes at speeds faster than the speed of sound used by the Soviet Union. The design of the Blinder was underwhelming, with limited range and performance.  While the bomber saw use in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in wars against foes with anti-aircraft missiles, Tu-22 Blinders were regularly shot down. Ukraine, which inherited its military equipment from the USSR, had Tu-22 Blinders in its inventory in 2000, though the plane has long since been retired with one left as a literal museum piece.

Meanwhile, the Tu-22M, while borrowing that “Tu-22” designation, is a wholly different design, meant to fill the same role. The Tu-22M has variable-geometry swept wings, meaning it can have the wings spread out wide for more efficient flight at subsonic speed, while the wings can fold back for reduced drag when flying supersonic, something like US-made F-14s. The Tu-22M’s original mission was to destroy US bombers and airfields.

While the first flight of a Tu-22M took place in 1969, the bombers were built up gradually over the 1970s and 1980s. Tu-22Ms saw use in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and were largely mothballed in the early 1990s, as Russia’s strategic picture changed following the dissolution of the USSR.

The aircraft functions as a conventional bomber, the role the Tu-22M took in Afghanistan and presently performs above Ukraine. It was also built to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, including both nuclear bombs and nuclear-armed cruise missiles. 

“The mission of the bomber, peripheral attack or intercontinental attack, became one of the most fiercely contested intelligence debates of the Cold War,” reports the Federation of American Scientists. “The key variable was the estimate of the range of the aircraft. A series of competitive analyses to determine the range produced divergent results and failed to end the debate.” 

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) initially assessed the Tu-22M’s range at up to 3,100 miles, while the CIA instead assumed 2,090 miles. Part of the complication is that the Tu-22M can be fitted with a probe to permit air refueling, though the probes are not permanently installed on the plane. Russian sources, since made public, attest to a range of 3,170 miles for the model that entered service in 1976, and 4,350 miles for the version that entered service in 1981. These ranges put the bomber, and its feared nuclear payload, squarely in the “intercontinental” range. Cruising speed for the Tu-22m is 560 mph, while maximum speed is 1,430 mph.

Modern warfare

Using the technology of the time, the Tu-22M is designed to evade defenses in two distinct ways. Supersonic speeds allow the bombers to strike fast and outpace missile interceptors. Subsonic flight, at low altitudes, is designed to let the bomber fly “below the radar,” or low enough to the ground that attempts to track it by radar would fail by getting extra feedback from the ground, confounding it. 

The first Tu-22M lost in combat occurred during Russia’s August 2008 five-day-long invasion of Georgia, the neighboring country in the Caucasus mountains bordering the Black Sea. While Russia handily bested its minuscule neighbor, the loss of any aircraft in combat was surprising. (The war ended with Russia’s military occupying and guaranteeing the breakaway of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Georgian provinces.) 

At the time, the Russian military claimed that the Tu-22M lost was a reconnaissance variant. Former Russian air force chief Anatoly Kornukov told the Associated Press in 2008 that “Using the Tu-22 for a reconnaissance mission over Georgia was the same as using a microscope to drive nails.”

Above Ukraine in 2022, the Tu-22M was observed dumping unguided bombs on the then-Ukrainian held parts of Mauripol, the Black Sea city encircled by invading Russian forces as the military fought its way from the Donbas to Crimea. Carpet bombing is one of the oldest ways planes have been used in war, and because it does not deliver precision strikes, it is a reliable way to create swathes of indiscriminate desolation and brutality.

Beyond carpet bombing, the Tu-22M bombers were used as missile-launching platforms alongside other Russian bombers in the Long Range Aviation, part of the Russian Aerospace Forces. These bombers could hit targets deep from the frontlines, and importantly far from Ukrainian air defenses, by using their range and speed to launch anti-ship missiles against terrestrial targets, causing panic and destruction.

While capable of hitting targets at great range, a supersonic bomber built to penetrate Cold War air defenses being used to fire missiles and fly away is a far cry from its original purpose. Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled to establish control over the skies in the present conflict, leaving each side to adapt to new ways to ground the other’s aircraft.

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The B-2 Spirit bomber is an elegant machine for a war that never came. The flying wing stealth bomber, unveiled for the first time in 1988, represented the near-peak of the American Cold War defense industry. The first Spirit entered operational service in 1997, six years after the end of the Cold War, and only 21 of the bombers were ever built. Nineteen of those bombers remain in service (one was destroyed in a fire in 2008), and on August 9, Northrop Grumman announced the successful demonstration of transferring mission data from a ground station to an airborne bomber’s computer, thanks to new upgrades.

It is easy, given how futuristic the B-2’s appearance remains, to forget that the bomber was designed and built before the ubiquitous wireless data transfers of modern technology. Mission data, or information like where to fly and what targets to bomb, had to be inputted manually. B-2s are crewed by two pilots, and they fly long missions. An Air Force fact sheet lists the range as simply “intercontinental”; the Federation of American Scientists notes the range without refueling is 6,000 nautical miles (6,900 statute miles), and with air refueling the range of the B-2 can cover the entire globe. 

On such a long flight, or even a normal one, there’s always a chance a human pilot manually entering data will make an error.

The new technology is an “integrated airborne mission transfer,” which “delivers an advanced capability that enables the B-2 to complete a digital, machine-to-machine transfer of new missions received in flight directly into the aircraft,” Northrop Grumman stated in a release.

Machine-to-machine transfer is a big deal, especially ensuring that it is done securely. Every B-2 bomber is capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons. Together with roughly half of the venerable B-52 bombers, these planes largely constitute the bomber third of the “nuclear triad,” a distribution of nuclear launch capabilities between ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped or missiles launched by planes. (US fighter jets are also capable of carrying some nuclear bombs, though these aren’t usually included in the discussion of the nuclear triad.)

Carrying nuclear weapons is a terrible responsibility, and films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe show what tragedy might happen when a nuclear bomber cannot receive new information in flight. The B-2’s manual system to input data mid-mission makes changes possible. But a human manually entering data can still make errors, even in the least stressful of contexts. A direct machine-to-machine update of mission data removes the possibility of human error from data entry, letting pilots devote their full attention to piloting and other tasks.

In addition, as Northrop Grumman told Air & Space Forces Magazine, this allows mission data to be uploaded to the bomber without interfering with any other computer processes, keeping flight and other critical systems secure. Introducing any connectivity can risk a possible exploit of that entry point by a malicious actor, though it appears the security concerns and risks are being taken seriously.

“We are providing the B-2 with the capabilities to communicate and operate in advanced battle management systems and the joint all-domain command and control environment, keeping B-2 ahead of evolving threats,” said Nikki Kodama, vice president and B-2 program manager, Northrop Grumman in a release.

Advanced Battle Management and Joint All Domain are military concepts, heavily pursued by the Pentagon in recent years, that make it so many different tools, from fighter squadrons to bombers to ships to tanks and infantry, can be used together in a fight together. Battle management is giving tools to the commanders in charge of parts, or all these forces, to be able to send new orders as the situation changes. If soldiers fighting on one island spy the deployment of anti-air missiles, and communicate that, a commander could then use that information to redirect bombers on a course out of range of those missiles, for example. In short, the Pentagon wants to make it easier for the military to share information with itself, in a timely fashion.

“The integration of this digital software with our weapon system will further enhance the connectivity and survivability in highly contested environments as part of our ongoing modernization effort,” said Kodama. 

Taking in new mission data, directly from machine to machine, reduces the steps in which error can enter the process. It’s the difference between handing someone a written note or playing a verbal game of telephone, where whispered messages can lose or change meaning at every step of the process.

While the B-2 fleet is small, upgrades like this could help ensure the stealth bombers can remain part of the US arsenal for years to come, while the new, more numerous B-21 Raider stealth bomber fleet is built and integrated into the Air Force. There is no retirement date set for the B-2 beyond the readiness of its planned replacement. New tools ensure that, for however long that transition takes, the US will still have a handful of stealth flying wings, ready to drop conventional or nuclear weapons across continents.

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For 18 months, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been fought largely from the ground. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been able to establish air superiority, or the ability to completely rule the sky at the other’s expense. While Ukraine is working to gradually build up a new air force using NATO-model fighters like the F-16 (which nations including Denmark and the Netherlands have pledged to the country), it is also using a range of drones to drop death from the sky. On August 19, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense announced a small new armed drone for military use: the SkyKnight.

The announcement of the new UAV was posted to the Ministry of Defense’s Telegram account, and features an image of the SkyKnight drone. The vehicle is compact, and features four limbs like a common quadcopter, but each limb sports two rotors, making the drone an octocopter. A sensor is fitted on the front of the drone, with a camera facing forwards, and what appears to be batteries are strapped, in an unusual configuration, to the top of the drone’s hull. Underneath it holds a 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs) bomb. That’s between three and five times as heavy as a hand grenade, and would be a large explosive for a drone of this size.

“This can be used against stationary and moving targets – anything from tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and other systems, to infantry units on the move and in trenches, and against any target that is identified as a Russian military one,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “This payload can be effective and devastating against infantry units, as evidenced from multiple videos of similar attacks by quadcopters.”

Before the massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country fought a long, though more geographically confined, war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas of Eastern Ukraine. Using quadcopters as bombers was a regular occurance in that war, like when in 2018 Ukrainian forces used a DJI Mavic quadcopter to drop a bomb on trenches. While the Mavic was not built for war, it is a simple and easy to use machine, which could be modified in the field to carry a small explosive and a release claw. Paired with the drone’s cameras and human operators watching from a control screen, soldiers could get a bird’s eye view of their human targets, and then attack from above.

This tactic persisted in the larger war from February 2022, where small drones joined medium and larger drones in the arsenals of both nations fighting. The war in Ukraine is hardly the first war to see extensive use of drones, but none so far have matched it in sheer scale.

“Never before have so many drones been used in a military confrontation,” writes Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Many, possibly the majority, of the drones used by Ukrainian forces were originally designed for commercial purposes or for hobbyists.” 

The SkyKnight is described as domestically produced, a production of the present Ukrainian industry built for this specific war. It appears to share parts in common from the broader hobbyist drone market, and its assembly, complete with strapped-on batteries and exposed wires (at least according to how it’s depicted on Telegram), speaks to ease of assembly over finicky obsession with form.

In the announcement of the SkyKnight, the Ministry of Defence says that if the pilot has any familiarity with DJI or Autel drones, which stabilize themselves in flight, then the pilot can learn to fly the SkyKnight in about a week.

“DJI and Autel are a staple [Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle] across the Ukrainian military, with many thousands fielded since the start of the Russian invasion,” says Bendett. “DJI especially as a go-to drone for ISR, target tracking, artillery spotting and light combat missions. Ukrainian forces and drone operators have amassed a lot of experience flying these Chinese-made drones.”

Domestic manufacture is important, not just because of the shorter supply lines, but because DJI’s response to the conflict has been to ban the sale of its drone to Ukraine and Russia.

“The Chinese manufacturer DJI produces most of these systems,” writes Franke. “It officially suspended operations in Ukraine and Russia a few weeks into the war, but its drones, most notably the Mavic type, remain among the most used and most sought-after systems.”

By making its own self-detonating drone weapons, Ukraine is able to use the drones as a direct weapon, which can attack from above and is hard to see or stop. In a war where soldiers describe fighting without quadcopters as being “like blind kittens,” a flying camera with a bomb attached makes soldiers deadly, at greater range, and in new ways.

Beyond the airframe and remote control, the Ministry of Defense boasts that the SkyKnight has an automatic flight mode, and can continue to fly towards a target selected by the operator even if the operator loses communication with the drone.

“Ukraine is investing a lot of resources in domestic combat drone production to meet the challenge from the Russian military that is increasingly fielding more quadcopter and FPV-type drones,” says Bendett. “This SkyKnight needs to be manufactured in sufficient quantities to start making a difference on the battlefield.”

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The Pacific Ocean is vast, and when it comes to planning for how to fight a war in and across it, the United States is turning to a new airframe design—one that promises more efficient flight. In an event put on by the Air And Space Forces Association on August 16, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Ravi I Chaudhary announced the award of a contract, worth up to $230 million through 2026, for the development and production of a prototype “Blended Wing Body” airplane.

The plane was announced with concept art, showing an Air Force gray plane with a body that starts from a conventional pointy cockpit and broadens as it goes back, seamlessly sloping up into a large wing, with a pair of jets mounted on top of the plane at its rear. In the concept art, Rogers Dry Lake and the runways of Edwards Air Force Base are clearly visible, tying the new concept plane into the long history of experimental and innovative aircraft. When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he did it flying a plane out of Edwards.  

“Today is a historic day in the development of airpower,” Chaudhary told the assembled crowd of press and industry spectators, in person and on Zoom. He tied the announcement of this new plane to a record-setting endurance flight from August 1923, which saw repeated mid-air refueling, allowing a plane to continuously transit from Canada to Mexico without landing in between.

Blended Wing Body design offers greater lift, as it reduces drag and expands the lifting surface of the aircraft. The B-2 flying wing bomber is a kind of extreme blended wing. While this new plane will not be designed to the same exacting and stealth demands of a long-range bomber, the hope is that it will offer long range efficiency flight, allowing it to become a valuable transport and tanker. Should oceans become battlefields, this plane, which Chaudhary referred to as the X-BWB-1, would become a valuable way for the Air Force to ensure the rest of the US military to stay in the fight, despite the long distances involved.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

 “All of you have recognized that we have entered a new era of great power competition in which the [People’s Republic of China] has come to be known as our pacing challenge, but honestly, I ain’t having it,” Chaudhary continued. “Today, we are going to set the pace by doing what we have always done. Design, build, and fly with blended wing technology.”

(While jet planes and new missiles certainly outline the parameters for a conventional war in the pacific, should one happen, nuclear weapons went unmentioned at the announcement. The US has over 5,200 nuclear warheads and China has the world’s third-largest arsenal, estimated at 410 warheads. Any conventional war between the US and China carries with it a risk of nuclear conflagration)

The last time the US fought a peer or near-peer competitor across the Pacific, the plane all used propeller engines, and operated either from aircraft carriers or fiercely contested island landing strips. Today, aircraft carriers and networks of bases are still part of the picture, but missile technology has advanced from its infancy to a durable, long-range threat.

The X-BWB-1, should it work, would provide logistical support for the US military’s planned “ACE,” or “Agile Combat Employment” strategy. Operating by these principles, the ships and planes and bases that house US forces will be distributed across the ocean, making them harder to target all at once. However, these resources can be assembled and concentrated during attacks, allowing the US to pick and choose battles as it sees fit. 

“Operational energy will be the margin of victory in a near peer conflict in the Indo-Pacific,” said Chaudhary. With efficient flight, longer range, reduced radar and audio signature, and useful cargo capacity, the X-BWB-1 isn’t a weapon itself, but a tool that could make the rest of the military’s operations in this area more effective. The design also promises shorter takeoffs and landings than conventional airframes, allowing for runways on small patches of land.

The military applications of the technology took center stage at the announcement, but the commercial applications of such plane design were also brought up. The X-BWB-1 is designed to use existing jet engines, so they can be easily integrated into the commercial market. The same aerodynamic advantages that make a plane useful for military resupply could also make such a craft an efficient long-haul carrier for airlines.

“The BWB is the best first step on the path to zero carbon emissions. It offers 50 percent lower fuel burn using today’s engines and the airframe efficiency needed to support a transition to zero carbon emissions propulsion in the future,” said JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary in a release. “No other proposed aircraft comes close in terms of efficiency.”

Many branches of the military, like parts of the commercial aviation industry, have expressed a commitment towards lower-emissions operations. In the case of the US Army, this means a climate approach that emphasizes meeting existing needs and missions, but with more efficient means, rather than scaling back operations.

With significant investment from the US military and a waiting commercial market, the Blended Wing Body program could build on decades of NASA research and deliver a useful, efficient aircraft that transports soldiers as easily as passengers. 

The first test flight of the X-BWB-1 is expected in 2027. Perhaps by then, the plane will have a better name.

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Popular artificial intelligence applications like ChatGPT or DALL-E are growing more popular with the masses, and the Department of Defense is taking note. To get ahead of potential uses and risks of such tools, on August 10, the DoD announced the creation of a new task force analyze and possibly integrate generative artificial intelligence into current operations.

AI is an imprecise term, and the technologies that can make headlines about AI often do so as much for their flaws as for their potential utility. The Pentagon task force is an acknowledgement of the potential such tools hold, while giving the military some breathing room to understand what, exactly, it might find useful or threatening about such tools.

While Pentagon research into AI certainly carries implications about what that will ultimately mean for weapons, the heart of the matter is really about using it to process, understand, and draw certain predictions from its collection of data. Sometimes this data is flashy, like video footage recorded by drones of suspected insurgent meetings, or of hostile troop movements. However, a lot of the data collected by the military is exceptionally mundane, like maintenance logs for helicopters and trucks. 

Generative AI could, perhaps, be trained on datasets exclusive to the military, outputting results that suggest answers the military might be searching for. But the process might not be so simple. The AI tools of today are prone to errors, and such generative AI could also create misleading information that might get fed into downstream analyses, leading to confusion. The possibility and risk of AI error is likely one reason the military is taking a cautious approach to studying generative AI, rather than a full-throated embrace of the technology from the outset.

The study of generative AI will take place by the newly organized Task Force Lima, which will be led by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. CDAO was itself created in February 2022, out of an amalgamation of several other Pentagon offices into one designed to help the military better use data and AI.

“The DoD has an imperative to responsibly pursue the adoption of generative AI models while identifying proper protective measures and mitigating national security risks that may result from issues such as poorly managed training data,” said Craig Martell, the DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. “We must also consider the extent to which our adversaries will employ this technology and seek to disrupt our own use of AI-based solutions.”

One such malicious possibility of generative AI is using it for misinformation. While some models of image generation leave somewhat obvious tells for modified photos, like people with an unusual number of extra fingers and teeth, many images are passable and even convincing at first glance. In March, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis in a Balenciaga Coat proved compelling to many people, even as its AI origin became known and reproducible. With a public figure like the Pope, it is easy to verify whether or not he was photographed wearing a hypebeast puffy jacket. When it comes to military matters, pictures captured by the military can be slow to declassify, and the veracity of a well-done fake could be hard to disprove. 

[Related: Why an AI image of Pope Francis in a fly jacket stirred up the internet]

Malicious use of AI-generated images and data is eye-catching—a nefarious act enabled using modern technology. Of at least as much consequence could be routine error. Dennis Kovtun, a summer fellow at open source analysis house Bellingcat, tested Google’s Bard AI and Microsoft’s Bing AI as chatbots that can give information about uploaded images. Kovtun attempted to see if AI could replicate the process by which an image is geolocated (where the composite total of details allow a human to pinpoint the photograph’s origin). 

“We found that while Bing mimics the strategies that open-source researchers use to geolocate images, it cannot successfully geolocate images on its own,” writes Kovtun. “Bard’s results are not much more impressive, but it seemed more cautious in its reasoning and less prone to AI ‘hallucinations’. Both required extensive prompting from the user before they could arrive at any halfway satisfactory geolocation.” 

These AI ‘hallucinations’ are when the AI incorporates incorrect information from its training data into the result. Introducing new and incorrect information can undermine any promised labor-saving utility of such a tool. 

“The future of defense is not just about adopting cutting-edge technologies, but doing so with foresight, responsibility, and a deep understanding of the broader implications for our nation,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in the announcement of the creation of Task Force Lima. 

The US military, as an organization, is especially wary of technological surprise, or the notion that a rival nation could develop a new and powerful tool without the US being prepared for it. While Hick emphasized the caution needed in developing generative AI for military use, Task Force Lima mission commander Xavier Lugo described the work as about implementation while managing risk.

“The Services and Combatant Commands are actively seeking to leverage the benefits and manage the risks of generative AI capabilities and [Language Learning Models] across multiple mission areas, including intelligence, operational planning, programmatic and business processes,” said Lugo. “By prioritizing efforts, reducing duplication, and providing enabling AI scaffolding, Task Force Lima will be able to shape the effective and responsible implementation of [Language Learning Models] throughout the DoD.”

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On July 28, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced it was planning to scale its current laser technology up to a 500-kilowatt-class laser. This would be a substantial increase in output over the company’s existing 300-kW laser, and would be more powerful than existing laser weapons in development or in the field today. The move also illustrates one of the fundamental truths about modern laser weapons: when it comes to destruction by laser, more power equals faster results.

Laser weapons represent a substantial up-front cost during their development and research, with the promise that they will pay off down the road in lower costs per shot fired and object destroyed. Lasers are primarily defensive tools: High-powered light is used to melt through and disable income drones, mortar rounds, rockets, and other projectiles. Many of these targets are small, like hobbyist quadcopters or simple rockets, and can be defused as a threat by disabling a rotor limb or a guide fin. 

But when it comes to protecting big targets, like Navy ships, Army bases, or Air Force hangars, destroying threats quickly and effectively becomes an essential task of base defense. 

A laser with 500 kilowatts of energy would be powerful. In October 2022, when Popular Science got to go hands-on with a Raytheon laser weapon, it was a 10-kilowatt laser. Held steady against a drone by a professional, it could disable a quadcopter in as little as eight seconds. Used by PopSci, it took 15 seconds to stop the same style of drone.

What the 500-kilowatt laser in development promises is 50 times the same energy concentrated into a beam, likely melting drones in fractions of a second. The US Army has already selected Lockheed’s 300-kw laser to mount on armored vehicles and protect formations from rocket attacks.

“Lockheed Martin has invested in our production infrastructure in anticipation of the Department of Defense’s demand for laser weapons that have additional layers of protection with deep magazines, low cost per engagement, high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements,” said Rick Cordaro, vice president of Mission Systems & Weapons at Lockheed Martin, in a release. “The 500-kW laser will incorporate our successes from the 300-kW system and lessons learned from legacy programs to further prove the capability to defend against a range of threats.”

While jargon-dense, Cordaro’s statement parses out to a comprehensive overview of why, exactly, the Pentagon wants laser weapons. “Additional layers of protection” means that these lasers will not replace existing defenses, but join them, letting lasers slot into use alongside protective measures like Patriot missiles and anti-helicopter rockets. “Deep magazines” refers to the capacity of a laser to fire as long as it has electrical power. This can come from batteries, generators, or from onboard power plants when used on ships. It’s a reference to magazines of ammunition, typically bullets or shells, used by guns and cannons. While those magazines are limited by physical constraints, like how many bullets can be prepared to feed into a gun before firing, the quantity of a laser’s shots are limited by its access to electrical power.

Additionally, “low cost per engagement” is the military and industry’s long promise to reduce the cost of each zap fired by a laser down to about $1. “Engagement,” here, means destruction of incoming targets. A cost per engagement is how much ammunition was used to destroy a threat. Patriot missiles, built to shoot down jets, cost about $4.1 million apiece, which is a lot of money, but can be worth it against expensive jets, or to prevent cruise missiles hitting more valuable targets. If lasers like Lockheed’s can offer cheaper ways to stop some threats, it can let the military save more expensive tools for threats lasers cannot hit.

Finally, Cordaro emphasizes “high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements.” If the laser can quickly and accurately stop threats, especially threats that are hard to hit at present or take lots of ammunition to stop, then a more powerful laser can meet those threats at the price of electricity generated.

Lockheed is developing the 500-kW laser as part of the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, a Pentagon program to develop lasers at the 300-, 500-, and 1000-kW power ranges. A Government Accountability Office report from April 2023 notes that “Such systems could eventually enable [high energy lasers] to engage powerful targets such as cruise missiles.”

For now, work at the 500-kW level is in development. Should it succeed, and should lasers be able to scale up even more, the promise is for weapons that, once in place, could offer unprecedented protection against major threats. For decades, missiles have presented an unbalanced threat to tanks, planes, and ships, where the missile is much cheaper than the vehicle it is designed to destroy. Lasers, while not cheap to develop, could make missiles less effective as a counter to such vehicles, because the directed energy would be able to zap them before they reached their targets. 

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

YOU’RE STANDING at the top of a mountain, elated to have reached the summit. But when you reach into your pack for some water, your foot gets wedged between two rocks, and you fall and crack your ankle. While you’re not dead, you definitely can’t hike down. You need help. Luckily, you have an SOS device: a little piece of technology that can communicate with satellites to send a cry for help, along with your location and maybe a text or two, to authorities. Teams mobilize to come get you. 

In this hypothetical scenario, you were in the backcountry for recreation—to have fun. But satellite communication and tracking aren’t useful just for hikers, hunters, and mountaineers who have no cell signal. It’s also important for those doing their jobs in the kinds of wild, harsh environments that could otherwise leave them incommunicado: people like those on search-and-rescue teams who would help an injured hiker, as well as miners, forestry technicians, wildland firefighters, and soldiers. 

To make communication easier for all those folks, a company called Everywhere Communications has brought together services from two powerhouses of the industry—Iridium, maker of satellites, and Garmin, maker of GPS devices—to create a secure system that organizations can use to track and communicate with extremely remote employees and assets. If you did, in fact, crack your ankle on a peak, the search-and-rescue team that would mobilize might use Everywhere to help themselves help you. Today, the company has 300 customers, including the US government and the US national parks. 

Global SOS

Patrick Shay, who founded Everywhere Communications in 2016 along with a core team, has a long history in the finding-things and communications spaces. Earlier in his career, while working at Motorola and Sirius, Shay was instrumental in putting SOS buttons in cars, the first being a fancy one: a $100,000 S-Class Mercedes. After that, he joined Iridium. Iridium, initially funded by Motorola, created and launched a constellation of communications satellites and the bulky satellite phones you may have seen in ’90s movies. 

Finally, Shay joined a company called DeLorme, which created inReach, an SOS device that allows its users to track themselves, call for help, and send messages to civilization. In 2016, Garmin bought DeLorme and thus acquired inReach. But the device, and most commercial satellite communications tech today, tends to end up in the hands of outdoorsy recreators rather than people with dirty and dangerous jobs such as those in defense. Shay wanted to reach out to that latter segment. “At Everywhere, we focus on exclusively government and business,” he says. That includes the business of search and rescue.

But he didn’t want to start from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel when it’s already rolling around? So Everywhere formed a partnership with Garmin, which by then owned the inReach technology whose development Shay had been a part of. The inReach device looks like a diminutive walkie-talkie, and in its smallest form, the burnt-orange-and-black device weighs just 3.5 ounces and measures 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide. 

“We were incredibly fortunate because we do business with our old friends,” says Shay of his colleagues from DeLorme. Those friends allowed Everywhere to take off-the-shelf versions of inReach and add firmware that makes it secure and encrypted enough for professional and government use and also lets operators erase all the data remotely if a device gets lost. “The reason that happened,” says Shay, of the partnership and device modifications, “was because of personal relationships and history.”

Those security features were necessary if Everywhere was to appeal to the feds, because traditional satellite communications—including those of the Iridium constellation, on which Everywhere relies—have historically been simple to hack, allowing clever eavesdroppers to intercept communications. 

The software, too, needed amping up to appeal to this new crowd, so Everywhere has created code that operates differently from what you’d interact with as a civilian carrying a device like a Garmin inReach on a peak-bagging quest. Most important is the Everywhere Hub, a web-based portal that functions like an incident command center or a security operations center—the place with all the information that directs the people in the field. “That’s that room with all the TVs on the wall,” says Shay. “And one of those TVs is a picture of the world with a bunch of blinking dots and lights.” Those little lights are the team members. “If somebody in Yemen pushes an SOS button, it’s going to light up on that screen,” Shay continues.

These aren’t totally new capabilities, but Everywhere combined them into one package rather than requiring a hodgepodge of services and gadgets. The company’s innovation is taking existing hardware, modifying it for security, and linking it with Everywhere’s own professional software backbone. 

The software also has capabilities your average casual elk hunter wouldn’t need. For instance, a person using the Everywhere Hub can create a “geofence,” essentially a boundary in space and time. When, say, a soldier or miner enters or leaves that specific area during that specific time, the command center gets an alert. Those soldiers and miners could also send large amounts of information back to base, or to each other, like data regarding which streets are flooded or where a sensitive material like uranium is. And anyone driving a secured vehicle—be that a car full of cash or the lead vehicle in a security convoy—could be tracked along their route. Home base can also schedule check-ins for workers—meaning they don’t have to be tracked all the time.

A satellite constellation

All that connection is possible because of the Iridium satellite constellation—66 spacecraft in orbit—and cellular network. Together, they provide coverage for the whole planet, all the time, so no matter where you are, you can communicate if you have a device like the inReach. Iridium also allows a device to transmit information about its location—information the device gathers from GPS satellites. The GPS satellites do the pinpointing, but communications satellites relay those pinpoints. Like SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, the Iridium spacecraft live in low Earth orbit, around 500 miles from Earth, so signals like those to and from an inReach can whiz back and forth quickly, without the lag time caused by more distant orbits. 

While Iridium does make its own communications and tracking devices, it also sells chips and antennas to other outfits, like Garmin, so they can implant those in their devices, or stick them to their assets, allowing their own technology to enable a connection from the satellites.

“Other networks were going after who can provide the fastest internet pipe to your home or remote cabin,” says Matt Desch, Iridium’s CEO. “We weren’t going after that. That’s not what we do.” 

Instead, Iridium aims to provide extremely mobile connections, like those that firefighters, miners, soldiers, and searchers would need as they roam in the field and use Everywhere’s services. More than 60,000 aircraft—including medevac helicopters whose position and ability to communicate are lifesaving, not just vacation-enabling—also have Iridium chips inside. Iridium’s network also guides autonomous vehicles on land, by sea, or in the air. For example, Swoop Aero’s drones use it above the ground, and SailDrone’s uncrewed boats use it on the surface of the ocean. 

Military or aid organizations can also stick sensors on, say, pallets of food and water to make sure they get delivered to their intended destination, or use the antennas to send, for example, weather and seismic information from ground sensors to an intelligence outfit halfway across the world. The ability to do such data transfer is especially important, militarily, in the Arctic: Near the top of the Earth—where missile warning and air surveillance are prime activities—satellite comms are really the only option. And when teams are completing missions, or helping deliver aid, an organization can use a software-hardware combo system like Everywhere to watch the boots on the ground from the comfort of the incident command room and to send a text if, say, someone looks stuck.

People have typically gone to areas like distant summits to be a little alone, to disappear for a while, to feel self-sufficient, and, maybe, to not be tracked. But when people need rescuing, the ability to call for help and say where to send it can trump that desire for solitude. And when you’re out there—or in a combat zone without cell service, or on a cross-conflict trek with no infrastructure, or deep in a mine or forest—for work, a bit of job security, in the more literal sense of the word, can be lifesaving.

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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It is the Department of Defense’s responsibility to secure the skies above the United States from potential threats. Following the transit across the US in February of a large balloon originating in China, the Air Force scrambled jets to shoot down new objects seen with more sensitive radar apertures. This led to the shoot-downs of several objects. Finding unknown objects in the sky is hard work, which is why the Pentagon commissioned think tank RAND to map public reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena across the United States.

RAND’s report was completed in May 2023, sent to the Department of Defense for review, and published on July 25. One day later, on July 26, former Department of Defense employee David Grusch testified before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee, specifically offering statements on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term is largely a modern rebranding of UFOs, after the latter abbreviation became shorthand for objects potentially connected with extraterrestrial life. The hearing attracted far-reaching headlines, as well as disputes regarding Grusch’s claims from news media and the Pentagon alike. 

The question of what people spot and keep spotting in the skies above the US is real. The RAND report, with access to great swathes of data, offers a good starting point for understanding this topic. When it comes to modern observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the RAND study’s most concrete finding is that unknown aircraft are most commonly reported near Military Operations Areas (MOAs), or swathes of the sky designated for military practice and maneuvering. These areas are not necessarily near air bases.

The history of UFO sightings and Project Blue Book

For decades, air traffic over the United States was largely limited to commercial and military vehicles, with onboard human pilots. Other types of flying machines, like balloons or uncrewed target drones, were used within specific areas, and would sometimes show up in public reports of unusual phenomena. (The sensor-carrying balloon that crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in June 1947 is likely the most famous of these.)

Following a flying saucer panic in the US in 1947, the Air Force collected public reports of Unidentified Flying Objects through Project Blue Book. An analysis of Blue Book sightings, conducted by the University of Colorado in 1969, found that at least 90 percent of sightings could be explained as naturally occurring phenomena, like Venus seen at dawn. Of the remaining 10 percent that could not be publicly explained, documents declassified in 1992 revealed that fully half of those sightings were Americans reporting the flight paths of US spy planes, like the U-2. These were flying objects known to the government, but not known to the public.

Area 51, the Air Force base that is almost synonymous in popular culture with alien research, was started as a place to test the U-2 spy plane. It is still in use to this day for flights of experimental craft, and the military secrecy around the bases’ contents and operations lend it an outsized air of mystery.

What the RAND report found about UAPs today

To understand where and why Americans are reporting unusual sightings in the sky, RAND researchers Marek N. Posard, Ashley Gromis, and Mary Lee started with the National UFO Reporting Center database. Established in 1998, the NUFORC is a nongovernmental entity that allows people to report sightings, and through a moderation process filters out obvious hoaxes. The researchers used that data to answer two questions at the heart of the report: where in the US are people likely to report such sightings, and what factors predict where people are more or less likely to report UAP sightings?

The sightings were matched to US census-designated places, then compared to places of interest, like military bases, MOAs, airports, and weather stations. The data set is big, with researchers finding 101,151 reported UAP sightings in 12,783 census-designated places from 1998 to 2022.

“The most consistent—and statistically significant—finding from our models was for reports of UAP sightings in areas within 30 km of MOAs,” write the authors. “According to the FAA, ‘MOAs are established to contain nonhazardous, military flight activities,’ including air combat maneuvers, air intercepts, and low-altitude tactics. Given this association, we suspect that some of the self-reports of UAP sightings to NUFORC are authorized aircraft flying within MOAs.”

A good example of an MOA is the Desert MOA, situated north of Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s near Nellis Air Force Base, but planes are also likely to fly from Nellis to Carson MOA, which is far from any air bases. 

Notably, reported sightings of UAPs went down when people were within about 19 miles (30 km) of an Air Force or Navy base, and they also went down further than 37 miles (60 km) away. Being within 37 miles of an airport reduced the rate of sightings. While weather stations did not change the frequency of sightings, weather did, as for “each additional 1 percent of cloudy days, the expected rate of all UAP sightings increased by 1.6 percent.”

Taken altogether, the research suggests that people are more likely to not report unusual sightings of aircraft when they are in an area where they expect aircraft to be, like by an Air Force base. 

“One possible explanation for this pattern of findings is that people located in more–densely populated areas, near airports and near weather stations, are more aware of the types of objects that fly overhead and nearby and are therefore less apt to report aerial phenomena,” write the researchers.

Identifying the unknown

New aircraft, like cheap high-altitude balloons or abundant hobbyist drones, are already changing how people see and understand the sky. Air Force sensors are geared towards identifying larger crewed aircraft. One policy choice posed by the RAND study is if there is value in the military turning to public reports of unusual aircraft.

The authors offer three suggestions. 

“First, we recommend that government authorities (e.g., local and state government officials, the FAA, and DoD) conduct outreach with civilians located near MOAs,” they write. This would help people near skies used by the military, but far from airbases, understand what exactly it is they are observing. Being near an airbase makes the presence of aircraft intuitive, but training areas exist largely on maps until they are abruptly in use, with no ground-based indicators highlighting what is happening. “Second, we recommend that government authorities conduct additional outreach to notify nearby civilians when there is airspace activity near a MOA,” the authors continue.

The authors’ third recommendation is a new evaluation to inform the design of a detailed and robust system for public reporting of UAP sightings. A new reporting tool could improve precision in location, in tools used to record sightings, and ideally would be designed to filter out hoaxes or known objects.

“In conclusion,” they write, “the U.S. government has a large swath of airspace to monitor at a time when there is greater access than ever to small, technologically advanced, and inexpensive aerial objects. If officials believe that public reporting could be a valuable tool to help manage U.S. airspace, it will be important to ensure that members of the public report actual threats. Greater transparency in how sightings are collected, investigated, and used may also help mitigate the conspiracy theories that have long surrounded aerial phenomena.”

It has been so long since the military first collected data about unusual sightings that the UFO term has transcended its role as a military acronym. Instead of relying on a non-governmental tool to capture reports from the public, a new government-created tool for civilians may offer a way to understand the skies better, but it is unlikely that reporting alone will be enough to dispel conspiracy theories.

Correction on August 9: This article has been updated to remove a reference in the first paragraph to a hobbyist balloon that had potentially been linked to a shoot-down of an object on February 11, 2023.

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A buzzer goes off in a large industrial kitchen at an Army base in Natick, Massachusetts. Two small metal tubes full of food—truffle mac and cheese and hash browns with bacon—have been heating up for five minutes in a steam oven and are now ready for eating. Daniel Nattress, a senior food technologist with the military’s Combat Feeding Division, uses a red protective mitt on his right hand to grab them. 

Then comes the moment I’ve been waiting for: a chance to eat the food that comes out of these tubes—the mac and cheese, the hash browns with bacon, and a tube full of what’s called chunky apple pie, which I’ll be consuming at room temperature. The apple pie is first, and attached to the tube is an orange probe that’s like a rigid straw. I squeeze the tube to push the food through the probe, and eat some. “It actually tastes like apple pie,” I remark.

The food made in this facility is unique among military rations for the Department of Defense. A soldier in the field may get their nourishment from an MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat), sampling a flavor like “spaghetti with beef and sauce.” Or, if they were at a base, they’d eat whatever was served at the dining facility. Meanwhile, a sailor on a ship or submarine will eat grub in the galley. But the pilots of the high-flying U-2 spy planes bring along sealed tubes of food to give them a boost during a long flight. Here’s why they rely on tube food, and how it’s made. 

Dining at 70,000 feet

When an Air Force pilot flies a U-2 aircraft, they wear a full pressure suit and helmet. The plane is known for being both a challenge to fly—especially to land—and for its ability to soar at heights significantly higher than commercial airliner cruising altitudes. The U-2 can operate, according to an Air Force fact sheet, “at altitudes over 70,000 [feet],” and the suit the aviators wear exists to protect them. 

“Really what it does is it acts as a backup envelope, as it were, for the pilot if the cockpit cabin were to decompress,” says Hannah Jacobs, the Air Force program manager at the David Clark Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, which makes the suits. It’s like “a secondary atmosphere—a container to keep the individual flying the aircraft safe if the aircraft were to become damaged, or if the cabin pressurization system were to fail,” she says.

Jacobs knows the topic well. Before working for the David Clark Company, she was in the Air Force, where she was a technician who was a part of the U-2 program, focused on areas such as maintenance and repair of those pressure suits.

[Related: The real star of this aerial selfie isn’t the balloon—it’s the U-2 spy plane]

Someone wearing a sealed pressure suit can’t exactly grab a protein bar to gnaw on if they get hungry. That’s where the tube food and the straw-like probe comes into play. The pilot, who can heat the tube in the cockpit, puts the probe through a small portal in the helmet, allowing them to get sustenance while staying protected within the envelope of the sealed suit. “The idea is that you don’t have to break the seal at all,” she says. “The straw goes in through the feeding port, and that also has an o-ring around it that would prevent any kind of air leakage from escaping the suit, and so you stay protected the entire time.”  

While there are 19 flavors of the tube foods, she recalls the popularity of the chocolate pudding (there is both a regular version and a caffeinated one) and that she once, while in the Air Force, “experienced a chocolate pudding shortage.” 

“You never want to be the tech delivering that news to anyone—that the chocolate pudding supply has been exhausted,” she adds. 

How the tube food is made

The food that a U-2 pilot eats—flavors include hash browns with bacon bits, chocolate pudding, chicken tortilla soup, polenta with cheese and bacon, beef stroganoff, beef stew, and pepperoni pizza—begins its life in the Department of Defense kitchen in Massachusetts. (Technically in a building called the Bainbridge Combat Feeding Laboratory, at the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, which is also known as the DEVCOM Soldier Center, which is located at a base in Natick.) Favorite items include pears, chicken tortilla soup, and the hash browns with bacon.

The main event happens at the Nordenmatic 602, a machine that according to the company’s website can fill various kinds of tubes with various kinds of things—think stuff like toothpaste or cosmetics. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The tubes for this Air Force cuisine are made of aluminum with a gold food-grade liner inside to prevent the grub from being in direct contact with the aluminum. Each one holds about 5 ounces, and before it’s filled with its delicious contents, one end remains open, so it’s essentially a cylinder. The tubes take a trip on a small track in the machine with their open end facing upwards, passing below a hopper from which the food travels down into the tube. Another part of the machine then crimps the end of the filled tube, sealing it. 

“This is brand-new,” Nattress says, noting that it replaced an older machine. So why the upgraded equipment? “They’re envisioning that the U-2 will fly another 20 years,” he says. Two more decades of flight for this storied aircraft means two more decades of tube food production.

To get into the hopper above the Nordenmatic, the food travels through a hose from a 40-gallon steam-jacketed kettle. This large metal container is where the food is mixed—it then gets pumped into the hopper of the nearby Nordenmatic machine. After being filled, the tubes are sterilized in a retort oven.

It’s better than baby food

Nattress, who has been in charge of the tube food program for 25 years and is a trained taste-tester, takes the culinary mission seriously. He notes the four ways that people derive sensation from food: taste, texture, smell, and appearance. A pilot who is squirting the food directly from an opaque tube through a probe and into their mouth is missing out on some of those senses, leaving two for them to focus on. 

“Texture and taste are huge,” he says. The key is to make sure there is a texture to the cuisine, with little particles that can fit through the probe. 

“If we just grind it down into nothing, you lose that texture,” he says. “You want to have a little bit of texture in there, so that they can discern the food particles.” For example, the chunky apple pie dish is made from real sliced apples (as opposed to applesauce) that have been ground up, along with graham cracker crumbs. The chunks are good, but they can’t be too big. “Imagine being up there at 70,000 feet, and you want to have something, and it clogs up,” he says.

While holding a tube of the chunky apple pie, he recalls the process that went into developing that flavor. “We’ll take a nice apple pie—a nice, good-quality apple pie—we’ll put it in our mouth and taste it, and we try to describe, write down, those sensations that we get. And we try to recreate that in here,” he says, pointing at the tube. 

In other words, this stuff is not just flavored paste, sauce, or a baby-food like substance. “Even like the more advanced baby foods, they may have a little bit of texture, but they don’t have a lot of spice in it,” he adds. “We want to have that full-flavor profile.”

Eating the tube food

The chunky apple pie I tasted straight from the probe included not just apples, graham crackers crumbs, but also cinnamon, nutmeg, and “some dairy,” Nattress says. After eating the dessert item first, it was time to eat the two that he’d heated: the truffle mac and cheese, and the hash browns with bacon. 

To conserve those plastic probes, he squirts the truffle mac and cheese straight onto a plate into a gooey yellow pile, and hands it to me with a spoon. This item’s ingredients include truffle oil, gouda, a cheese powder, onion powder, paprika, little bitty pastas, and cream. 

The next one was the hash browns and bacon, whose origin story, Nattress says, involved a request for breakfast food. “They were expecting an egg product,” he says. But that’s not what they got—they got a delicious and savory combination of hash browns and bacon bits. He squirts that one onto a different plate. The hash browns, he says, have actually started out as tater tots. 

I tried both, and perhaps due to an aversion for creamy food, the winner in my eyes was the hash browns with bacon. “I think this is my favorite, so far,” I say, after my first spoonful of this breakfast item made for spy plane pilots. “You can taste the little bacon bits in there.”

Nattress says they produce more than 20,000 tubes each year.

Watch a short video about the process below—including the taste tests. 

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On July 16, 1945, at 5:30 am, the first atomic bomb in history was detonated at what is now White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test was named as such by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the central figure in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer. Getting the science of atomic fission correct was hard work—up to the moment of the test scientists were taking bets on whether or not the explosion would ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere (it didn’t). Important, also, was the difficult work of capturing the test on film, a feat that had never been done before.

Filming Trinity allowed the scientists to have a record of the test for analysis after the act. So much in an atomic reaction happens quickly, and any instruments that could normally measure blast details in proximity would be destroyed by a successful explosion. That meant relying on distance photography, and developing special high-speed cameras in order to capture in precise detail moments of the blast fractions of a second apart.

Photographing Trinity

Specialized cameras were used to study atomic processes in the laboratory setting, and then more advanced cameras were adapted to capture the test site. These cameras provided important and durable information, but the only color still photograph of the test happened to be captured by the personal camera of a civilian employee of the labs, Jack Aeby.

“[I] aimed the camera at the detonation point, which was roughly 6,000 yards away,” Aeby told the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He had four shots left on a roll of color film when he went down to the test site, and one of those shots ended up being the only color capture of the explosion. “I released the shutter, it closed, I cranked the exposure down to where it was reasonable, at about 1,000th of a second, and fired the other three shots in rapid succession. The middle one, by luck, turned out to be just about the right exposure—the other two were usable but not as clear or in focus.”

That photograph ended up being one of the first images of the Trinity test the Army released, and it was used by the researchers to confirm what they had calculated about the explosion.

“They actually did one of the first yield measurements by measuring the width of the fireball and estimated time of when that was made and they could back calculate something resembling a good estimate of the yield. It turned out to be in agreement with the other estimates they had,” said Aeby.

Beyond Aeby’s camera and his lucky shot, the Manhattan Project records that 52 different cameras were used to capture the detonation. Most of them were cameras used to record motion pictures, so many of the photographs that endure today from the blast are stills taken from film.

“I was just sitting there with the camera running. Everything was operated from the central control station. Turned on. So I didn’t have to do anything at the time but just sit there. The camera started running,” Manhattan project photographer Berlin Brixner told the Los Alamos Historical Society. Brixner had gone with scientist Kenneth Bainbridge to set up the Trinity site and the photography stations needed, and was managing the cameras for the test.

“Of course it was nighttime, I couldn’t see anything. But when the explosion went off, that welding glass seemed to just glow white, intense white like the sun. So it just blinded me, so I looked aside to the left, the Oscuras Mountains were at the left, and they were just lit up like daylight then. So I looked at that for a few seconds, and then I looked back through my welding glass and I saw that the terrific explosion had taken place. Just unbelievably large explosion. My camera was just sitting there, but soon the ball of fire was starting to rise and I thought, gee, I better get busy. So abruptly I raised it and photographed the ball of fire as it went up to the stratosphere. I kept photographing it for the next couple of minutes or so,” Brizner continued.

[Related: Survivors of America’s first atomic bomb test want their place in history]

Many cameras were set up at fixed locations, some as close as 800 yards from the explosion. To ensure that these cameras could work through the blast, they were set up in shelters, angled facing mirrors that were pointed at the blast. It was raining the night of July 15, and the rain did not let up until the early hours of July 16, so Brizner and a technician had to go and clean the lenses from water and dust to ensure the film worked. Most of the cameras worked, creating footage visible today.

Where can I see Trinity photographs?

Several collections of Trinity photographs exist online, with varying degrees of curation. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the great inheritor of the Manhattan Project’s theoretical division, has shared an album on Flickr of test photographs titled “Trinity to Trinity.” This album includes Aeby’s color photograph, pictures of the mushroom cloud at time intervals from 0.006 seconds to 16 seconds, as well as pictures of Gadget (as the explosive device was called) before the test, and the Trinity site afterwards.

[Related: Watch a 1953 nuclear blast test disintegrate a house in high resolution]

Los Alamos National Laboratory is part of the Department of Energy, and the Department of Energy’s Manhattan Project interactive history includes an animated gif made from film of the first 0.11 seconds of the Trinity explosion. The Atomic Archive offers a guided slideshow of Trinity site and test photographs. 

The Atomic Heritage Foundation has galleries of Trinity test footage, including shots of the specially modified military tanks used to test the soil after the detonation. One of the more haunting and unusual images of the blast is that captured by the only pinhole camera at the test, used by photographer Julian Mack.

The Atomic Heritage Foundation’s YouTube page also offers videos of the test. The test can be seen in black and white (embedded below, as well), color, and close-up.

Twice a year, the White Sands Missile Range opens up to the first 5,000 visitors at the site, who can go and walk around the Trinity crater. As part of the display, photographs of the Trinity test are mounted on the chain link fence surrounding the crater. For 2023, the Army expects a higher than usual number of visitors to the site. 

After images

Nolan’s film leaves out direct imagery of the people killed by atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though it does feature the audio from a filmed Manhattan Project report of the devastation wrought by the weapons. 

The Atomic Archive has galleries of damage at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and of Nuclear Effects on Humans, the latter of which carries a warning:  “These images can be quite graphic, and should be viewed with caution.”

One way to view photographs and understand the attacks on Japan, which are inseparable from the test at Trinity, is through the stories of hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors. A digital archive project, developed in 2010-2011, allows readers to click over digital maps of the cities, and view stories and images from the people who lived in them at the time of the bombing. Paired with photography from the devastation, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki digital archives offer a deeper perspective on the cities, beyond just targets on the map.

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American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan in the 2000s and early 2010s had a problem. The country’s terrain, with steep mountains, sharp hills, and deep valleys, made it easy for their enemies to hide, especially given their adversary’s local knowledge of the terrain. US airplanes and helicopters had uncontested control of the skies, but by the time a patrol was ambushed, had called for air support, and then the support arrived, the fight might be over. The Switchblade drone, originally developed as the Lethal Miniature Aerial Missile System, offered an answer to this threat. 

The Switchblade is a kind of piloted missile that can also be a scout. From its initial deployments with the US Army in 2012, to its inclusion in US military aid to Ukraine in March 2022, the Switchblade has expanded the power and ability of infantry. For example, in May 2022, Ukraine’s military released footage showing a Switchblade used to attack a Russian tank crew, who were on top of the tank. The human-portable missile, with an onboard camera to provide its operator a view as it attacks, offers soldiers air support they can bring to battle on their backs. Plus, its operator can call off a strike if the situation changes.

Why a miniature missile?

The Switchblade began development, like many drones, as a scout. According to Switchblade-maker AeroVironment, in 2004 the US Army asked the company to develop a drone that could be launched from the barrel of a 105 millimeter mortar, letting the artillery team do damage assessment after their attack without having to send anyone close to the site to check. While that program didn’t ultimately pan out, AeroVironment had succeeded in developing a tube-launched drone that could send real-time video back to human operators.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects agency, was interested in developing a “Close Combat Lethal Reconnaissance” tool, which was built on the same tube-launched premise. AeroVironment pitched an armed tube-launched drone to Air Force Special Operations, who were so impressed they offered funding for it in 2006, and by 2010 the US Army ordered the weapons as well. 

In Afghanistan, the main threats faced by US and coalition forces on patrol came from ambushes, snipers, and roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Alone or in combination, all of these could prove fatal. One such adaptation was the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, a vehicle that protected its occupants from the immediate harms of a roadside bomb. Another was the Switchblade, which offered a way to combine the scouting power of human-carried drones with an explosive charge, so it could be used like a missile against sniper nests or people setting up IEDs.

“Think about it—pairing switchblade aerial munitions with an [unmanned surveillance drone like a] Raven, Wasp, or Puma—a small team with those tools can know what is going on around them within about 15 klicks. Once they identify a threat, Switchblade lets them engage that threat immediately,” Steven Gitlin, a spokesman for AeroVironment, told Marine Corps Times in 2012.

For special operations forces, who are used to operating without air support, and for the mainline infantry of the Army and the Marine Corps, having a backpackable missile on hand expanded how they could fight in the field. In a pinch, the Switchblade offered a way out of an ambush, or just-enough firepower to drive an enemy back while waiting for more air support to arrive.

How does a Switchblade work?

The Switchblade is a flying camera robot with an explosive inside. These all-electric machines are weapons that will help find or attack nearby enemies, not far-away ones. 

Switchblades come in two sizes: the Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600. Both can be carried by one person, though the weight difference is substantial—a 300 weighs just 5.5 pounds and can fit inside a backpack. The 600 is heavier, with the missile itself weighing 33 lbs and the components needed to transport it much heavier.

The Switchblade 300 can hit targets at a range of just over 6 miles, and can fly for a total of 15 minutes. The 600 has a range of 25 miles or a flight time of 40 minutes. The Switchblade contains cameras, and video from these sensors, as well as GPS information and image processing, is used to guide the Switchblade. The Switchblade is also designed to receive targeting information from other drones, allowing it to follow and find selected targets. That makes it one weapon among many that can be directed against a target with the targeting information provided by other drones.

What kind of targets could a Switchblade be used against?

Unlike other drones that are just used for reconnaissance, the Switchblade 300 carries a small explosive payload, the kind most likely used to hit people or unprotected weapons, like a mortar launcher or exposed machine gun emplacement. For the larger Switchblade 600, the payload is an “anti-armor warhead,” making it useful against vehicles.

If the humans directing the Switchblade see that it no longer has a target, it can be called off and then recovered. The brochure for the Switchblade 600 boasts that the weapon offers a rechargeable battery.

While these seem like a highly modern creation, there’s historical context: The Kettering Bug, a 1918 uncrewed biplane that’s considered a predecessor to both drones and cruise missiles, flew for a time before an internal signal released its wings and it crashed its explosive payload into the ground. 

[Related: What is DARPA? The rich history of the Pentagon’s secretive tech agency]

Modern loitering munitions typically fly for some time, using sensors to look for targets such as anti-air missile sites and radar stations. Even at the full endurance of the Switchblade 600, the drone can only fly for 40 minutes, and the short duration of a Switchblade 300 is barely enough to qualify it as a loiterer.

When the missiles were first proposed and tested, they were commonly referred to as either “kamikaze drones” or “suicide missiles.” Popular Science, in its coverage a decade ago, referred to prototype Switchblades as a “Flying Assassin Robot” and a “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” All of those names capture something important about the category: when one of these weapons blows up, it cannot be used again or recovered. Today, in addition to calling such weapons “loitering munitions,” Popular Science uses the term “self-detonating drone.”

Is a Switchblade an autonomous weapon?

Like many drones, the Switchblade is directed by waypoint navigation, in which a human plots a path on a map and the robot, once launched, flies on its own accord.

“[Unlike] radio-controlled devices, the operator is not flying the aircraft, the operator’s simply indicating what he wants to look at, what he wants the camera to be pointing at, and the onboard computer flies the aircraft to that point and maintains on target,” Steve Gitlin, AeroVironment’s Chief Marketing Officer, told The War Zone in 2020. “We have a similar capability in our tactical unmanned aircraft systems. You could lock in on a target and the aircraft will basically maintain position on that target, autonomous.”

Other software on the Switchblade, like feature and object recognition, likely aids in its ability to find and track a target. That doesn’t make it an autonomous weapon in the strictest definition, but it is a weapon with autonomous features, which can change the ways people use them.

Focusing on whether or not it fits a strict definition of autonomous weapon is less important than understanding how, exactly, Switchblades use what autonomous features they have. “It’s therefore probably wisest to put the definitional debates aside and instead focus on the novel (as well as familiar) challenges and risks that are raised by the growing autonomy of weapon systems,” tweeted Arthur Holland Michel, a scholar of drones and autonomous war machines. “For example: Do the operators have sufficient situational awareness to make a decision on the use of force? Do the weapons provide a sufficient control surface for human operators to exercise precaution in attack?”

In battle, the short flight time between launch and impact for Switchblades, especially Switchblade 300s, means that the person firing the weapon is operating in a similar manner as someone firing an anti-air missile at a plane, with trust that the missile’s own targeting system will hit what it is supposed to hit. 

What is different for the Switchblade, compared to other missiles, is that the human operator has the possibility of calling off the attack if something changes, like a civilian walking into the area or the cameras revealing what the operator thought was a tank to be a school bus instead. That’s different from something like a high-flying Reaper drone, which fires missiles that can’t be turned around.

The ability to exercise that kind of control, to in effect un-fire a missile already airborne, is one of the big promises of control systems like this for weapons. For that promise to be realized, it requires that a human, launching weapons in battle, is able and willing to watch the missile’s own video feed until it ends.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 22, 2022.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below. 

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network. 

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?

The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?

Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. 

ICBMs carried with them a special fear, because they could deliver thermonuclear warheads, threatening massive destruction across continents. The US’s creation and use of atomic weapons, and then the development of hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), can also be understood as a kind of technological surprise, though both projects preceded DARPA.

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

Popular Science first covered DAPRA in July 1959, with “U.S. ‘Space Fence’ on Alert for Russian Spy-Satellites.” It outlined the new threat posed to the United States from space surveillance and thermonuclear bombs, but did not take a particularly favorable light to ARPA’s work.

“A task force or convoy could no longer cloak itself in radio silence and ocean vastness. Once spotted, it could be wiped out by a single H-bomb,” the story read. “This disquieting new problem was passed to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which appointed a committee, naturally.”

That space fence formed an early basis for US surveillance of objects in orbit, a task that now falls to the Space Force and its existing tried-and-true network of sensors.

Did DARPA invent the internet?

Before the internet, electronic communications were routed through telecommunications circuits and switchboards. If a relay between two callers stopped working, the call would end, as there was no other way to sustain the communication link. ARPANET was built as a way to allow computers to share information, but pass it through distributed networks, so that if one node was lost, the chain of communication could continue through another.

“By moving packets of data that dynamically worked their way through a network to the destination where they would reassemble themselves, it became possible to avoid losing data even if one or more nodes went down,” describes DARPA. 

The earliest ARPANET, established in 1969 (it started running in October of that year), was a mostly West Coast affair. It connected nodes at University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Utah; and Stanford Research Institute. By September 1971 it had reached the East Coast, and was a continent-spanning network connecting military bases, labs, and universities by the late 1970s, all sending communication over telephone lines.

[Related: How a US intelligence program created a team of ‘Superforecasters’]

Two other key innovations made ARPANET a durable template for the internet. The first was commissioning the first production of traffic routers to serve as relay points for these packets. (Modern wireless routers are a distant descendant of this earlier wired technology.) Another was setting up universal protocols for transmission and function, allowing products and computers made by different companies to share a communication language and form. 

The formal ARPANET was decommissioned in 1988, thanks in part to redundancy with the then-new internet. It had demonstrated that computer communications could work across great distances, through distributed networks. This became a template for other communications technologies pursued by the United States, like mesh networks and satellite constellations, all designed to ensure that sending signals is hard to disrupt.

“At a time when computers were still stuffed with vacuum tubes, the Arpanauts understood that these machines were much more than computational devices. They were destined to become the most powerful communications tools in history,” wrote Phil Patton for Popular Science in 1995.

What are key DARPA projects?

For 65 years, DARPA has spurred the development of technologies by funding projects and managing them at the research and development stage, before handing those projects off to other entities, like the service’s labs or private industry, to see them carried to full fruition. 

DARPA has had a hand in shaping technology across computers, sensors, robotics, autonomy, uncrewed vehicles, stealth, and even the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The list is extensive, and DARPA has ongoing research programs that make a comprehensive picture daunting. Not every one of DARPA’s projects yields success, but the ones that do have had an outsized impact, like the following list of game-changers:

Stealth: Improvements in missile and sensor technology made it risky to fly fighters into combat. During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force adapted with “wild weasel” missions, where daring pilots would draw fire from anti-air missiles and then attempt to out-maneuver them, allowing others to destroy the radar and missile launch sites. That’s not an ideal approach. Stealth, in which the shape and materials of an aircraft are used to minimize its appearance on enemy sensors, especially radar, was one such adaptation pursued by DARPA to protect aircraft. DARPA’s development of stealth demonstrator HAVE BLUE (tested at Area 51) paved the way for early stealth aircraft like the F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber, which in turn cleared a path for modern stealth planes like the F-22 and F-35 fights, and the B-21 stealth bomber.

Vaccines: In 2011, DARPA started its Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program. Through this, in 2013 Moderna received $25 million from DARPA, funding that helped support its work. It was a bet that paid off tremendously in the COVID-19 pandemic, and was one of many such efforts to fund and support everything from diagnostic to treatment to production technologies.

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There are two kinds of fire fights in war. There’s an exchange of gunfire, where the fighting is done with firearms, and then there’s literal firefighting, where first responders and whoever else is on hand work to put out active flames caused by weapons. As Russia continues its war against Ukraine with missile attacks deep into the country’s interior, rapidly putting out fires is not just emergency response work, it’s part of the war effort. Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence announced that the country would provide 17 special firefighting vehicles to Ukraine.

Odessa, a Black Sea port city in western Ukraine, is somewhat removed from the front lines of the war, but missiles can cause destruction and terror far beyond the range of bullets and artillery. That’s what has happened this month, with Russian attacks wrecking a cathedral, an event that killed one and injured 19, in just one of the salvos launched against the city. After the missile hit, fire crews inundated the cathedral with water, clearing the flames, and prompting workers to bring documents and valuables out of the building, lest they be further damaged, reports NPR.

“These specialist firefighting vehicles will boost Ukraine’s ability to protect its infrastructure from Russia’s campaign of missile and drone attacks and continue our support for Ukraine, for as long as it takes,” said UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace in a statement. 

The vehicles being delivered to Ukraine are primarily from the Royal Air Force and Defence Fire and Rescue, with one coming courtesy of the government of Wales. There are two types: Major Foam Vehicles and Rapid Intervention Vehicles, which have been part of how the Royal Air Force and Defence Fire and Rescue decided to structure its firefighting needs in the 1990s. 

Major Foam Vehicles (MFV) use water and foam liquid to suppress fires by making it hard for the flames to catch new fuel. An MFV has a tank that holds up to 1,500 gallons of water, and another tank that holds up to 180 gallons of foam. Foam is especially important because for certain fires, like the oil of a car or jet, suppressing that fire requires a compound other than water. The foam can be sprayed from the roof, bumpers, and through the sides of the vehicle, allowing it to rapidly suppress a fire as soon as it arrives. The MFV has six wheels to support its full size, allowing it to be a major responder to fires.

Fire suppressant foam is over a century old. Popular Science first covered it in 1916, describing a test by Standard Oil Company of a carbon-dioxide foam used to control and extinguish fires. Before such systems, sand was “most frequently used in these emergencies, and water, used in the early days of oil fire-fighting, is now never used, since it is heavier than oil and causes the gasoline to overflow and thus spread the fire instead of confining it.” 

While such foams have over a century of use, many of the compounds originally used leave behind environmental toxins, leading governments to replace the kinds of foam they have on hand for fire emergencies so as to avoid future injury when treating an immediate crisis. 

The other vehicle that the UK is sending Ukraine for firefighting is the Rapid Intervention Vehicle, which is a four-wheeler. Its water tank capacity is 600 gallons, while its foam liquid tank holds just 75. Despite the smaller limits, the vehicles are useful for getting into places quickly, and treating fires with foam and water as required.

Part of what makes fire suppressant vehicles so important for an air force, enough that British fire fighting forces can have on hand extras to give away, is because one bad landing can turn a plane into an oily, fiery wreck. Stopping fires powered by jet fuel quickly makes it more likely to save the plane’s pilot and occupants, and possibly leave enough of the plane behind to salvage or repair. These vehicles, both the MFV and RIV, are made to deploy with the Royal Air Force when it operates away from domestic air bases, as the danger of fires is ever present at any operational runway.

In July 2020, the Royal Air Force replaced the MFVs and RIVs at Brize Norton, its largest air base. The larger High Reach Extendable Turret (HRET) strikers will fill the role of the MFVs, allowing fire suppressant to be placed at better angles. The smaller Multi-Purpose Response Vehicles (MPRV) are replacing the RIVs. With a new generation of firefighting vehicles tending to its own air bases, the UK is passing along its surplus firefighting tools to a country in direct need. 

Ukraine could use the vehicles for tasks like putting out fires caused by missiles, especially if such attacks hit vehicles and risk spreading through fuel. The vehicles would also be useful for ensuring that airports stay open, allowing crews to cool and clear struck vehicles from a runway. 

 “We are confident that the equipment provided to date, and associated training, will directly enhance firefighting capability, as we consider further opportunities to support the Ukrainian Military Fire Service moving forward,” said Defence Chief Fire Officer Sim Nex.

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On July 21, 2023, Christropher Nolan’s Oppenheimer entered wide release. The film follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who directed the US program to create the world’s first atomic bombs. The movie, shot in part in New Mexico, tells a story of the bomb and the early Cold War focused closely on Oppenheimer, his personal relationships, and the revocation of his security clearance in 1954. The film depicts a fairly mainstream understanding of the scientist’s life, triumph, and foibles.

Because Nolan’s camera is kept narrowly focused on Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, much of the bomb’s impact and early history is kept largely off screen. The film draws directly from American Prometheus, a 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which offers a thorough portrait. Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Oppenheimer oversaw the bomb’s development, was founded as part of the atomic bomb effort and today remains an important center of American nuclear weapons research.

Any fuller story of the bomb needs to venture beyond the boundaries of laboratory grounds and test ranges. Here are three details of nuclear weapons and their development not captured in the film.

The bombs of today are much more powerful 

At the heart of an atomic bomb of any kind is a fission reaction. In this process, a mass of radioactive isotopes, like Uranium-235 or Plutonium 239, is compressed at high speed, breaking apart the atomic bonds in the isotopes and sending neutrons outwards with tremendous force. 

It’s a fission bomb that forms the centerpiece of Oppenheimer. In an attempt to get scientists to stop openly talking about bomb production, the first atomic bomb was named “Gadget.” It was tested at Trinity on July 16, 1945. 

It yielded an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, or 20 kilotons. Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, had a yield of 15 kilotons. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, had a yield of 20 kilotons. These weapons had a massive impact. In the US, Gadget’s fallout caused health impacts still observed in people downwind today. 

Initial estimates place the death toll from Hiroshima at 70,000 and the death toll from Nagasaki at 40,000 people. A later estimate puts the deaths at 140,000 for Hiroshima and 70,000 for Nagasaki. The methodology of both estimates is sound, and added to those estimates can be the tens of thousands injured by the bomb’s effects but not killed outright.

These numbers are the baseline for understanding how many people a fission weapon of such power can kill. Given the scale of an atomic blast, bombs will invariably kill civilians if used near any population center.

Another type of bomb, called the “Super” during the Manhattan Project, sought to use a small fission reaction to set off a larger fusion chain reaction. It’s also known as an H-Bomb, or more broadly a thermonuclear weapon, and the largest one ever detonated by the United States had a yield of 15 megatons. The largest H-bomb detonated by the Soviet Union yielded 50 megatons.

The current nuclear bombs in the US arsenal range from 0.3 kilotons up to 1.2 megatons, making yields like that seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the small end of what is presently fielded. Weapons with yields as small as Gadget, Fat Man, and Little Boy are sometimes described as “tactical” nuclear weapons, though that’s a broad adjective and not a particularly useful term. Most US nuclear weapons have larger—and often much larger—yields. Should a nuclear weapon be used by the United States in the 21st century, it would likely be at least one or two orders of magnitude more powerful than the only atomic bombs used so far in war.

There were complex, and costly, supply chains involved

Los Alamos is central to Oppenheimer’s story, and to the theory, design, and assembly of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer selected the location because of a fondness for northern New Mexico, and the US Army agreed to use the mesa that became Los Alamos because access to and from the lab could be easily controlled. The Army acquired the land in part by refusing grazing permits to families that previously used the mesa, as well as offering small cash payments or in some cases outright condemnation of the land—strong-arming inhabitants into leaving. 

Los Alamos was just one node at the head of a broader industry built to design and create the bomb. Some parts of the work were done at university laboratories. Other parts, especially in the field of enriching uranium or producing plutonium, had to be done elsewhere. The city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was created to facilitate the enrichment of Uranium-235 isotopes from acquired naturally occurring Uranium-238. At the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State, the Army commissioned reactors to produce plutonium. Environmental harms from the work at Hanford were discovered as possible in 1949, but not revealed until public investigation in the 1980s. 

Before uranium could be refined, it needed to be extracted from the ground. Some uranium existed in stockpiles outside mines, as before the war the element was not terribly sought after compared to radium, which resulted from decaying uranium. During World War II, the Belgian government in exile sold uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo to the US. Mining radioactive material is harmful to the miners, and Belgian employers worked miners at Shinkolobwe around the clock, with little surviving written record of the human toll of the operation. 

Uranium was also mined from areas on Navajo reservations within the United States. The health impact of this work, on miners and their families, was largely kept from people, until it spilled forth in disaster in the late 1970s in New Mexico. “On July 16, 1979, the Church Rock uranium mill experienced the largest release of radioactive material on United States soil. The south cell disposal pond experienced a massive, twenty foot breach in its wall — likely caused by numerous six-inch cracks in the cement,” records the Atomic Heritage Foundation. “The wall, which acted as a dam to keep the radioactive waste in the pond, was located directly next to Pipeline Arroyo, a tributary for the larger Puerco River. In all, 1,100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of liquid waste ended up in the river.”

History is complicated, not tidy

The American creation of the bomb was motivated, in large part, out of a fear that the atomic bomb research undertaken by Nazi Germany was already further along. An American bomb could then be used in the war first, as the thinking at the time went. German decisions ended up not leading to anything like a productive bomb production effort, and as Los Alamos neared completion of the Gadget, Germany surrendered.

The first atomic bomb was tested and used in the window between when Germany had surrendered in the war and when Japan surrendered unconditionally. This timing is often used to argue that the dropping of the atomic bomb was a course of action directly chosen to end the war that otherwise would not have ended. One popular post-war narrative holds President Harry Truman as making the decision to drop the bomb rather than launch a massive invasion with US forces.

History is more complicated than that tidy tell, which itself was a postwar justification. What is notable instead is that President Truman, when he succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inherited a bomb program that was nearly ready for testing, and which was producing a weapon the Army expected to use. As historians like Alex Wellerstein have argued, there was never a specific moment at which a singular decision was made to drop the bomb.

“The day after Nagasaki,” writes Wellerstein in an article for The New Yorker, “Truman issued his first affirmative command regarding the bomb: no more strikes without his express authorization. He never issued the order to drop the bombs, but he did issue the order to stop dropping them.”

Correction on July 21, 2023: This article has been updated to correct an error regarding the names of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Correction on July 24, 2023: This article has been updated to correct an error about the weight equivalent of 20 kilotons.

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What does the Department of Defense do with scrap wood, cardboard, and paper? Usually, just send them to the landfill. But these seemingly small portions of waste materials do add up—to about 13 pounds per soldier each day. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, these comprise around 80 percent of all solid waste made at DoD forward operating bases. 

Now, DARPA, a Pentagon agency that focuses on innovation and research, wants to take that waste and divert it from the landfills or burial by turning it into something useful. Through a new program called Waste Upcycling for Defense (WUD), they want to find ways to integrate scrap wood, cardboard, paper, and other cellulose-derived matter into building materials. Scientifically speaking, this is not a new idea. Various teams of researchers have been testing out this process for years. 

The basics of the formula is as follows: You need to chemically treat the scraps to degrade a wood component called lignin, then mechanically press them together to make them more dense, strong, and durable against bad weather, water, and fire. In some instances, these made-again wood products are stronger than the original wood itself. And as attention around climate change focuses on the sustainability of the construction industry, there are increasing efforts to reduce emissions and experiment with greener materials, like green cement and maybe even fungi. 

[Related: The ability for cities to survive depends on smart, sustainable architecture]

Although small batches of products have been made with this technique at a laboratory scale with harvested wood, these methods have not been tested on scraps, so may need to be adjusted or refined. Ideally, researchers would come up with a solution that can be scaled up for mass production. 

“Finished products could greatly reduce the need for re-supply of traditional wood products, such as harvested lumber used in DoD construction and logistics,” WUD program manager, Catherine Campbell said in a press release. 

[Related: DARPA wants aircraft that can maneuver with a radically different method]

DARPA aims to develop and test products and methods through a feasibility stage in the next 24 months. At the eight-month-mark, they hope to be able to start conducting mechanical property testing for the samples to figure out ways to reduce chemical and energy consumption in the process. Near the 21-month-mark is when full demos are expected to be ready to be presented to DARPA. The end goal of the Phase I period is to have a preliminary design for a device that can produce densified wood from wood waste at the rate of 100 kg/hr. 

There is an accompanying callout for participation from the scientific community in this effort. Proposals are due by mid-September this year.

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In the series I Made a Big Mistake, PopSci explores mishaps and misunderstandings, in all their shame and glory.

Super Glue is a fascinating substance. A strong, quick-drying adhesive, it is useful enough to keep around the house as a handy tool, and so easy to use (and misuse) that it’s a regular source of trips to the emergency room. One such study highlights “patient carelessness” as responsible for nearly 80 percent of the cases involved, with “childhood curiosity and lack of parental supervision” clocking in at another 11 percent. The history of Super Glue’s creation is as wild as that of the stories that ER doctors could tell each other over drinks, and it starts in 1942, with an attempt to improve the accuracy of weapons.

Super Glue was twice invented by Harry Coover. The first time, he was working at Eastman Kodak on military research. Eastman Kodak is best known today as a film manufacturer, one whose present survival came thanks to a bailout from Hollywood film studios. As a side note, director Christopher Nolan, whose 2023 film Oppenheimer covers the most famous military research project of all time, was one of the leading forces behind Kodak’s rescue, emphasizing the specific qualities of the film.

In the 1940s, Eastman Kodak could point to decades of work in military technology. Its researchers, engineers, and technicians had designed gunsight lenses for fighter planes in World War I. Before World War I, the best-quality optical glass came from Germany, and other nations regarded its creation as a trade secret, leading the US to engineer its industry on its own. In 1942, Coover was continuing in that line of research, looking to design a new gunsight made of clear plastic. Plastic had the promise of making for a lighter sight, and one that could be made at scale if the right compound was found. 

Coover did not, in 1942, discover a better gunsight material. Instead, he had found a problem.

Sticky situation

What would become known as Super Glue was a cyanoacrylate, and the first impression was that it was worthless for the problem Coover was looking to solve.  

“I was working with some acrylate monomers that showed promise,” Coover recalled for Popular Science in the February 1989 issue. “But everything they touched stuck to everything else. It was a severe pain.”

Coover and colleagues were looking for a straightforwardly useful material. Cyanoacrylate presented only problems, and throughout World War II, Eastman Kodak would make its gunsight lenses in the tens of thousands out of glass.

[Related: Raytheon asks retirees for help making new Stinger anti-air missiles]

It would take the post-war world, and a move to Tennessee, for Coover to stumble on Super Glue a second time, and realize its unique value. In 1951, Coover’s job was moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where he was assigned a team of chemists.

“He had been overseeing the work of a group of Kodak chemists who were researching heat-resistant polymers for jet airplane canopies. They tested cyanoacrylate monomers, and this time, Coover realized these sticky adhesives had unique properties in that they required no heat or pressure to bond. He and his team tried the substance on various items in the lab, and each time, the items became permanently bonded together,” notes an MIT profile of Coover.

In 1954, after this second discovery of Super Glue, Coover filed a patent for “Alcohol-catalyzed alpha-cyanoacrylate adhesive compositions.” This facilitated the commercialization of the discovery, as Eastman 910 industrial adhesive, in 1958.

Because glue forms a polymer where it contacts water, it can be used to seep into and seal small cracks and pores on the surfaces it is connecting, creating a powerful, tight bond. Under normal conditions, continued Coover in 1989 in Popular Science, “all surfaces have at least a monomolecular layer of water on them. It’s actually the water, or any weak base, that is the catalyst causing the polymerization.”

Coover once demonstrated this to comedic effect on a gameshow, where he demonstrated Super Glue’s strength by binding two pieces of metal together, and then holding on to one as it was lifted into the air. Show host Garry Moore jumped on as well, and still the glue held the metal together, enough for the men to both be lifted up. 

All patched up

Coover’s invention seems like it should follow a straightforward trajectory as a happy accident of military research, finding postwar use instead. What makes Super Glue remarkable is that it ended up on the battlefield anyway.

[Related: Super Glue could make it easier to recycle plastic]

In 1964, Eastman Kodak submitted an application to the FDA that Super Glue be considered for wound sealing. It would take years for a variation of the glue to be formally certified, but during the Vietnam War, the glue was reportedly used as a way to seal wounds and cuts, at least until better medical attention could be found. Today, specific medical variants exist. 

Skin adhesives specifically formulated for the task are a regular tool in hospitals, and while the Mayo Clinic doesn’t encourage the use of Super Glue as a way to treat small cuts and wounds, it acknowledges that it has been successfully used as such. So let that fact stick in your brain, and proceed at your own risk when using the substance.

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On July 12, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it wants a new way to make photorealistic virtual models. The organization’s mission is researching and developing new tools for intelligence agencies, like the CIA and the FBI, as well as others through the US government and the Department of Defense. Intelligence is the profession of finding useful, actionable information, and the new project on virtual renderings is a way to ensure that when people on the ground are sent to a building they’ve never visited before, they can find all the right side doors in.

Spy thrillers make it seem like government agencies have access to perfect information about the world, from the panopticon of 1998’s Enemy of the State through the superhumanly perceptive agencies of the 2000’s Bourne trilogy to the all-knowing and all-powerful AI “Entity” of 2023’s Mission: Impossible. Intelligence agencies guard knowledge of what they can and cannot do so as to not dispel that notion. This request, for a tool to create useful, 3D virtual models, suggests that movie scenes where an agent enhances a camera view until it’s a perfect life-size picture remain the stuff of fiction.

What IARPA wants help with, in brief, is the ability to give people, like soldiers or first responders, an explorable 3D map of a place made from real imagery, rather than a 2D depiction of the place.

The organization calls the initiative WRIVA. “The Walk-through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) program seeks to produce innovations that will advance 3-D site modelling capabilities far beyond today’s state of the art, giving personnel virtual ‘ground truth’ with unrivaled insights into locations that would be difficult, if not impossible, to view,” reads the announcement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Modeling in this instance conjures to mind specific renderings of locations made by computer software, which is the intent, but it’s worth considering how recently the models procured by the CIA were literal, physical models, with parts that might accompany an electric train set or a hobbyist wargame. 

“In support of the raid that resulted in the death of Usama Bin Ladin, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) modelers built Abbottabad Compound 1 Model,” notes the CIA’s description of the 1:84 scale model. Before Navy SEAL Team 6 went on the May 2011 raid, they used this model, where 1 inch matches 7 feet of the compound, to understand the compound and its surroundings. The CIA continues, “This model was used to brief President Obama, who approved the raid on the compound.”

The compound was under surveillance for a long time, and had the virtue of housing an occupant who was unlikely to leave. That allowed surveillance images to be collected for building the model, to ensure the SEALs found the highest profile target in the War on Terror. Not content with merely a miniature model, the SEALs also rehearsed the raid in a life-size mock-up of the compound in North Carolina.

WRIVA wants to offer that kind of detail and clarity, without the painstaking work of physical modeling, thus expanding who gets access to such walkthroughs.

“Imagine if the Intelligence Community (IC), law enforcement, first responders, military, and aid workers could virtually drop into a location and familiarize themselves before their feet even hit the ground,” reads the announcement.

In cases like the Abbottabad raid, where the mission was specifically about sending armed special operations forces into danger, knowing the external layout of a building and its surroundings allowed the raiders to move through the exterior parts of the compound with some familiarity. In rescue work, being able to pull up the outside of a building could give first responders en route a way to search for entrances and features familiar to locals but unknown to new arrivals.

DARPA, which tackles blue sky technological development for the military and is a type of cousin to IARPA, has explored development in a similar lane with its subterranean challenge. In this competition, competitors built robots that could go inside and map out buildings, creating useful tools for any humans that follow. This has immediate implications for rescue work, and also can be easily adapted to military use, where a robot explores a dangerous cave possibly filled by armed enemies, before any soldier is put at risk.

With IARPA’s project, it’s the observable outsides of buildings that become fodder for virtual model making. The announcement says the goal is to make “photorealistic virtual models using satellite, ground-level, and other available imagery.” (While IAPRA did not mention artificial intelligence in its announcement, the companies named as leads include Blue Halo and Raytheon, which have experience working with AI, which could be one way to tackle this problem.) The trio of satellite, ground level, and other available imagery sounds a lot like the methods used by open-source analysts to try and identify the location of videos and events in publicly available photography. With access to the resources on hand across the US intelligence community, what can be done in open source should be seen as just the beginning, not the end state, of what IARPA is asking companies to do.  

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

A HIGH VALLEY in the mountains of West Virginia is home to one of the world’s largest radio telescopes: a white-paneled behemoth called the Green Bank Telescope whose dish is bigger than a football field and whose topmost point is almost as high as the Washington Monument’s. That telescope typically collects radio-wave emissions from cosmic phenomena such as black holes, pulsars, supernova remnants, and cosmic gases. When doing that work, it receives those emissions passively. But now it has had experience with a new, more active tool: a radar transmitter. 

Thanks to defense contractor Raytheon, the telescope has gotten practice emitting its own radio waves, using the big dish to direct them, and bouncing them off objects in space. The reflected signals were then collected by more radio telescopes—antennas spread across the planet that are part of a collection of instruments called the Very Long Baseline Array. Data from those radar signals can be used to produce detailed pictures of, and to learn more details about, the moon, the planets, asteroids, and space debris—a set of targets of interest to both science and the defense community.

Radar genesis

The collaboration is Steven Wilkinson’s fault. “I’m the instigator,” Wilkinson, principal technical fellow at Raytheon, confesses jokingly. Back in 2019, Wilkinson was working on ultraprecise clocks but needed to find a new funding stream. So he went to the American Astronomical Society meeting, hoping to talk to someone from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) about those clocks—a technology integral to the instrumentation of radio telescopes. The NRAO is a set of federally funded telescopes that astronomers from all over the world can use. 

At the meeting, Wilkinson met the director of NRAO, Tony Beasley, and Beasley did indeed want a partner—but not in timekeeping. He wanted a radar collaborator. “That is our core competency as a company,” says Wilkinson. “I just could not believe my ears.”

Always game for a new experiment, Wilkinson went back to Raytheon and attempted to convince the bosses to put a radar transmitter on the giant Green Bank Telescope—formerly part of the NRAO, now its own separate facility but often a partner in NRAO projects. (Disclosure: I worked at the Green Bank Observatory, which is where the Green Bank Telescope is located, as an educator from 2010 to 2012.) 

“For radar, you’re worried about sending a signal and then receiving it,” says Patrick Taylor, head of NRAO’s and Green Bank Observatory’s joint radar division. “So you lose a lot of your power going out and then coming back again. … In that sense, you need really large telescopes. And the largest telescopes in the world are radio telescopes.” The array of telescopes that would catch the returning signal, conveniently, belongs to NRAO.

By October of 2020, the joint Raytheon radio observatory team had built a 700-watt prototype transmitter—about as powerful as a household microwave oven—and placed it at the prime focus of the telescope.

With the system in place, the joint team has since performed three kinds of tests: experiments involving the moon, an asteroid, and space debris. “Those are the three main fields that we want to look at,” says Taylor. “Planetary-scale bodies, like the moon; small bodies, like asteroids and comets, for planetary science and planetary defense; and space debris, for, essentially, safety, security, and awareness of what’s out there around the Earth.” 

The system that illuminates all of these objects—natural and synthetic—is the same: Radar signals leave the telescope, bounce off the objects, and return to be collected by other telescopes.

Over the moon

The moon tests returned perhaps the most striking results, showing portraits of the Apollo 15 landing site and Tycho Crater in detail such as you might find on a United States Geological Survey quadrant map of Earth. The pictures, taken from hundreds of thousands of miles away, boast a similar level of detail to those shot with the high-tech camera aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which, as its name suggests, is in orbit around the moon. 

Later, the team shot radio waves at an asteroid 1.3 million miles from Earth. The rocky body was just about 0.6 miles wide—small enough to make for impressive pictures from afar, but too big for comfort if it were on a collision course with Earth. Finding such asteroids, keeping track of their orbits, and understanding their characteristics could help scientists both know if a global catastrophe is careening toward the planet and develop mitigation strategies if one is—a capability the Double Asteroid Redirection Test recently demonstrated. (That mission involved slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid in orbit with another asteroid, to see if the bump could change its trajectory. It was successful.) 

“Radar is not great for finding asteroids in the sense of discovering them,” says Taylor, “but radar is great for tracking, monitoring, and characterizing them after they are discovered by optical or infrared observatories.”

Importantly, though, both sides of the team—those from Raytheon and those from Green Bank Observatory and the NRAO—are also interested in using the radar system to check out space debris. Those objects would be ones that are far out, between geostationary orbit (around 22,000 miles from Earth) and lunar orbit. “With so many more payloads going to the moon, there’s going to be more and more junk out there,” says Taylor. “Especially if we start sending human payloads, which we’re obviously planning to do, you’re gonna want to be able to track that debris.”

Wilkinson cites as an example the recent rocket booster from the Artemis I mission, a precursor to sending humans back to the moon. “That would be something that we would try to go and find and image and do some cool stuff,” he says. 

Knowing the nature of debris is of interest to scientists and to civil projects that may venture far out, but it’s also relevant to defense: The Space Force, for instance, is keeping an eye on the problem, and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is even working on a program called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS), which according to an AFRL statement will “search for unknown objects like mission related debris, rocket bodies, and other previously untracked cislunar objects, as well as provide position updates on spacecraft currently operating near the moon or other cislunar regions that are challenging to observe from Earth.”

Sure, you don’t want pieces of space trash to hurt astronauts or damage or destroy spacecraft. But military and intelligence officials are also, in general and specifically through programs like CHPS, trying to find out more about everyone’s spacecraft out there and what they’re up to. Powerful Earth-based radar, if it’s capable of surveilling debris, would be technologically capable of doing the same to active satellites too. 

Let’s dish

The team’s hope is that a higher-powered radar system would be a permanent fixture on the telescope now that the low-power prototype has done its demo job. The work can feed back into Raytheon’s other projects. “We could take a little bit more risk to develop technology and the things that we’re learning here and then fold that back into our other products,” says Wilkinson. This system could be a test bed, he says, for the company’s future tracking work in the space between geostationary orbit and the moon—a science experiment that could lead to the next generation of “space situational awareness” technology.

Both sides of the team are working on a conceptual design for the higher-power system with funding from the National Science Foundation. Flora Paganelli, a project scientist in NRAO’s radar division, says it’s the first time she’s been able to help craft a ground-based telescopic tool as it’s being built. Previously, she was a member of the Cassini Radar Science Team, and she also worked at the SETI Institute before joining NRAO. 

Having such input on this instrument is very significant right now. For researchers like Paganelli, such an instrument would augment science in a more significant way than it would have even just a few years ago. That’s because a few years ago, the US had two “planetary radars,” or systems that did work like surveilling the moon, planets, and asteroids.

Today, there’s just one—Goldstone, in California—because the other, at the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, is no longer usable. Sadly, the telescope collapsed in 2020: The platform that hung above the dish crashed into its panels. Taylor worked there for years, before he did a stint at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and then came to NRAO. “Having a radar on the Green Bank Telescope, it’s something we considered for many years, essentially as a way to complement the other existing systems,” he says. 

Because there are no firm plans to rebuild Arecibo or something like it, Green Bank represents the best hope for a second such radar system in the United States. “It kind of went from something that could complement Arecibo to something that could step in and fill the void,” Taylor says of Green Bank’s system. Paganelli notes that the scientific community’s radar expertise could now coalesce there.

Wilkinson, though he comes from the corporate national security sphere, also has an inherent interest in astronomy, which makes this dual-use project exciting to him. Also exciting: astronomy’s openness. “A lot of the things we do here, typically, we can’t talk about,” says Wilkinson, of Raytheon. The universe’s secrets, on the other hand, are there to be discovered and shared, not kept. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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The jet engines on commercial airplanes can be absolutely huge. Technically known as turbofans, these machines have massive spinning fans in the front that create thrust by sending air out the back. One specific engine model has a fan that measures about 11 feet across. The engines burn jet fuel, create huge amounts of thrust, and are very loud. 

But what if you could point a ray gun at them and shrink them way down, make them electric, and better yet, very quiet? That’s the goal of a company called Whisper Aero, which was founded in 2021. However, their propulsors aren’t intended to power large airliners. Instead, the company aims to have their innovative electric machines power military drones, perhaps a small nine-passenger jet, or even take on other, non-aerial tasks—like move the air in leaf blowers or HVAC systems. 

“Whisper’s all about delivering the next generation of cleaner, quieter, more efficient thrust—for drones, for jets, and anything that moves a lot of air,” says Ian Villa, the company’s co-founder and COO. He compares the company to “an electric Pratt & Whitney, plus a Dyson, combined.” In other words, merge a maker of aircraft engines with a company famous for vacuums, and you’ve got Whisper. 

[Related: The metallic guts of GE’s massive jet engines, in photos]

The company’s CEO and co-founder is Mark Moore, a veteran of NASA (and its X-57 program) and Uber Elevate, where Villa also worked. (Joby Aviation acquired Uber Elevate, which focused on flying taxis and urban air mobility, in 2020.) Moore notes that the result of the design is a “very rigid, very lightweight, high-performing fan unit.” 

Technically, what the company is working on is called an electric ducted fan, which just means that a spinning fan is enclosed within a duct. (For another take on ducted fans and flight, check out Lilium.) But Whisper’s version of this device involves some tweaks. For one, the tips of the fan blades are all connected with a circular shroud. Villa compares the setup to the wheels on a bike, with the fan blades being a bit like spokes and the shroud being like the outer wheel itself. And that means that the fan blades can be held in tension between the hub they are attached to at their base, and the shroud, or rim, at their tips. “We’re using tension to our benefit in order to be able to get to these high blade counts,” he says. 

The other aspect to know about the device is that those fan blades spin relatively slowly, at least when measuring the speed of their tips, and there are a lot of them. “We have so many blades that our fan looks like a solid disc, if you look at it from the front,” Moore adds. 

Because of the shroud that connects all the fan blade tips, “you’re also eliminating the tip vortex noise from the blade, which is a high contributor of noise,” says Villa. (Counterintuitively, the motor spinning the fan blades operates at a high RPM, but because the blades are small, their tip speeds are relatively pokey.)

“The combination of a lot of blades, with a high RPM on the motor, gets the tonal frequencies up to the ultrasonic, so people don’t even hear any tonal noise whatsoever,” Moore says. “That’s one of the reasons we’re so quiet.” Below is a video that demonstrates a Whisper propulsor in action:

Whisper currently shows off two different sized propulsors on their website. One has a fan diameter of just over 6 inches, and the other, nearly 10 inches. Moore notes that the small size of their thrusters swims against the current in the world of airplane engines, which like to be large to get better fuel efficiency. “Aircraft have essentially gone to fewer and fewer engines, that are bigger and bigger, to get to the highest possible efficiency and the lightest weight,” Moore adds. “The technology that we’ve developed has essentially broken that truth.”

So what can you do with such a highly engineered ducted fan? For one, you could put it on a drone. Whisper Aero has created and flown their own 12-foot-wide drone, which is powered by one of their propulsors. They have “shown that it’s inaudible from 200 feet away, [during] overflight,” Villa says. A quiet drone like that would be useful for a military that wants to carry out tasks focused on ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. 

“Our goal is to actually get a DOD application—a DOD-focused propulsor—out the door later this year, early next year, for first flight probably next year,” Villa adds. 

The company also envisions that their propulsors could power something they call the Whisper Jet (the jet doesn’t actually exist) that would have 11 of their ducted fans on each wing, for a total of 22. That nine-passenger aircraft would be designed to take off in a conventional way, by speeding down a runway, as opposed to vertically, like the flying machines from other companies, such as Joby. When it comes to hypothetically using their propulsors to power aircraft that could carry people, the appeal is that the flying machines would be relatively quiet. 

And back down on the ground, these shrouded, ducted fans could do less glamorous work, like power leaf blowers that are also less of a noise nuisance in your neighborhood. 

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On July 7, the White House announced the contents of its latest security assistance for Ukraine. These transfers of weapons and equipment have proceeded regularly over the last 18 months, since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The latest weapons include anti-air missiles, armored vehicles, anti-tank weapons, and a host of other systems. The most stand-out item, and the one that has attracted greater public response, is the inclusion of the Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munition (DPICM), otherwise known as cluster munitions.

A cluster bomb or cluster munition is a shell that, after it’s fired, opens and releases many smaller explosives, called submunitions. The ones being sent to Ukraine are rounds for 155m howitzers, an artillery piece that lobs shells at a high trajectory so they fly over obstacles and then descend to hit whatever is below. In a cluster bomb, the outer casing detonates away, allowing the spin of the shell to scatter cluster bomblets like so many deadly seeds. This dispersal means that the submunitions cover a larger area than the blast of a single conventional bomb would.

“With this announcement, we will be able to provide Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of additional artillery ammunition immediately. This decision will ensure we can sustain our support for Ukraine by bridging us to a point where we are producing sufficient artillery ammunition on a monthly basis across the coalition. We recognize the complexities here, which is why I want to quickly provide a few additional pieces of information on DPICM,” Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, said at a press conference after the announcement. 

The use of cluster munitions in Ukraine predates the 2022 invasion, with both sides using the weapons during the long Donbass war between Ukraine and Russia from 2014 until the 2022 invasion. Russia has used cluster bombs in its invasion of Ukraine, with reports indicating use against both military targets and cities. Ukraine is currently waging a counter-offensive against Russian forces entrenched in Ukraine, and has sought cluster munitions as a tool worth firing in their own country because of the desired military effect against defensive positions, like trenches.

That ability to cover an area with small explosives represents both the military potential and the biggest post-war concern from the use of cluster munitions. Bomblets are small, and while they are all designed to detonate on impact, some may not. These duds can either be truly inert, where they will never detonate, or they can be set off at some point in the future, by civilians in the area or by mine-clearing crews. There is a risk of leaving unexploded duds with all bombs, but because each cluster munition scatters many small bomblets, it makes the number of unexploded bombs much greater per shell than it is for single munitions.

The history of cluster munitions

During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed cluster munitions, alongside the development of precision-guided weapons. Like many Cold War weapons, they were originally designed for use in a massive ground war over Europe, and found use instead in the long running military campaigns, like the US in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Ukraine and Russia both inherited military equipment from the Soviet Union after the Cold War, including cluster munitions.

As a category, cluster munitions date back to World War II, and in a March 2022 report, the Congressional Research Service notes the weapons have been used by at least 21 countries since. These include use by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the United Kingdom in the Falklands War, by various factions in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and others. The United States used cluster munitions extensively in Southeast Asia, as part of the Vietnam War, “and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that in Laos alone, 9 million to 27 million unexploded submunitions remained after the conflict, resulting in over 10,000 civilian casualties to date.”

The United States also used cluster munitions in the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, but has reportedly not used the weapons since the first three weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

Part of the challenge of making cluster munitions work is that potential for duds. From a human rights and laws-of-war perspective, duds are deadly because they pose a risk to people who are civilians—they’re not uniformed armed combatants, soldiers, or other members of the military. By threatening civilians, and by threatening them after a war is over, these weapons create an enduring risk; the small bomblets are costly to clean up and deadly to leave in place. The other reason duds are a problem for the military is that each dud fired in battle is a potential enemy left alive, making the weapon less effective than promised.

Dealing with deadly duds

There are a few ways countries have responded to the problems posed by cluster munitions and their duds. The first is the Convention on Cluster Munitions. This treaty, which is agreed to by more than 100 nations, entered into force in 2010.  The convention “bans the use of cluster munitions, as well as their development, production, acquisition, transfer, and stockpiling,” with two exceptions: if the cluster munition is designed to detect and hit a single target (like many small bombs hitting a tank) or if they are cluster munitions that include an electronic self-destruction or self-deactivating feature. That last feature lets munitions render themselves inert, reducing but not completely eliminating the risk to civilians posed by unexploded bombs.

Several nations have not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, including Russia, the United States, and Ukraine, among others. While some NATO allies, like Canada, France, and the United Kingdom are signatories, the treaty does not prevent general or military cooperation with non-signatory nations.

The other way to reduce the risk of unexploded submunitions is to ensure that more of the submunitions explode.

This is the tack that Kahl emphasized, saying that “compared to Russian cluster munitions, the DPICM rounds we will provide Ukraine have an extremely low failure, or dud rate. The DPICM ammunition we are delivering to Ukraine will consist only of those with a dud rate less than 2.35 percent. Compare that to Russia, which has been using cluster munitions across Ukraine with dud rates of between 30 and 40 percent. During the first year of the conflict alone, Russia fired cluster munitions deployed from a range of weapon systems have likely expended tens of millions of submunitions, or bomblets, across Ukraine.”

The aftermath 

Unexploded bombs from this fighting were already a major postwar concern for Ukraine, because safely clearing explosives is slow, painstaking work. While Kahl gave a failure rate of 2.35 percent, the New York Times reports that “the Pentagon’s own statements indicate that the cluster munitions in question contain older grenades known to have a failure rate of 14 percent or more.”

With 72 small grenades in each shell of cluster munitions, a 14-percent failure rate translates to just over 10 failures per shell. (The number of submunitions in a shell varies, with reports ranging from tens to hundreds.) These are stockpiled weapons that the United States stopped using in 2003, and stopped procuring in 2008 as the failure rate was deemed too high under Pentagon policy.

In a press conference July 7, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan emphasized the nature of the war Ukraine is fighting as a justification for the weapons.

“The argument I’m making is that Russia has already spread tens of millions of these bomblets across Ukrainian territory,” said Sullivan. “So we have to ask ourselves: Is Ukraine’s use of cluster munitions on that same land actually that much of an addition of civilian harm, given that that area is going to have to be de-mined regardless?”

Kahl echoed that same sentiment, saying “Russia has been using cluster munitions indiscriminately since the start of this war in order to attack Ukraine. By contrast, Ukraine is seeking DPICM rounds in order to defend its own sovereign territory.”

These arguments anticipate and in part respond to the robust disagreement about the weapon’s transfer and use from allies and human rights organizations. On July 8, Canada’s government released a statement condemning the transfer, saying “We do not support the use of cluster munitions and are committed to putting an end to the effects cluster munitions have on civilians – particularly children.”

Legacy weapons—and the question of using them or not—are realities that present and future policy makers must grapple with. Like a submunition left undiscovered in a field until tragedy strikes, the decision to develop and field a weapon has implications in the immediate moments of the conflict, and in the long aftermath of a battle. The hastened end of a war may make the peacetime work of restoration and demining arrive sooner, but the way in which the war is fought will determine the scale of post-war repair needed.

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Stinger missiles are Cold War relics, and like many such relics, have seen action to lethal effect in Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion. Nations like the United States and other NATO allies have given Ukraine their Stingers, putting the venerable human-portable surface-to-air missile to use against Soviet-designed aircraft, as it was originally designed to do. But the Stinger missile design is so old, and the stockpiles of the missiles being expended so quickly, that Stinger-maker Raytheon is asking for its retired missile makers to teach current workers how to restart production, Defense One reported in late June.

The US Army announced it was looking for a new Stinger missile replacement in March 2022, just a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The announcement came after the Biden administration had already announced the planned transfer of hundreds of Stinger missiles to the country. The Department of Defense’s June 27 factsheet on security assistance to Ukraine records over 1,700 Stinger anti-aircraft systems sent to the country. The missiles, which can be shoulder-fired or mounted on vehicles like Humvees, are being put to use, depleting what was already a finite supply of the weapons.

“Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon parent company RTX, reports Defense One. Kremer’s remarks came at the Paris Air Show in June, an annual gathering and exhibition of aircraft and aircraft-related technologies. Kremer continued: “We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger. We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The relevance of the Stinger to modern combat, combined with the manufacturing know-how being bound up in the minds of retirees, frames the machine as something of a useful relic. To understand the drive to restart Stinger production now, it is helpful to understand the circumstances under which the missile was first made.

Take the Redeye

The Army’s search for an anti-air missile can be traced back to 1951, after years of experimenting with anti-air guns found the weapons had insufficient range and accuracy to stop newer and faster planes. The HAWK missile, which has also seen action in Ukraine, is one of the early anti-air developments, but it is big, and needs vehicles to transport and launch it. Putting a missile in the hands of soldiers and marines on foot allows infantry to shoot down low-flying aircraft, including attack planes and increasingly helicopters. 

The first shoulder-fireable missile developed by the United States for this purpose was the Redeye, which used an infrared seeker to chase after the hottest object in the sky. It was first deployed for combat in 1967. The Soviet Union, working on a similar problem, developed the Strela shoulder-fired anti-air missile, which has seen use by both Ukraine and Russia.

The Redeye’s seeker meant it was easy to throw off targets with flares or even just the sun on a bright day, limiting the weapon’s usefulness, and it could not distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft, meaning anyone firing a Redeye risked the missile turning and hitting a nearby friendly plane. The original Redeye was also slow, making it a weapon that could hit a low-flying plane after an attack run, but not stop it before an initial pass. 

The Stinger’s evolution

What became the Stinger started its development as the Redeye II. The program was renamed in 1972 and the missile became operational in 1981. The Stinger included a system that let the missile attempt to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft, by matching a coded friendly radio signal from the allied planes. The guidance system of the Stinger is still infrared, but once it gets close to a target the missile can navigate to hit other parts of the aircraft. 

The Stinger received significant upgrades over the course of its production, ensuring the weapons would remain useful for the duration of their service life, but the weapon is fundamentally based on technology and components from decades ago. While all military production is to some extent bespoke products, they exist in an ecosystem of parts that match commercial capabilities available at the time. 

Raytheon bringing back retirees to teach the basics of Stinger production will likely help with a lost transfer of knowledge, until the Army’s desired Stinger replacement is designed, tested, and improved. In the meantime, another option for the Army would be to reach out to allies like Japan and the United Kingdom, and see if their respective Stinger updates (Japan’s Type 91) or replacements (the UK’s Starstreak) are available for production. 

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On June 27, defense giant Northrop Grumman announced that it had successfully flown a plane with a new navigation system. Designed to work in situations where GPS signals may be difficult or impossible to get, this Embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) / Inertial Navigation System (INS) Modernization, or EGI-M, is a tool that could someday help fighter jet pilots and other aircraft fight through the jammed skies of a future war. 

For the May flight test, instead of trying the system on a fancy fighter or high-end military craft, the EGI-M was reportedly flown on a Cessna Citation V business jet.

“This flight test is a major step forward in developing our next generation airborne navigation system,” Ryan Arrington, a Northrop Grumman VP, said in a release. “The EGI-M capability developed by Northrop Grumman enables our warfighters to navigate accurately and precisely through hostile and contested environments.”

There’s many ways that a sky can be made inhospitable to intruding aircraft. Anti-aircraft weapons, primarily missiles and rockets but also fighter jets and sometimes anti-air guns, can all try to shoot a plane out of the sky. Jammers, or other tools and electronic warfare systems designed to interfere with signals in the electromagnetic spectrum, can block the information that pilots or drone operators need to operate their aircraft. The former kind of interference is referred to by the military as “kinetic” or physically destructive, the latter broadly is “electronic warfare.” Both kinds of interference can make for a hostile and contested sky.

The United States military has, for decades, operated in skies it could quickly and reliably control.

“Last time an American soldier died from an enemy aircraft was April 15th, 1953,” said James Hecker, a general in the U.S. Air Force, on a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. “We’ve gotten a little bit spoiled, especially in the last 30 years. Desert storm, we had to fight for air superiority, but we got it really quick. Other wars that we’ve been in in the last 20 years, we got it uncontested.”

Hecker was speaking alongside Air Marshall Johnny Stringer of the British Royal Air Force, in a discussion about lessons learned about air superiority in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“The biggest lesson learned that really the world has gotten out of this is what happens if you can’t get air superiority. What we’ve seen on both sides is that neither one was able to get air superiority,” said Hecker, who went on to note that the reason neither side can claim air superiority is because both sides have very good integrated air and missile defense systems.

While these defense systems are primarily missiles, being able to block out some of the signals used by planes and drones also impedes the aircraft’s ability to function. GPS systems, originally developed for military use, depend on aircraft receiving and using signals from space, and then being able to match that to a physical position on or above the earth. 

The EGI-M is designed to operate in GPS-contested and GPS-denied environments, or places where the signals face interference and complete obstruction. To get around that, an inertial navigation system uses sensors like gyroscopes to instead track changes and speed of movement from a known point, allowing the aircraft’s movement to locate it in space. To help in GPS-contested environments, the system can receive GPS-M signals, which is a higher code of GPS signal specifically reserved for military functions; it is designed to be harder to obstruct and more secure in transmission. 

In the May flight, the Cessna testbed carried three models of the system, which it used to capture three different kinds of navigational information. As outlined in a conference abstract, found by The Aviationist, the three types of navigational data were inertial only, GPS only, and a blended GPS/inertial management system that used both at once.

As designed, the EGI-M system will go into two planes upon launch. One of these is the F-22 Raptor, a stealth air superiority fighter exclusively flown by the United States Air Force, which will be crucial to flying into and fighting to open any contested sky. In addition, EGI-M is designed to launch on the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a prop-driven plane operated by the Navy that features a large radar in a disk mounted above the plane’s fuselage. The Hawkeye is a command and control aircraft, used to perceive allied and enemy movement and direct battle while airborne. 

New navigation systems will not guarantee that US or allied aircraft can permanently clear a sky in the face of hostile foes, but they can expand the window in which such aircraft can reliably operate, and can make reasserting air superiority easier.

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On June 22, Denmark’s Ministry of Defense announced what companies would be building its next patrol ships. The new type of vessel is designed to be modular and upgradeable for years and even decades to come, allowing the same hulls and bones of the ship to serve even as the tools and technologies change with the times.

While Denmark is a small country, its possession of Greenland ensures it has an outsized role to play in the Arctic. With global climate change and thawing ice, the Arctic was already going to become a more trafficked and contested part of the globe. And that was before Russia’s invasions of Ukraine, first in 2014 and then at massive scale in 2022, put a deep freeze on cooperation between all of the Arctic states. As a founding member of NATO, Denmark has long been part of a defensive military alliance, ready to respond to Russian threats. New patrol ships will enable the country’s navy to operate more capably where needed for decades to come.

“A rethinking of the design will mean that we in the maritime domain are future-proof to handle changing needs. This applies, for example, to dealing with hybrid threats in a faster and more flexible way than before,” said Torben Mikkelsen, the head of the Danish Defense Ship program, according to Shephard News. 

Observers expect the new patrol vessels will be based on a ship template called the OMT MPV80, built by Odense Maritime Technology and SH Defence. OMT is a naval design and advising firm—it’s one of the three major parts of the named consortium responsible for producing Denmark’s new patrol vessels, alongside Terma, a naval military contractor, and PensionDanmark, a pension fund.

The OMT MPV80 debuted at the DSEI arms exhibition in 2021. It was built with SH Defense’s modular “Cube” system as an essential characteristic. CEO of OMT Kåre Groes Christiansen told Naval News that they had made “a ship that was born Cubed.”

Cubed? Christiansen is referring to the Cube modular system, made by SH Defense. It is a system of packaging equipment in modules that are all designed to fit the footprint of shipping containers. The Cube modules are designed to fit on decks or into storage, letting existing vessels use the system. The OMT MPV80, designed for Cube utilization, will have spots for a Cube to be loaded through open side panels. Once the Cube system equipment is slotted in, the ship can use that equipment while underway, and then when it returns to port after a patrol or a mission, the crew can swap out what modules it carries. 

Consider a ship designed for use with the Cube. Before it goes out on patrol, it could take on mine-laying modules, with shipping crate-sized mine storage and conveyor belts slotting in, letting the vessel turn the sea into an inhospitable domain, obstructing safe passage and protecting ports from hostile intrusion. 

Alternatively, the same kind of vessel could be outfitted with mine-hunting modules. Storage, a work station, and launch space for mine-hunting underwater robots could fit inside a crate. Rather than build a control station for the minehunting robots into the body of the ship, a shipping container-shaped control room can plug in, letting the vessel work as a minehunter when it needs to be, but also letting it take on other missions at other times.

Other possibilities abound. The vessel could carry extra torpedoes, anti-air missiles, or depth charges for more of a naval combatant role. The Cubes could contain salvage arms and rescue boats, allowing the patrol vessel to serve more of a coast guard and life-saving role. With a base design that accommodates some deck guns for protection and a helipad to launch crewed and possibly uncrewed aircraft, the OMT MPV80 design seems well positioned to perform whatever Denmark might ask of it, alone or in support of allied navies. 

The consortium’s announcement of the agreement for a new patrol vessel emphasized the modularity as a way to future-proof the ships. While naval operations entail risk, ensuring that the tools and equipment needed can be installed on the ships as soon as they are ready for use ensures that outdated weapons or sensors are unlikely to hinder such a ship.

These new patrol vessels are designed to replace Denmark’s existing fleet of Thetis ocean patrol ships, which operate in the icy waters around Denmark’s possession of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. These vessels are ice-rated, and entered service in the early 1990s. While sea ice has declined precipitously since then, it’s still a durable presence and risk in Arctic and near-Arctic operations. Designing for the future means designing for one where naval operations may follow the warming water north, and staying on the edge of the sea ice.

Watch a video about the type of vessel below:

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Small planes have one propeller, bigger ones have two, and helicopters have a giant rotor on top and a smaller one on the tail. Then there’s an electric aircraft from Joby Aviation, which has a whopping six propellers. They can all tilt to allow the flying machine to take off and land vertically, or cruise in forward flight. 

The California-based company, which has been developing electric air taxis for years, officially took the wraps off its first production prototype aircraft today. It looks similar to pre-production aircraft that the company has flown before, but this one is destined to be delivered to Edwards Air Force Base in California after Joby finishes testing it. “We have the approval to fly that plane now legally, and we will fly it very soon,” says Jon Wagner, a veteran of Tesla who is the company’s lead for the powertrain and electronics team. That FAA certification to fly the plane, which has the word “experimental,” written on its side, is not the same type of certification that the company needs to fly paying customers. That comes later, if all goes according to plan.

The schedule holds for Joby to bring the aircraft to the Edwards Air Force Base in 2024, but the company will conduct tests that include flying it before sending it to the military base. “We expect very, very soon it will be in the air,” Wagner says. “We’ll be flying it in Marina [California] here, and then it will be moved to Edwards, and complete its official flight test plan with the US Air Force as a partner.” 

Joby Aviation and other electric aviation companies like Beta Technologies have a relationship with the Air Force through a program called Agility Prime. The purpose behind this program is for the military to help out the companies working in the field, while also learning from the tech and exploring how it could help the military. In a press release, Joby said after the aircraft arrives at Edwards, “it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases.”

“We’re super excited about taking this aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base in California to begin testing with the DOD,” the company’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, told Bloomberg News. “That is just a spectacular opportunity for us to begin building the operational muscle and begin moving goods and people around military airbases before we have FAA certification.” 

Joby’s production aircraft could be a way to transport cargo or people someday; it can hold four passengers, plus a pilot. The company’s goal is to carry people beginning in 2025. “I believe what we’re showing here is going to revolutionize aviation forever,” Wagner says. Joby also has a planned collaboration with Delta Air Lines, which could provide a way for passengers to make a short hop from somewhere in the New York City area, for example, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, before embarking on a regular plane to someplace further away.

Wagner says that the production aircraft that they’ve just unveiled appears, superficially, to resemble the pre-production aircraft the company has fabricated already. It “looks substantially similar to the very first aircraft we built, six years ago,” he says, “and especially [similar] to the last two aircraft we built.” 

But he says that even if it looks similar, the flying machine that came off the production line has been subjected to iterations to improve it. “The biggest difference is that we’ve now invested in the manufacturing systems, and we can make multiple of these aircraft, over and over now, and that’s because we’ve gained the confidence in that design,” he says. 

The industry as a whole has seen setbacks, as has Joby. A company called Kitty Hawk, which was working on a single-seat self-flying aircraft, closed its doors last year. And, an uncrewed, remotely piloted aircraft from Joby crashed in February of 2022, after it “experienced a component failure over an uninhabited area near Jolon, California,” the NTSB said in its preliminary report. “There were no injuries, and the aircraft was substantially damaged.” Plus, earlier this month, NASA said that it wouldn’t fly its electric X-57 plane, due to safety concerns and time constraints. 

In the US, Joby’s competitors include Beta Technologies, Archer, and Wisk, which is owned by Boeing.

Take a look at the sleek new aircraft, below:

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On June 26, the US Army announced a new name and a new acronym for what will replace the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The program to do so was formerly known as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, but the vehicle itself will now be known as the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle. Replacing the Bradley is no small task, as the Army has tried and failed to find a suitable next-generation version of its fighting troop carrier for decades.

Before the Army decides on a final model of the XM30, it has awarded contracts to two teams to design and build up to 11 prototype vehicles each. These teams are led by General Dynamics Land Systems, based in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and by American Rheinmetall, also based in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

“In recent years, peer and near-peer competitors of the United States have significantly increased their combat vehicle capabilities. The character of warfare has changed and our potential adversaries bring increased capabilities to the battlefield. The best way to respond is to ensure that our formations equipped with Infantry Fighting Vehicles can bring greater survivability, powerful lethality at stand-off range, and improved maneuver capabilities to the battlefield,” Dan Heaton, of the Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, says via email. “The Bradley Fighting Vehicle continues to be a capable and reliable asset for our Army. As we consider the future fight, however, we need to invest in a new vehicle that can meet the needs of the Army of 2040.”

The Bradley’s origins date back to the late Cold War, when the Army sought a troop transport that could not just deliver infantry safely to battle, but whose crew could use the vehicle’s weapons and sensors to fight alongside the disembarked soldiers. This design was oriented, as with much of US military planning at the time, towards fighting in the European plains and steppes where the Army expected to face the forces of the Soviet Union.

Today, Bradleys can be seen leading armored assaults against Russian lines in Ukraine, as the country works to expel the invading army using machines passed down to it by the US and others.

For the new XM30, building upon the success of the Bradley while designing for the future means leaning heavily into automation, reducing the crew needed to operate the vehicle from three to two, while keeping room for six passengers on the inside. In addition, it’s expected the vehicle will be armed with a 50mm cannon mounted in a remotely controlled turret. It will also have anti-tank guided missiles and machine guns.

“The XM30 at initial fielding [will] include waypoint navigation, Artificial Intelligent Target Recognition (AiTR), and Advanced fire control systems all of which are designed to ease the cognitive burden of the two-person crew,” says Heaton. 

That’s just the start, though. The Army is also working on ways to develop software that is independent of hardware, enabling each side of the equation to be upgraded independently. If better targeting comes from better software on the same hardware, the XM30 should be able to incorporate that.

“We don’t know which technologies will emerge in the future or the rate at which they will be ready to incorporate into a combat vehicle,” says Heaton. “Through the use of Modular Open System Architecture, we are building a vehicle platform that is intentionally designed to allow new technology to be incorporated into the vehicle at the right time. The XM30 is being designed with future upgrades in mind.”

Automation, especially on vehicles designed for combat, requires striking a balance between letting the machine automatically do tasks that require little human supervision, while ensuring human operators are fully in control of major decisions.

While new tools will change the minutiae of how the XM30 operates, the overall role of the vehicle will be the same as the Bradleys it is designed to replace.

“The XM30 is an armored combat vehicle designed to maneuver through the enemy’s security zone to deliver Infantry to positions of advantage to accomplish the unit’s mission,” says Heaton. “The focus of the autonomous behaviors is on reducing the cognitive burden on the crew and allowing formations to generate combat power faster than our adversaries.”

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SCHIAPARELLI WAS OUT OF CONTROL. As the probe entered Mars’ atmosphere on October 19, 2016, an onboard computer miscalculated its altitude, prematurely jettisoning the craft’s parachute. The disc-shaped probe with what looked like a futuristic World’s Fair of instruments on its flat back sent one last swan song of a data package back to its circling companion, the Trace Gas Orbiter, as it tumbled into free fall. Onboard thrusters fired for three seconds rather than 30. Then, some 1,272 pounds of atmospheric and meteorological sensors—and nearly two decades of European deep space ambition—slammed into Mars at 335 mph. The probe added another crater to the pockmarked surface, peppered a stretch of the Red Planet with mechanical debris, and joined a growing list of disappointments in the European Space Agency’s quest to make its first successful landing on Martian soil.

Part of the first mission of the ExoMars program (a reference to exobiology, the study of life beyond Earth), the Trace Gas Orbiter still circles the Red Planet today, high above its failed entry module. But the program is defined by continued setbacks. Since the project’s inception in 2001, it’s been plagued by bureaucratic delays, budget shortfalls, geopolitical turmoil, and mechanical failures. But Exo­Mars received its fiercest blow in more than two decades when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The ongoing war has left the future of ESA’s next ­attempt—which was meant to touch down on Mars in June 2023—up in the air. 

Despite the resilience of the engineering teams and scientists behind the mission, their efforts increasingly seem more Sisyphean than Herculean. As the rover sits motionless in a facility in northern Italy, its precious components—some made of rare-earth minerals and gold—are at risk of atrophy and decay. Funding is in limbo until the US Congress and European member states decide whether to invest more cash. 

If the rover launches in 2028, as is currently planned, it will represent the culmination of roughly 30 years of patience, redevelopment, and, most recently, a European reunion of sorts for NASA. This follows a long line of setbacks and disappointments that began long before Russia’s war in Ukraine booted Russian space agency Roscosmos and its booster engines from the program.

Getting Rosalind Franklin (named in honor of the late English chemist known for her contributions in identifying DNA’s double helix) to a safe landing spot millions of miles away will require unfettered determination and a level of global cooperation that seems increasingly difficult to maintain. If they want a chance of making it to the finish line, the mission’s leaders will have to let go of some of their original goals. 

As Jorge Vago, an ExoMars project scientist, puts it: “It’s now about surviving.”

MARS HAS BEEN a primary target of international space exploration since NASA launched Mariner 4 in 1964. This fly-by mission supercharged modern humanity’s fascination with the Red Planet, which has inspired a relentless, decades-long quest to uncover its secrets. Central to this exploration is the search for extraterrestrial life, a pursuit that has spawned numerous rover projects and brought together leading global space agencies.

The modern era of Mars exploration started when NASA’s Pathfinder arrived on the Martian surface in 1997. Among its discoveries were confirmation about ancient water and new information about the planet’s thin atmosphere, fueling the scientific community’s interest in Earth’s neighbor as a potential human habitat. That focus brought us the Mars Science Laboratory, launched in 2011 to deliver NASA’s car-size Curiosity. Equipped with a state-of-the-art scientific payload, it discovered organic molecules and complex chemistry in the Red Planet’s soil, strengthening the case for past or even present microbial life. Through these discoveries, NASA remained close partners with ESA, which launched its Mars Express orbiter on a Russian Soyuz in 2003. In 2009, NASA and ESA made joint commitments to two more Mars missions. Meanwhile, ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016 in collaboration with Russia’s Roscosmos, is still analyzing the Martian atmosphere for gases associated with biological or geological activity.

Astronomers now know that Mars once hosted a climate that could sustain life, before a dramatic shift made the dusty planet as hostile as it is today. Uncovering what happened millions of years ago could help improve our understanding of how and when life tends to evolve in our galaxy. It could also provide hints about the trajectory of Earth’s own changing climate.

Projects in the heavens also serve as tools for diplomacy, fostering international cooperation and shared scientific goals to better the planet. ExoMars was meant to be one such collaboration, but NASA couldn’t sustain its financial partnership and departed the program in 2012. Roscosmos partnered with ESA in NASA’s stead, securing the future of the mission. 

Then everything came undone. 

After Russian troops and weapons entered Ukraine in February 2022 in an unprovoked assault on the eastern European nation, ESA canceled its contract with Roscosmos in line with Western sanctions. The program already had its rover, but nothing to deliver it to Mars. ESA scrubbed the September 2022 launch date.

Russian scientists spent that April dismantling their equipment from the lander, while engineers at ESA facilities across Europe worked to reimagine how they might adopt outside equipment into their designs. One example is the lightweight radioisotope heater units that would save energy and keep the rover from freezing during Martian winters. Those heaters are produced only by Russia and the US, but a swap will not be seamless: The Russian versions were each about the size of a mini soda can, and the Rosalind Franklin rover was designed to accommodate three. The American substitutes are more like 35mm film canisters, and it will take at least 30 to keep the rover warm. Attaching them will require some nimble tinkering. 

Now NASA is poised to give ESA the boost it needs to vault over the mission’s final hurdles. If the agencies are able to retrofit lander parts for instruments customized for Roscosmos tech (also not a small feat), the rover could be launched from Kennedy Space Center on a US-owned rocket. But the success of the salvaged mission hinges on more than just engineering.

“It’s a Russian nesting doll in that sense, the way we built up the partnership,” says Albert Haldemann, Mars chief engineer at ESA. Now the two space agencies have to assemble the parts and make sure they fit well enough to survive the journey to Mars—and its volatile atmosphere.

SINCE 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions more, exacerbated political tensions around the globe, and cast a shadow over future collaborations in space exploration, including the International Space Station. Vago recalls having difficulty processing the news. “We were devastated…wrenched,” he says. 

The team was tormented by two realities following the loss of Russia’s space instruments and expertise: the potential collapse of ExoMars and a void in the world’s astronomical knowledge. A morose fog fell over the mission.

“The realization of what was happening hit different people in different ways at different times,” Vago says. For a brief period, it wasn’t clear how they would or should proceed. “If it was someone else’s mission, looking with some detachment, you’d say, ‘Yes, of course you can’t launch with this war going on and with cooperation with the side that started it,’” he explains. “The other half of your brain is thinking, I’ve been working on this thing with colleagues from the US, Russia, Europe, and they are nice and sweet. That’s 20 years down the toilet.”

The abrupt end of the partnership severed emotional ties too, says Haldemann. “There are personal stories on both sides.” The main Russian partner was NPO Lavochkin, a military supplier to the Russian army. “I suspect some of the people I worked with are full supporters [of the invasion], and that feels a little weird,” Haldemann adds.

When Russian cooperation collapsed, the European team moved back to one of the very first phases of development for the lander, essentially backtracking from final flight checks to the process of creating basic equipment. NASA saw an opportunity to rejoin another mission with a longstanding ally, which will mean a surprise comeback if it moves to officially support the project again. ESA is now cobbling together a new game plan that accounts for the loss of resources—and includes replacements it hopes it can count on. The new launch date is tentatively set for 2028; the six-year delay represents the bare-minimum time the team will need to design and build and test new equipment. 

“The uncertainties now are more on whether we will get the US contributions in time to match with the plans that we have at the moment,” Vago says.

Plenty of US players are eager to see a successful continued collaboration on Mars. The reengagement with overseas partners after years of “America First” diplomacy was a long time coming, says Charles Bolden, who served as the NASA administrator from 2009 to 2017. Despite the uncertainties surrounding the ExoMars project, its original intent to promote international cooperation through scientific exploration remains an inspiring one. As the world grapples with the challenges of the present, the quest to uncover the secrets of Mars and the potential for life beyond Earth serves as a powerful reminder of what humanity can achieve when working together toward a common goal.

“It’s a golden opportunity for us to work with the Europeans in this project,” Bolden says.

This March, the White House proposed $27.2 billion for NASA’s 2024 budget, with almost $950 million supporting the agency’s ongoing collaboration with ESA to bring samples from the previously launched Mars 2020 project back to Earth. The desired budget also allocated an unspecified amount “toward US collaboration with the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover mission.”

The Presidential Office Budget still needs to wend its way through a Congressional process of budgetary drafting, amendment, and approval. So for now the wait continues. “We’re encouraged by what we’ve seen [from the US], so hopefully we’ll see a commensurate amount of funds,” says Eric Ianson, Mars Exploration Program director at NASA. “We’re operating under the assumption right now that we will get the funding, so we’re continuing.”

But while that may be enough to save the mission, it won’t be enough to save every part of the nesting doll. “If anything, we’re cutting,” says Vago of the mission’s scientific instruments. “We are [now] interested in keeping things as simple as possible. We’re getting rid of anything that is not essential for the landing and for helping to deliver the rover to Mars.” With a drill capable of digging to depths of up to two meters, however, Rosalind Franklin’s main objective of subsurface sample extraction and analysis remains unchanged. She will plumb the Martian soil farther than any of her predecessors—anything else will be a bonus.

With ESA workers investing time and brainpower into facilitating the use of American equipment, each month without a US commitment intensifies the palpable anxiety of the team. In a way, the mission replicates the tensions surrounding the future of global space exploration and cooperation.

On a recent afternoon in March, a reminder of the dissolved partnerships sat at an unassuming gated factory on a windy industrial stretch south of the Alps in Turin, Italy. Inside lies a modified clean room where a mission control station overlooks a mock Martian landscape. The Russian landing platform sits abandoned in a corner. Once meant to provide its own package of instruments to monitor an alien environment, the glorified ramp now collects dust. 

Rosalind Franklin is stowed a few buildings away, in an over-pressurized room at the Thales Alenia Space facility. Along with her earthbound training twin Amalia, she’s undergoing regular maintenance and continued testing to stay prepared for a launch that should have happened last year. The hopes and setbacks for the mission are on display as scientists and engineers continue exercising the rover and its operators in the hopes of maintaining mission readiness. Meanwhile, they scramble to source batteries, plutonium, and booster engines that were meant to come from Russian collaborators. 

The mission’s chances will now be determined by NASA, which has both the engines and the plutonium necessary for the launch. So the ESA team’s work is never done—a nesting doll of collaborations that must be revisited, maintained, and renewed. 

“I’m reinvigorated by the fact that [EU] members have committed money on the table to see that the rover happens,” says Haldemann. He notes that for some, the mission has made up the bulk of their careers. Russia’s war in Ukraine shattered some of those dreams. “It’s bittersweet. It’s an emotional roller coaster for a lot of members of the team who were on the verge of launch.”

“It bothers everyone that the war happened,” Vago adds. “If I look at it in terms of the mission…the war has affected so many people, but it has also affected our colleagues who were working on these teams from the Russian and Ukrainian side.”

Until NASA officially commits to the mission, the ExoMars team has to muscle its way forward, as it has for many years. “If we had been able to pluck a ready-made lander off the shelf, we could have launched in 2024,” Vago says. “But no such luck.” In times of war, it’s important to be resourceful, pick the right allies, and survive.

Kenneth R. Rosen is an independent journalist based in Italy and the author of “Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs.”

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About 80 miles north-northwest of the Las Vegas strip, sits Groom Lake. The smooth, flat, dry lakebed is one of several across the Nevada desert, with more than a superficial similarity to Rogers Dry Lake, next to California’s Edwards Air Force Base. These spots in the desert, hospitable to people only with great effort, served as an ideal found resource for the United States in the 20th century. On lakebeds dry enough to land planes and far from the prying eyes of civilian life, the Air Force could test new and novel planes, with secrecy baked into the dusty earth around them. If Groom Lake sounds unfamiliar, that’s because it is also known by another name: Area 51.

For decades, the Air Force operations at Groom Lake and Area 51 were shrouded in deliberate secrecy. The base was established in 1955, but it would take until 1998 for the Air Force to acknowledge its existence. Previously, it has stated tersely: “Neither the Air Force nor the Department of Defense owns or operates any location known as ‘Area 51.’ There are a variety of activities, some of which are classified, throughout what is often called the Air Force’s Nellis Range Complex. There is an operation location near Groom Dry Lake. Specific activities and operations conducted on the Nellis Range, both past and present, remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.”

But even before that, Area 51 had already made multiple appearances in a major series of arcade games by Atari (released in 1995), as a major plot point in the 1996 blockbuster alien invasion movie Independence Day, and it remains a staple in fiction and conspiracy theories about secret extraterrestrial research. It’s second perhaps only to Roswell, New Mexico, in the imagination of people who believe the US government is covering up the existence of aliens. However, aside from its notorious reputation, Area 51 instead has a long history as the holder of far more mundane, terrestrial secrets. Keeping that aura of secrecy up was partly what allowed speculation as to the true nature of the facility to run wild. During this time, the Air Force and CIA were able to test spy planes in the open desert with some degree of privacy.

All that U-2 can’t leave behind

In the early 1950s, the United States Air Force, recently spun off as an independent wing from the Army, set out looking for a high-altitude, long-range, long-endurance spy plane. This was early in the Cold War, and previous attempts to surveil the Soviet Union with balloons had produced extremely limited success. A plane offered far more control, and the reasoning at the time was that a high-altitude plane could stay beyond the range of Soviet radar and missiles. 

This plane ultimately materialized in the form of the U-2, which is still in service today (though the history of its development saw it built on CIA funding instead of Air Force money). While looking for a place to test and develop the new plane, the early U-2 design team spied Nevada’s Groom Dry Lake from the air and landed on the lake bed, proving the inherent viability of the site. Eventually, a paved runway was built. The purchase of land was made by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the boundaries of Area 51 are adjacent to what would become the Nevada Test Site, where the US would detonate nuclear warheads first in open air, then underground.

“The outlines of Area 51 are shown on current unclassified maps as a small rectangular area adjoining the northeast corner of the much larger Nevada Test Site. To make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, [Lockheed engineer] Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch,” reads a CIA history of the U-2 program, written in 1998 and declassified in 2013.

[Related on PopSci+: A CIA spyplane crashed outside Area 51 a half-century ago. This explorer found it.]

Secrecy was baked into Area 51 from the start, though it became hard to completely disentangle spy plane flights from UFO sightings. In 1947, a flying saucer panic led to public reports and inquiries into unknown aircraft, which helped make a surveillance balloon crash outside Roswell, New Mexico an enduring story. Project Blue Book, an official inquiry by the Air Force into UFOs, collected reports of official sightings, most of which could be dismissed as natural phenomena. One category the Air Force could dismiss internally, but not acknowledge publicly until 1992, was the number of U-2 flights reported as UFOs.

Stealth technology, now a defining feature of jets like the F-22 and F-35 family, was developed and tested at Area 51. In 1977, the US Air Force Special Projects Office tested HAVE BLUE, a stealth demonstrator, at Area 51. The two versions of HAVE BLUE both suffered crashes in their testing, and the wrecked planes were buried in the desert. Before the crashes, enough information was gleaned such that development of other stealth aircraft could continue. The F-117, the first stealth fighter, would be first tested at Area 51, before moving to a different, larger base in Nevada that could accommodate a full squadron.

Beyond developing new technologies, Area 51 has played host to foreign aircraft, acquired at times from defectors, allowing the US military to see just what tech other countries were flying and fighting with. One such incident was the loan from Israel to the United States of a MiG-21 in 1968, flown by an Iraqi pilot who had defected. This let the US get a close look at the most widely produced jet fighter in history, and one that was at the time serving capably in the skies above Vietnam.

In March 1994, Popular Science published “Searching for the Secrets of Groom Lake,” a dive into the development and history of Area 51, spurred by an Air Force’s ultimately successful request to give the Department of the Air Force control over 4,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management-owned territory around the site. This was an effort in part to deter people on the ground from spying on their operations at a distance. That story featured both a 1968 aerial photograph of the site taken by the US Geological Survey, and a 1988 photo taken by a Russian spy satellite that was then made commercially available. 

In October 2006, “New Secrets of Area 51” by Popular Science looked at the kinds of drones and other aircraft that might have been in development at the site. Among these is a sort of white whale for secret plane waters: the Aurora, a long-theorized ramjet powered hypersonic craft.

What, no aliens?

While Groom Lake and Area 51 has hosted plenty of secrets, there’s nothing to suggest it hosts the secret technology most synonymous with the name from popular culture: anything to do with aliens. Some of those claims can be traced back to a 1989 broadcast on Las Vegas television station KLAS, in which a man named Bob Lazar appeared “claiming to be a physicist hired by the government to reverse-engineer the propulsion systems of saucer-shaped alien spacecraft.”

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At the Paris Air Show this week, French defense contractor Turgis and Gaillard unveiled a new large drone: the AAROK. With over 24 hours of promised flight time, the drone is being heralded as Europe’s first Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone. It’s a form of uncrewed aircraft that is attempting to fulfill a similar role as drones like the MQ-9 Reaper and other drones of the War on Terror. AAROK’s debut in Paris offers a chance to consider what role such a drone may have in the decades to come.

The AAROK weighs 5.5 tons, can cruise at speeds of up to 287 mph, and reach altitudes of 30,000 feet. It has a wingspan of 72 feet, longer than the 66 feet of the MQ-9 Reaper. The Reaper, famously used by the United States for surveillance and targeted strikes as part of the War on Terror, is a direct comparison point to the AAROK, and already in service with the French military. The AAROK can carry up to 6,000 pounds of payload, of which half can be weapons. As promised, the AAROK is slightly faster than the Reaper, although with a lower service ceiling at present.

“We are proud to introduce our first prototype of remotely piloted aircraft, the AAROK unmanned aerial vehicle. Produced in our French factories, this UAV will meet the requirements of French and allies forces at a reduced cost, both in purchase and use,” said Fanny Turgis, president of Turgis and Gaillard Group, in a release.

What made the Reaper such a good fit for how the Pentagon used it is the way it combined powerful cameras, multiple missiles, and the ability to watch an area for targets for hours, with remote pilots and crews switching control of the vehicle mid-flight. In counter-insurgency warfare, where combat was dictated by looking for and tracking cells of insurgents operating in remote bases or moving in cities, the Reaper’s abilities shone, giving commanders enough information where they could feel comfortable making a kill order. (These orders did not, always, find the right targets, though the missiles certainly found people on the ground below.) 

But the Reaper was built for a specific kind of environment, one where the drone could operate in the sky for long stretches without fear of being shot down by hostile aircraft, and at most only experience a minor risk from human-portable anti-air missiles. As the grinding conventional war in Ukraine has shown, while plane-sized drones can play some role in scouting and targeting, they struggle against dedicated anti-air defenses, and especially against hostile air forces.

This makes the AAROK a curious new entry into the familiar Reaper pattern, loaded with sensors and bristling with bombs and missiles. “AAROK stands out with its robust design, its ability to take off and land from rough fields and operate on all weathers conditions as well as its flight endurance (more than 24 hours) and maximized payload,” Turgis and Gaillard Group said in a release. In addition, the company emphasized the drone’s powerful camera, radar, and communications detection and transmission tools.

Turgis and Gaillard expect the AAROK to be useful for patrolling “Exclusive Economic Zones,” or swaths of ocean claimed by countries that typically extend beyond territorial waters. France has overseas territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans, where over 1.5 million French citizens live. The French embassy in Malaysia notes that 93 percent of France’s exclusive economic zone is located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

In addition to scouting and surveilling existing French claims to the ocean, Turgis and Gaillard pitch the AAROK as an important “asset for operational dominance (intelligence, reconnaissance, and support for high intensity strikes even in contested areas),” suggesting that the drone’s design is useful and durable enough to make it useful in the face of hostile defenses. It can also function as a communications node, with the drone operating as an airborne relay between forces over distance, ensuring commands and information get from headquarters to forces in the field. 

At present, the AAROK is a promise more than a reality, with Patrick Gaiilard, director general of the company, telling Breaking Defense that the prototype “was finished just a few weeks ago and hasn’t yet flown.”

Still, the idea is a compelling pitch for not just the French military but other countries France might sell weapons to, like partner states in Africa or NATO allies. The AAROK can perform much of the missions expected of a legacy drone like the Reaper, but is built on modern tech, with an understanding of modern threats baked in. Part of that understanding comes with cost: the AAROK is pitched as cheaper than other similar vehicles, which makes it both more accessible to smaller militaries, and also somewhat more expendable for militaries with means.

As the aircraft is still in the prototype stage, it remains to be seen how much of the promise can actually be delivered. But the promise itself is compelling, a drone capable of both counter-insurgency and anti-submarine operations, built to be used and lost if needed.

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Under a cloudy sky above Pula, Croatia, on April 21, drones took flight like high-tech clay pigeons. The quadcopters, launched against a coastal backdrop, were testing tools for US soldiers, hobbyist types of the kind that soldiers can now expect to encounter on battlefields. Learning to defeat these drones, and using specific tools for the task, was one goal of Exercise Shield, an air defense and electronic warfare exercise that ran from April 19 through April 21. As the drones flew, soldiers pointed blocky gun-shaped tools into the air, and sent the quadcopters back to the ground.

The tool used at Exercise Shield is the Dronebuster 3B, made by Flex Force. It comes in a tan-beige plastic reminiscent of computers from the early 1990s, with the pistol grip transforming it from an electronic novelty to an especially curious weapon.

“The Dronebuster Block 3, and Dronebuster Block 3B were designed to interrupt the control of the drone by overwhelming the control frequency,” reads the description from Flex Force. “This causes the drone to either stop and hover, or return to the operator, depending on the model of drone. The drone operator has no control of the drone while the command link is being overwhelmed with RF [Radio Frequency] energy.”

In other words, the gun can jam the drone to uselessness over radio frequency channels. Also, Dronebusters can overwhelm Global Navigation Satellite Systems, like GPS, though there are several others. That is important, as one of the main ways hobbyist drones can mitigate loss of control is by navigating to known home coordinates by GPS.

Hand-held drone jammers are relatively new for militaries, with many developed over the 2010s and the 2020s. They are one of the more straightforward attempts to meet the evolving threats on modern battlefields brought about by the abundance of cheap commercial drones in the hands of everyone from professional militaries to insurgent forces. Scouting and bombing aircraft used to at least be large enough to contain a pilot, making them a big target for missiles or guns, but small drones are orders of magnitude cheaper. Finding and stopping them means using everything from high powered microwaves to lasers to, like the Dronebusters, handheld jammers.

In June 2016, Popular Science reported on an exercise undertaken at West Point, where the Army Cyber Institute anticipated the coming preponderance of drones in war, and found a way to train cadets in their use and defeat. These cadets, all future officer candidates at the Army’s foremost military officer training school, traditionally have to engage in an “urban assault,” where a platoon of 40 or so cadets attack a compound defended by a squad of 10 or so underclassmen. 

This “urban” area was a half-dozen cinder block buildings in the woods in New York, and for the drone part of the exercise, the defenders (with an instructor operating the controls) would fly a commercial Parrot drone as a scout, letting them call in simulated artillery on their mock enemies. To stop it, the assaulting platoon could employ a specially set up jammer rifle, configured to knock out that specific Parrot drone.

While the 2016 West Point scenario involved a jammer set up to specifically defeat the drone fielded, the lessons are ones being applied broadly today. A small drone, like the Parrot or many others that can be bought off the shelf, is enough to direct artillery fire, to spy on troop movements, and to make life dangerous unless it is defeated. For soldiers on the ground, shooting it with bullets could be an option, but the drone overhead can see the bright flashes of a rifle muzzle, especially at night, revealing soldiers hoping to stay hidden. Taking out the drone with jamming, instead, makes it useless to the drone operators.

Ukraine has seen drones used at war since the start of the Donbas war in 2014, with quadcopters even used to drop bombs on trenches. Since the February 2022 invasion by Russia, what is really new is the scale of these drones used, with one British think tank estimating that as many as tens of thousands of commercial drones are lost in combat a month. While some losses are simply wear and tear or battery burn out, for people fighting below, stopping a drone as soon as it is found overhead can mean life or death. To that end, militaries will keep fielding and testing jammers soldiers can bring with them into combat. Especially ones that come in a familiar, gun-shaped package.

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On June 14, the US Army celebrated its 248th year as an institution. Timed in anticipation of that anniversary, the Army also announced the new name for its latest armored turreted military vehicle, initially known and developed with the name MPF, or Mobile Protected Firepower. But the MPF designation is no more; the vehicle is now the M10 Booker.

The Army prefers that the M10 Booker be referred to primarily as a “combat vehicle,” though “infantry assault vehicle” is also used. The vehicle, with a heavy gun and tank-like mobility, is less armored than a main battle tank like an M1 Abrams. It’s designed to go places the Abrams cannot, and to fight against enemy vehicles, defenses, and forces without needing the ultra heavy armor that bulk up battle tanks.

The name announcement took place at the National Museum of the US Army at Fort Belvoir, in Virginia. After a shroud was removed from the vehicle’s 105mm cannon, the barrel revealed the name Booker.

There are two people, both deceased, with the surname Booker who are specifically honored in the naming. The first is Robert D. Booker, a soldier who fought as part of the US Army in North Africa in 1943. Fighting against Axis forces, Robert Booker used his machine gun to defeat one machine gun nest, and then despite receiving fatal injuries, guided his squad as they advanced, actions for which he was awarded a posthumous medal of honor. 

The second person honored is Stevon A. Booker, who was among the tank crew leading the April 2003 assault on Baghdad. After the machine gun mounted on the tank failed, he lay prone on top of the tank and guided his unit to defeat anti-tank fire, continuing until he was fatally wounded, actions for which he was awarded a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross.

“The M10 Booker Combat Vehicle is named in [their] honor because it will accomplish what they both did – enabling squads to continue pushing forward through heavy machine-gun fire while protecting our most important weapon system: our Soldiers,” Army Chief of Staff General James McConville said at the Fort Belvoir celebration of the Army’s 248th birthday.

As designed, the vehicle’s mobility and firepower make it a useful tool for clearing uneven terrain, like the contested road to Baghdad or the fields of Tunisia, and then using a powerful gun to destroy fixed defenses and any defenders left crewing them.

“Our Soldiers will now have an infantry assault vehicle in a protected sense with decisive lethality to destroy the threats that took the lives of these two incredible Soldiers,” Doug Bush, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said in an Army release.

The two namesake Bookers died almost 60 years apart, fighting in wars under drastically different circumstances, technologies, and stakes. In the thick of combat, distinctions between the world-existential crisis of World War II or the war of choice that was Iraq fade away for those in the field. What the Army is designed to do is deliver soldiers to where they’re needed, with the tools on hand to win the day, and both Bookers died protecting their comrades-at-arms. 

This is work that can be done by a tank, but the Army is explicit that this is not a task that can fall to a light tank. Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems, told Task & Purpose, “The historic use of ‘light tank’ is to perform reconnaissance functions, and this is not a reconnaissance vehicle, it’s an assault gun. Historically, it’s not actually a mission match, even though it looks like, feels like, and smells like [a tank].” (Task & Purpose is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

The Army already had one mobile not-quite-tank with a high powered gun for similar purposes, the Stryker Mobile Gun System. That vehicle, armored and turreted but with eight wheels instead of treads, is one the Army is actively divesting from. The new M10 Booker will fill a similar role, in a body designed for the wars of the 21st century.

Some of those threats will feel familiar. Machine guns remain an efficient, durable, lethal tool for all militaries and insurgencies alike, and stopping one with force is a task well-suited to the M10 not-a-tank’s big gun. While the M10 is not light by any definition, its 42 tons is a significant drop down from the over 70 tons of the Abrams. That helps the M10s be delivered, two at a time, by C-17 cargo jets, making it armor that can follow infantry from a secured airfield. 

In total, the Army plans to acquire 504 of the M10 Bookers, priced at around $13 million apiece. While new counter-tank tools make armored assaults harder, and despite the military theorists who proclaimed the death of the tank in April 2022, the need for militaries to advance under fire persists. That makes tanks and tank-like vehicles a durable feature of modern armies, and while the Booker is named after medal awardees, the point of the machine is to win battles without needing such heroics. 

Correction on June 20, 2023: This article has been updated to change the word “metal” to “medal” in the final sentence.

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This post has been updated.

Earlier this year, NASA announced that it would be working with Boeing to create an aircraft with a dramatic new look, and it could be strutting down a runway in about five years. Called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, it has long, thin wings that are supported by trusses to give them the stability they need. Between those wings and other efficiency tweaks, the plane could be 30 percent more fuel efficient than similar-sized aircraft today, like the single-aisle Boeing 737 or Airbus A320, according to the aeronautics and space agency. 

This week, NASA said that the aircraft, which doesn’t yet exist, has received an X-plane designation from the Department of Defense. It’s now officially the X-66A, meaning that it’s an experimental research aircraft. NASA already has two ongoing X-plane programs, so the X-66A makes three of them. Here’s what to know about all three. 

The X-66A aircraft aims for fuel efficiency

The purpose of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator is baked into its name: to be as sustainable as it can be. While no aircraft that burns traditional fossil fuel can truly be thought of as sustainable, the goal is to make it as efficient as possible with the fuel it does consume. 

The aircraft will be the result of a collaboration between NASA and Boeing, and the agency stresses that one of the reasons they sought the X-plane designation from the Pentagon was to make the plane’s purpose apparent.

“We really wanted to make sure it was clear that this is a research airplane,” says Brent Cobleigh, the program manager for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. “We’re really trying to learn with this airplane—it’s not a prototype, it’s not a production airplane.”

Another reason for getting the X-name is to reflect the fact that the entire design of the aircraft is something new, as opposed to NASA testing out a smaller new technology on an existing aircraft design. 

“There’s a long history that goes along with the X-plane designation,” Cobleigh reflects. Projects that have carried that label have been “some of the most interesting and innovative airplane designs.” Take a look at a list of NASA X-planes here.

NASA had to apply to the Pentagon to receive that X label. The letters that are found in aircraft names imply something about that aircraft—the F in F-16 stands for fighter, and the B in B-21 is for bomber, and in this case, the X says something too. “It’s a research airplane,” Cobleigh says. “That’s what the X means.”

The plane’s most noticeable feature is its long, skinny trussed-braced wings, which are designed to create less drag as they move through the air while giving the plane the lift it needs to fly. That efficiency boost happens because a long wing can help mitigate the vortices you might sometimes notice forming at a plane’s wingtips. Those are “almost like a tornado coming off the wingtips—that’s a lot of energy created that doesn’t really do us much benefit,” Cobleigh says. The X-66A’s wings could weaken those. 

Another way it could be more fuel efficient comes from the engines. Because the wing on the X-66A will be higher off the ground than the wing on a plane like a 737, that means it could employ larger engines that don’t risk bumping their bottoms on the runway or inhaling debris. Colloquially known as jet engines, turbofan engines are at their most efficient when they can be large, so that they can have a high bypass ratio—when a great deal more air bypasses its core than goes through it. Or the fan that propels the air could possibly have no covering on it at all. 

The goal is to have the plane first fly in 2028, but it also makes sense to expect delays in programs like these.

The X-59 aircraft aims for quieter supersonic flight

If the X-66A’s first flight is at least five years away, the NASA X-plane most likely to fly this year is called the X-59. That plane, which NASA is creating with Lockheed Martin, exists to test a hypothesis: If an aircraft is designed the right way, could it fly faster than the speed of sound but do so quietly enough to not bother people below? 

Supersonic flight by civilian aircraft is not allowed over the United States because of the boom issue. Ideally, the X-59 could demonstrate that it’s possible for an aircraft to slice through the air faster than the speed of sound, but not create the powerful shock waves that lead to people hearing boom sounds. Here’s more on why supersonic flight creates sonic booms, and how the X-59 could change that.

A NASA spokesperson notes via email that the goal is still to get this bird airborne this year: “We are still targeting 2023 for the X-59’s first flight, and we’ll have a better idea of a date once we have completed some critical testing. We are currently gearing up for weight on wheels next and then moving to the flight line and planning to start ground vibration tests and structural coupling tests.”

The X-57 aircraft aims for electric flight 

The cleanest way for an aircraft to fly would be for it to produce no direct emissions whatsoever, and an electric plane can accomplish that. That is NASA’s target with the X-57. But batteries are heavy, and they are not as energy dense as fossil fuels are, meaning that an electric aircraft won’t have anywhere near the range their fuel-burning cousins have. The challenges of this new type of flight haven’t stopped companies from getting experimental electric flying machines airborne, though, with Beta Technologies repeatedly flying an electric aircraft, Joby Aviation doing the same and teaming up with Delta Air Lines, and Eviation flying the Alice aircraft for the first time last year, to name only three examples. (Another approach is to use hydrogen.)

But the X-57 Maxwell, NASA’s electric aircraft, has had technical issues to cope with. The agency had originally wanted for the plane to undergo several different design phases, or modifications, but now plans for it just have a simple design: one propeller, powered by electricity, on each wing. 

While the plan had held for NASA to get the plane in the sky in that configuration this year, a NASA spokesperson cast a shadow of doubt on that timeline in an email to PopSci: “We are working to overcome technical challenges associated with flight tests for this aircraft and are currently evaluating our schedule and budget to determine when first flight would occur. In the meantime, the X-57 project continues to produce knowledge that benefits the aviation industry, researchers, and regulators.”

Update on June 23, 2023: NASA has officially announced that the X-57 will not be flying.

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This post has been updated. It was originally published on June 12, 2023.

The most vulnerable part of a military truck is the driver. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), tasked with finding and incorporating new commercial technology into the military, has set a deadline of June 13 for ideas about how to roboticize the military’s existing fleet of transport trucks. These vehicles could one day include rides like the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, although at first the program will focus on another machine, the PLS.

Under a program called Ground Expeditionary Autonomy Retrofit System (GEARS), DIU wants vendors to prove that they can automate the driving of vehicles, with six converted a year after the contract is awarded and up to 50 or more vehicles converted within two and a half years of the contract.

“Initially, those vehicles would include palletized load systems (trucks) and could move to more multipurpose trucks like the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, also known as a Humvee) if shown to be successful,” a DIU spokesperson notes via email.

GEARS is the latest in what has been nearly two decades of effort by the Pentagon to solve an enduring problem from its recent wars. Deploying troops and equipment in a war zone, be it a whole country or even just a long front within one, means keeping people in places where supply infrastructure is limited, and that requires finding a way to resupply those soldiers. 

When there’s no threat of violence against cargo transport, military supply can mirror logistics in the domestic United States, where truck drivers bring gear as needed. When violence does threaten, as it does in both insurgency and conventional warfare, trucks face threats from ambushes, roadside bombs, or attacks from the sky in the form of missiles, artillery, or bombs. Robiticizing transport doesn’t remove that risk entirely, but it does mean that any vehicle that’s attacked results in just lost supplies and equipment, instead of killed or captured soldiers.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) has an existing fleet of military vehicles for its logistics operations. Today, however, these vehicles require human operators. In deployed situations, this creates unnecessary risk to service members’ lives and introduces limits to operational tactics,” reads the solicitation from DIU. “Human operators also have work-to-rest cycles, resulting in additional time constraints. In a fast-moving conflict, the ability to continuously move supplies from one hub to another will have significant impacts on the abilities to sustain operations while maintaining the safety of troops.”

[Related: The UK is upgrading military buggies into self-driving vehicles]

By replacing human drivers with uncrewed systems, the military can overcome the vulnerability of sending humans on milk runs, and such vehicles can push beyond the limits of humans who need to eat and sleep and rest. Continuous supply allows for cargo to be dispatched to where it is needed as soon as it is ready. 

Early in the US war in Iraq, getting supplies reliably and securely through the country meant deploying convoys, where several cargo trucks would carry guards and be escorted by other vehicles. While convoys allow supplies on the move to be protected, and take advantage of numbers to do so, they also present a juicy target. As the contours of fighting in Iraq changed over what’s now two decades of a US presence in the country, convoys persist as a target of opportunity for groups looking to harm or disrupt the US military in the country.

In 2004, DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, launched a grand challenge, offering a prize for teams that could make a vehicle autonomously navigate a course in the desert. The 2004 challenge ended in a total bust, but multiple vehicles completed the 2005 version, in a moment widely covered as the start of autonomous driving for both commercial and military needs. 

[Related: What the future holds for the Army’s venerable Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle]

With GEARS, DIU is looking to bring commercial tools and techniques back into the fold. To that end, the government is providing the vehicles to use as test beds for prototypes, consistent with the military’s existing cargo fleet and part of the Army’s Palletized Load System. In addition, the new add-on systems could eventually work with the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, or Humvees. By adapting these existing vehicles with new software and sensor hardware in what should be straightforward conversions, the Army can gain a new capability without requiring new advances in vehicle body to accommodate uncrewed operation.

“Solutions must have the ability to operate in environments inherent to military operations,” reads the solicitation. “Desired mission sets include, but are not limited to, convoy operations, waypoint navigation, and teleoperations. Solutions should be built to open architecture standards and be capable of integrating new hardware, software, and features as they become available.”

However the teams get there, the goal is to have vehicles that can run without the need for a human in the driver’s seat, or at least, move the human to a remote seat and have them drive from there. By removing the human operator from the road vehicle, the supply truck becomes essentially a reusable package for goods, instead of a prime military target. Goods may still be lost in attacks, though reliably remote navigation will let the military know when and where such attacks occurred.

In the meantime, the military can supply its bases less like caravans under attack, and more as nodes in a big transportation network.

This story was updated to include clarifications and a statement from the DIU about what types of vehicles will be retrofitted and in what order.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

VLADIMIR PLETSER stands in front of an eclectic audience—a group of people attending the Analog Astronaut Conference in Arizona. Analog astronauts are folks who simulate the lives of spacefarers, for science, while remaining on Earth. For days or weeks or months, they inhabit and experiment in facilities that mimic cosmic conditions, living as quasi-astronauts. Sometimes those facilities are settlements in the Utah desert that look like the Red Planet, such as the Mars Desert Research Station, run by the nonprofit Mars Society; others are mocked-up astro-habitats inside NASA centers, like the Human Exploration Research Analog at Johnson Space Center. 

But Pletser, on this Saturday in May, is here to discuss a new analog facility courtesy of Blue Abyss, a company where he serves as space operations training director. That’s an appropriate position, as he’s managed microgravity research for the European Space Agency, he’s worked in support of China’s space station, and he is an astronaut candidate for Belgium.

Blue Abyss, a company focused on enabling research, training, and testing in extreme environments, is planning to build the second-deepest pools in the world. (The deepest pool is in Dubai, built for recreation and filming.) The proposed bodies of water will be 160 feet deep and about 130 to 160 feet wide. They’ll be the largest pools in the world by volume. Giant bodies of water like these will be useful to astronauts who want to practice in an environment analogous to space—an oxygen-deprived place with neutral buoyancy. They’re also of interest to deep-sea divers and people in the offshore energy sector. Then there are operators in the defense industry who find themselves in the ocean for tasks like reconnaissance, search and rescue, and mine hunting. Blue Abyss aims to serve them all.

Diving in 

The pools will be built in Cornwall, England, and Brook Park, Ohio, near Cleveland, if all goes according to plan. And they won’t just be super-size swimming holes. They will have multiple underwater levels for research and provide enough room for big instruments and vehicles to enter the buildings and the water. 

“We envisage that the size and flexibility of our pools will enable some of the more complex planetary [extravehicular activity] that will be undertaken in the future on the moon and Mars to be practiced here on Earth, something that is still quite difficult to conduct in the neutral buoyancy pools that exist today, which weren’t developed with this in mind,” says John Vickers, Blue Abyss’ CEO. The facility will also be able to mimic the tides and currents of the real world and the varied lighting conditions people might find in the ocean or outer space. Specific chambers will simulate the pressure found at depths of up to thousands of meters. 

While Blue Abyss’ plans for facilities are not limited to big pools, they will be the centerpieces. Pools like these are not a totally unique idea in the astronaut world; NASA has a similar aqueous facility, called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, in Houston—but it goes down only 40 feet. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, hosts its own Hydro Lab, of similar depth. China’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility in Beijing and the European Space Agency’s in Germany both dip down 33 feet. Blue Abyss’ pools will be bigger, and perhaps better able to accommodate the needs of future astronauts, who will likely be doing complex missions outside their spacecraft. 

Analog oceans aren’t exactly a new idea in the defense sector either; the US Navy, for instance, has an “indoor ocean” in Maryland, called the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin. It is 35 feet deep at its lowest point and is used to test scale models of subs. But existing facilities weren’t necessarily made for the seagoing vehicles of today, which are often autonomous, drone-like, or both.

Water worlds 

If they succeed, Blue Abyss’ projects will provide access via the private sector to the same types of facilities that are today, in some cases, run by governments. The pools will be for humans (be they space explorers or divers or small-craft conductors) and robots (be they remotely operated vehicles or autonomous underwater vehicles). “Centers will provide training, certification, and technology demonstration, ensuring that divers, operators, and other underwater professionals have the skills and knowledge to operate safely and effectively in challenging circumstances,” says Vickers.

Or at least, that’s the idea. “We’re still in the phase of trying to find funding,” Pletser tells those at the conference. “So the project that we have in England, in Cornwall, is going much slower than the one that we have here in the States.”

The Cleveland area—an aerospace hub—has been supportive of the venture, says Vickers, but the company has had a harder time in its home territory of England, the original proposed site. “Brexit, the pandemic, and a lack of sufficient vision within parts of government have meant that what should have been the world’s first site may now come second,” he says.

It likely isn’t the interest of the analog astronauts gathered to hear Pletser speak that makes the general idea feasible, regardless of what country the pools are constructed in. After all, the world doesn’t have that many astronauts to train. 

But Blue Abyss is hoping to attract a much larger potential pool of people, and of money, from other contexts. Those in the offshore energy sector could practice working with cables and pipes, inspecting the foundations of wind turbines, and checking out vessels—without the serious dangers that come with conducting operations in the open ocean, where unpredictable currents, sea creatures, and other X factors can provide potentially deadly complications. Divers could train regardless of the weather. Scientists could test undersea research tools before sending them into an actual oceanic abyss. And makers of submersibles could test their craft and practice tricky maneuvers in a controlled environment. “So we not only address the space sector, but also the marine sector,” says Pletser. 

Importantly, that marine sector includes the defense field, where contractors help navies and coast guards make sense of the ocean’s mysteries.

Wet work 

One contractor that does such military work is General Dynamics. “We have a number of programs of record with the US Navy,” says Michael Guay, director for autonomous undersea systems. (A subsidiary, General Dynamics Electric Boat, makes nuclear subs for the Navy.) One of General Dynamics’ programs, Knifefish, has created a vehicle that can detect, classify, and identify mines placed underwater. Similar autonomous vehicles are also useful to the military for surveillance, reconnaissance, and even anti-submarine warfare.

Autonomous vehicles can also do hydrographic surveys. Such vehicles, which use sensors to measure aspects of the water like turbidity, salinity, and fluorescence, are useful for exploring for new oil and gas drilling sites and doing scientific assessments of the oceanic environment. 

General Dynamics has its own “full-ocean-depth-simulating pressure test tank,” says Guay, and its tanks can test full vehicles or just their parts. One of its facilities is in Quincy, Massachusetts, “So we have rapid access to Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay,” he says. 

Another company, called SEAmagine, sells small submarines and submersible boats—specifically those that require human drivers, which has been going out of fashion. “We didn’t believe that we were going to know our oceans by simply putting cameras and robots in the water,” says Charles Kohnen, SEAMagine’s co-founder. “Somehow the human element has to remain for us to understand.”

Today, SEAmagine, based in California, offers its craft to tourists, scientific researchers, yacht operators, and the defense sector. Its manned marine craft are specifically of interest to coast guards, which use them for search and rescue. Argentina’s, for instance, uses a SEAmagine vehicle to recover bodies from the ultra-deep water in the mountainous country. “They have these lakes that are 500 meters deep in the Andes,” says Kohnen. “And they’re very full of tourists because it’s beautiful. There’s a lot of tourists, and then lots of accidents.” These diminutive subs can ride on trailers on highways and be backed into the water like regular boats—not the case for your typical submersible.

But before either company does any of that fieldwork, its vehicles have to undergo rigorous testing. “The first, most important part of testing before you go in the ocean is going to be the pressure testing of the hull,” says Kohnen. 

That happens in pressure chambers, like the ones Blue Abyss’ facilities will include. “There aren’t that many in the world that are large enough and deep enough,” says Kohnen. Today, SEAmagine uses a variety of different chambers in the US to test its hulls and other components, but Kohnen says there’s room for more. “I’d like to see more testing facilities that can do the under-pressure testing,” he says. “As you build more of a blue economy for all these marine industries, the world could use some more labs.”

Blue Abyss hopes its facilities will be useful in certifying early-stage technology—the kind of tech that companies may not want to experiment with in the actual sea—validating and demonstrating sensors and components and autonomous capabilities at work in their relevant environments. That way, they can know that the technology either works or needs a tweak, and then they can demonstrate to agencies or customers that the parts and systems are ready. 

And analog astronauts may be eager to take the plunge, too.

Read more PopSci+ stories. 

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On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

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On May 9, under partly cloudy skies at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military invited an autonomous driving and flying robot to roll into a hangar and deliver a package. The machine, half of Elroy Air’s Chaparral delivery drone, was all exposed wires and metal brackets on four tall stands, and is a testbed for their autonomous driving program. With the demonstration, the Air Force got one step closer to adapting a useful cargo drone for military resupply missions, all without further strain on human pilots.

The Chaparral is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, with a large fixed wing, propellers for vertical thrust, and rotors that can provide vertical lift, enabling it to operate from small landing pads. None of that was present in the demonstration at Travis AFB, which was part of the Golden Phoenix Exercise. Instead, the ground autonomy system was mounted on a freestanding rig, with motors and wheels and sensors to steer around any obstacles it might encounter on a runway. Beneath it, and central to the Chaparral’s function, was a detachable cargo pod.

“One of the things that we showed at the event was our robotic ground tester, what we call ground bot. That demonstrated our autonomous taxing capability as well as our cargo pod pickup and drop off, and our cargo handling capabilities that we would use on the Chaparral,” says Amisah Prakash, director of customer programs at Elroy Air.

Autonomy for delivery on the ground is an important part of the overall vision for the drone, as it keeps the burden on human operators low while ensuring that the goods carried can get where they need to be. A runway is a complex environment, with planes and people and other vehicles moving around, to say nothing of the possibility of animals interloping on some of the more remote environments the drone is expected to operate. Getting the goods from point A to point B without incident is especially important when a runway collision might involve cargo that explodes.

“One of the use cases that we’ve been talking a lot with the Air Force on is logistics resupply types of missions, like, bringing cargo back and forth from different locations, whether that is fuel or munitions, anything that is needed for the ground troops to be able to do what they need to do,” says Prakash.

While shipping munitions is a more uniquely military mission, the Chaparral is intended as a truly dual-use aircraft, with an eye towards the commercial cargo market. As Popular Science reported last year, FedEx was interested in the plane, specifically taking advantage of the cargo pod’s 300-to-500-pound capacity, or about half the weight of what a typical delivery truck can carry. The drone will be able to deliver this at a range of up to 300 miles, and do so while flying faster than 100 mph.

If the comparison point for ground transport is a delivery truck, for remote delivery to small military bases a good point of comparison is a helicopter. During the US war in Afghanistan, both crewed and autonomous helicopters would deliver supplies to forward operating bases, austere outposts located where the fighting was and far from regular access to supplies. 

Imagine, says Clint Cope, chief product officer and co-founder for Elroy Air, that a mission commander is trying to send supplies somewhere, and triaging what is the most important use for an aircraft. “That decision-making gets a lot simpler when you can send a cheaper, in some ways expendable air asset, when you’re using an uncrewed system,” he says.

Cope offers as a comparison point a single helicopter making one supply run with 5,000 pounds of cargo. If that helicopter is shot down, it’s all lost in one go, and in order to make the mission, that full 5,000 pounds of load has to be assembled before any of it can go out for delivery. “You can go and load up a Chaparral [drone] and send a much smaller, almost right-sized amount of supplies where they’re needed and be able to have that much more rapid turnaround,” says Cope. 

In that way, using the drones changes resupply from fewer, higher-stakes missions, to more of managing a logistics flow through drones.

The Chaparral runs on jet fuel, like much of the Air Force, and has a generator to power its electric motors. It still needs human refueling, but the drone’s design, especially the pivot on its wing, is made so it can be transported inside larger cargo aircraft, like a C-130 or C-5, and flown from almost anywhere. 

While autonomous driving is useful for getting between the runway and the hangar, the loading ramp of a cargo plane is not a place to risk automated driving.

“We demonstrated how you can manually remote control the vehicle as well,” says Matt Michini, director of robotics at Elroy Air. “So if somebody on the ground wants to taxi it into a hangar or they want to move it to move it outta the way so that a plane can drive by or something, we want it to demonstrate how that’s possible as well without too much rigamarole.”

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On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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Navy SEALs have a well-earned reputation as an amphibious force. The special operations teams, whose acronym derives from “Sea, Air and Land,” are trained to operate from a range of vehicles, departing as needed to carry out missions through water, in the sky, or on the ground. When deploying covertly in the ocean, SEALs have for decades taken the SEAL Delivery Vehicle, a flooded transport in which the crew ride submerged and immersed in ocean water.  Now, Special Operations Command says the new enclosed submarine—in other words, it’s dry inside—should be ready for operation before the end of May.

This new submarine, in contrast to the open-water SEAL Delivery Vehicle, is called the Dry Combat Submersible. It’s been in the works since at least 2016, and was designed as a replacement for a previous enclosed transport submarine, the Advanced SEAL Delivery System. This previous advanced sub, developed in the early 2000s, was canceled after a prototype caught fire in 2008. That, compounded by cost overruns in the program, halted development on the undersea vehicle. It also came at a time when SEALs were operating largely on land and through the air, as part of the increased operational tempo of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. 

But now, it appears to be full-steam ahead for the Dry Combat Submersible. The news was confirmed at the SOF [Special Operations Forces] Week conference in Tampa, Florida, which ran from May 8 through 11. The convention is a place for Special Operations Forces from across the military to talk shop, meet with vendors selling new and familiar tools, and gather as a chattering class of silent professionals. It is also, like the Army, Navy, and Air Force association conventions, a place for the military to announce news directly relevant to those communities.

“This morning we received an operational test report. So that means the Dry Combat Submersible is going to be operational by Memorial Day, and we’re coming to an end scenario,” John Conway, undersea program manager at SOCOM’s program executive office-maritime, said on May 10, as reported by National Defense Magazine.

The flooded submersible in use today allows four SEALs and two drivers, clad in wetsuits, to travel undetected under the surface of the water several miles. With just the driver and navigator, the craft can traverse 36 nautical miles at 4 knots, a journey taking nine hours. With the four SEALs, the distance is limited, not just by the weight of passengers and their gear, but by the conditions of the submersible itself.

“Because the SEALs are exposed to the environment water temperature can be a more limiting factor than battery capacity,” wrote Christopher J. Kelly, in a 1998 study of the submarine in joint operations.

When Lockheed Martin announced in 2016 that it would be manufacturing Dry Combat Submersibles, it offered no specifics on the vehicle other than that it would weigh more than 30 tons and be capable of launch from surface ships. (The current SEAL Delivery Vehicle is launched from larger submarines.) The Dry Combat Submersible, at announcement, promised “longer endurance and operate at greater depths than swimmer delivery vehicles (SDV) in use,” the ability to travel long distances underwater, and an overall setup that “allows the personnel to get closer to their destination before they enter the water, and be more effective upon arrival.”

Concept art for the vehicle showed a passenger capacity of at least nine, though it would still be a fairly compact ride. The S351 Nemesis, made by MSubs, who has partnered with Lockheed Martin on this project, and is the likely basis for the Dry Combat Submersible. As listed, the Nemesis has a capacity for eight passengers and one pilot. The nemesis can travel as far as 66 nautical miles, and do so at a speed of 5 knots, or make the journey in 13 hours. 

Once in the Navy’s hands, the new submersible will ensure better starts to operations for SEALs, who can arrive at missions having only briefly donned wetsuits, instead of dealing with the fullness of the ocean for hours.

As the Pentagon shifts focus from terrestrial counter-insurgencies to the possibility of major power war, especially in and over the islands of the Pacific, the Dry Combat Submersible will expand how its SEALs can operate. It’s a lot of effort for a relatively small part of the overall military, but the precise application of specialized forces can have an outsized impact on the course of subsequent operations, from harbor clearing to covert action behind fortified lines. 

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This story was first published on June 3, 2013. It covered the most up-to-date technology in bomb detection at the time, with a focus on research based off canine olfaction. Today, dogs still hold an edge to chemical sensors with their noses: They’ve even been trained to sniff out bed bugs, the coronavirus, and homemade explosives like HMTDs.

IT’S CHRISTMAS SEASON at the Quintard Mall in Oxford, Alabama, and were it not a weekday morning, the tiled halls would be thronged with shoppers, and I’d probably feel much weirder walking past Victoria’s Secret with TNT in my pants. The explosive is harmless in its current form—powdered and sealed inside a pair of four-ounce nylon pouches tucked into the back pockets of my jeans—but it’s volatile enough to do its job, which is to attract the interest of a homeland defender in training by the name of Suge.

Suge is an adolescent black Labrador retriever in an orange DO NOT PET vest. He is currently a pupil at Auburn University’s Canine Detection Research Institute and comes to the mall once a week to practice for his future job: protecting America from terrorists by sniffing the air with extreme prejudice.

Olfaction is a canine’s primary sense. It is to him what vision is to a human, the chief input for data. For more than a year, the trainers at Auburn have honed that sense in Suge to detect something very explicit and menacing: molecules that indicate the presence of an explosive, such as the one I’m carrying.

The TNT powder has no discernible scent to me, but to Suge it has a very distinct chemical signature. He can detect that signature almost instantly, even in an environment crowded with thousands of other scents. Auburn has been turning out the world’s most highly tuned detection dogs for nearly 15 years, but Suge is part of the school’s newest and most elite program. He is a Vapor Wake dog, trained to operate in crowded public spaces, continuously assessing the invisible vapor trails human bodies leave in their wake.

Unlike traditional bomb-sniffing dogs, which are brought to a specific target—say, a car trunk or a suspicious package—the Vapor Wake dog is meant to foil a particularly nasty kind of bomb, one carried into a high traffic area by a human, perhaps even a suicidal one. In busy locations, searching individuals is logistically impossible, and fixating on specific suspects would be a waste of time. Instead, a Vapor Wake dog targets the ambient air.

As the bombing at the Boston marathon made clear, we need dogs—and their noses. As I approach the mall’s central courtyard, where its two wings of chain stores intersect, Suge is pacing back and forth at the end of a lead, nose in the air. At first, I walk toward him and then swing wide to feign interest in a table covered with crystal curios. When Suge isn’t looking, I walk past him at a distance of about 10 feet, making sure to hug the entrance of Bath & Body Works, conveniently the most odoriferous store in the entire mall. Within seconds, I hear the clattering of the dog’s toenails on the hard tile floor behind me.

As Suge struggles at the end of his lead (once he’s better trained, he’ll alert his handler to threats in a less obvious manner), I reach into my jacket and pull out a well-chewed ball on a rope—his reward for a job well done—and toss it over my shoulder. Christmas shoppers giggle at the sight of a black Lab chasing a ball around a mall courtyard, oblivious that had I been an actual terrorist, he would have just saved their lives.

That Suge can detect a small amount of TNT at a distance of 10 feet in a crowded mall in front of a shop filled with scented soaps, lotions, and perfumes is an extraordinary demonstration of the canine’s olfactory ability. But what if, as a terrorist, I’d spotted Suge from a distance and changed my path to avoid him? And what if I’d chosen to visit one of the thousands of malls, train stations, and subway platforms that don’t have Vapor Wake dogs on patrol?

Dogs may be the most refined scent-detection devices humans have, a technology in development for 10,000 years or more, but they’re hardly perfect. Graduates of Auburn’s program can cost upwards of $30,000. They require hundreds of hours of training starting at birth. There are only so many trainers and a limited supply of purebred dogs with the right qualities for detection work. Auburn trains no more than a couple of hundred a year, meaning there will always be many fewer dogs than there are malls or military units. Also, dogs are sentient creatures. Like us, they get sleepy; they get scared; they die. Sometimes they make mistakes.

As the tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon made all too clear, explosives remain an ever-present danger, and law enforcement and military personnel need dogs—and their noses—to combat them. But it also made clear that security forces need something in addition to canines, something reliable, mass-producible, and easily positioned in a multitude of locations. In other words, they need an artificial nose.

IN 1997, DARPA created a program to develop just such a device, targeted specifically to land mines. No group was more aware than the Pentagon of the pervasive and existential threat that explosives represent to troops in the field, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that the need for bomb detection extended beyond the battlefield. In 1988, a group of terrorists brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. In 1993, Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil drove a Ryder truck full of explosives into the underground garage at the World Trade Center in New York, nearly bringing down one tower. And in 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated another Ryder truck full of explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. The “Dog’s Nose Program,” as it was called, was deemed a national security priority.

Over the course of three years, scientists in the program made the first genuine headway in developing a device that could “sniff” explosives in ambient air rather than test for them directly. In particular, an MIT chemist named Timothy Swager honed in on the idea of using fluorescent polymers that, when bound to molecules given off by TNT, would turn off, signaling the presence of the chemical. The idea eventually developed into a handheld device called Fido, which is still widely used today in the hunt for IEDs (many of which contain TNT). But that’s where progress stalled.

Olfaction, in the most reductive sense, is chemical detection. In animals, molecules bind to receptors that trigger a signal that’s sent to the brain for interpretation. In machines, scientists typically use mass spectrometry in lieu of receptors and neurons. Most scents, explosives included, are created from a specific combination of molecules. To reproduce a dog’s nose, scientists need to detect minute quantities of those molecules and identify the threatening combinations. TNT was relatively easy. It has a high vapor pressure, meaning it releases abundant molecules into the air. That’s why Fido works. Most other common explosives, notably RDX (the primary component of C-4) and PETN (in plastic explosives such as Semtex), have very low vapor pressures—parts per trillion at equilibrium and once they’re loose in the air perhaps even parts per quadrillion.

The machine “sniffed” just as a dog would and identified the explosive molecules. “That was just beyond the capabilities of any instrumentation until very recently,” says David Atkinson, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. A gregarious, slightly bearish man with a thick goatee, Atkinson is the co-founder and “perpetual co-chair” of the annual Workshop on Trace Explosives Detection. In 1988, he was a PhD candidate at Washington State University when Pan Am Flight 103 went down. “That was the turning point,” he says. “I’ve spent the last 20 years helping to keep explosives off airplanes.” He might at last be on the verge of a solution.

When I visit him in mid-January, Atkinson beckons me into a cluttered lab with a view of the Columbia River. At certain times of the year, he says he can see eagles swooping in to poach salmon as they spawn. “We’re going to show you the device we think can get rid of dogs,” he says jokingly and points to an ungainly, photocopier–size machine with a long copper snout in a corner of the lab; wires run haphazardly from various parts.

Last fall, Atkinson and two colleagues did something tremendous: They proved, for the first time, that a machine could perform direct vapor detection of two common explosives—RDX and PETN—under ambient conditions. In other words, the machine “sniffed” the vapor as a dog would, from the air, and identified the explosive molecules without first heating or concentrating the sample, as currently deployed chemical-detection machines (for instance, the various trace-detection machines at airport security checkpoints) must. In one shot, Atkinson opened a door to the direct detection of the world’s most nefarious explosives.

As Atkinson explains the details of his machine, senior scientist Robert Ewing, a trim man in black jeans and a speckled gray shirt that exactly matches his salt-and-pepper hair, prepares a demonstration. Ewing grabs a glass slide soiled with RDX, an explosive that even in equilibrium has a vapor pressure of just five parts per trillion. This particular sample, he says, is more than a year old and just sits out on the counter exposed; the point being that it’s weak. Ewing raises this sample to the snout end of a copper pipe about an inch in diameter. That pipe delivers the air to an ionization source, which selectively pairs explosive compounds with charged particles, and then on to a commercial mass spectrometer about the size of a small copy machine. No piece of the machine is especially complicated; for the most part, Atkinson and Ewing built it with off-the-shelf parts.

Ewing allows the machine to sniff the RDX sample and then points to a computer monitor where a line graph that looks like an EKG shows what is being smelled. Within seconds, the graph spikes. Ewing repeats the experiment with C-4 and then again with Semtex. Each time, the machine senses the explosive.

A commercial version of Atkinson’s machine could have enormous implications for public safety, but to get the technology from the lab to the field will require overcoming a few hurdles. As it stands, the machine recognizes only a handful of explosives (at least nine as of April), although both Ewing and Atkinson are confident that they can work out the chemistry to detect others if they get the funding. Also, Atkinson will need to shrink it to a practical size. The current smallest version of a high-performance mass spectrometer is about the size of a laser printer—too big for police or soldiers to carry in the field. Scientists have not yet found a way to shrink the device’s vacuum pump. DARPA, Atkinson says, has funded a project to dramatically reduce the size of vacuum pumps, but it’s unclear if the work can be applied to mass spectrometry.

If Atkinson can reduce the footprint of his machine, even marginally, and refine his design, he imagines plenty of very useful applications. For instance, a version affixed to the millimeter wave booths now common at American airports (the ones that require passengers to stand with their hands in the air—also invented at PNNL, by the way) could use a tube to sniff air and deliver it to a mass spectrometer. Soldiers could also mount one to a Humvee or an autonomous vehicle that could drive up and sniff suspicious piles of rubble in situations too perilous for a human or dog. If Atkinson could reach backpack size or smaller, he may even be able to get portable versions into the hands of those who need them most: the marines on patrol in Afghanistan, the Amtrak cops guarding America’s rail stations, or the officers watching over a parade or road race.

Atkinson is not alone in his quest for a better nose. A research group at MIT is studying the use of carbon nanotubes lined with peptides extracted from bee venom that bind to certain explosive molecules. And at the French-German Research Institute in France, researcher Denis Spitzer is experimenting with a chemical detector made from micro-electromechanical machines (MEMs) and modeled on the antennae of a male silkworm moth, which are sensitive enough to detect a single molecule of female pheromone in the air.

Atkinson may have been first to demonstrate extremely sensitive chemical detection—and that research is all but guaranteed to strengthen terror defense—but he and other scientists still have a long way to go before they approach the sophistication of a dog nose. One challenge is to develop a sniffing mechanism. “With any electronic nose, you have to get the odorant into the detector,” says Mark Fisher, a senior scientist at Flir Systems, the company that holds the patent for Fido, the IED detector. Every sniff a dog takes, it processes about half a liter of air, and a dog sniffs up to 10 times per second. Fido processes fewer than 100 milliliters per minute, and Atkinson’s machine sniffs a maximum of 20 liters per minute.

Another much greater challenge, perhaps even insurmountable, is to master the mechanisms of smell itself.

OLFACTION IS THE OLDEST of the sensory systems and also the least understood. It is complicated and ancient, sometimes called the primal sense because it dates back to the origin of life itself. The single-celled organisms that first floated in the primordial soup would have had a chemical detection system in order to locate food and avoid danger. In humans, it’s the only sense with its own dedicated processing station in the brain—the olfactory bulb—and also the only one that doesn’t transmit its data directly to the higher brain. Instead, the electrical impulses triggered when odorant molecules bind with olfactory receptors route first through the limbic system, home of emotion and memory. This is why smell is so likely to trigger nostalgia or, in the case of those suffering from PTSD, paralyzing fear.

All mammals share the same basic system, although there is great variance in sensitivity between species. Those that use smell as the primary survival sense, in particular rodents and dogs, are orders of magnitude better than humans at identifying scents. Architecture has a lot to do with that. Dogs are lower to the ground, where molecules tend to land and linger. They also sniff much more frequently and in a completely different way (by first exhaling to clear distracting scents from around a target and then inhaling), drawing more molecules to their much larger array of olfactory receptors. Good scent dogs have 10 times as many receptors as humans, and 35 percent of the canine brain is devoted to smell, compared with just 5 percent in humans.

Unlike hearing and vision, both of which have been fairly well understood since the 19th century, scientists first explained smell only 50 years ago. “In terms of the physiological mechanisms of how the system works, that really started only a few decades ago,” says Richard Doty, director of the Smell and Taste Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “And the more people learn, the more complicated it gets.”

Whereas Atkinson’s vapor detector identifies a few specific chemicals using mass spectrometry, animal systems can identify thousands of scents that are, for whatever reason, important to their survival. When molecules find their way into a nose, they bind with olfactory receptors that dangle like upside-down flowers from a sheet of brain tissue known as the olfactory epithelium. Once a set of molecules links to particular receptors, an electrical signal is sent through axons into the olfactory bulb and then through the limbic system and into the cortex, where the brain assimilates that information and says, “Yum, delicious coffee is nearby.”

While dogs are fluent in the mysterious language of smell, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.As is the case with explosives, most smells are compounds of chemicals (only a very few are pure; for instance, vanilla is only vanillin), meaning that the system must pick up all those molecules together and recognize the particular combination as gasoline, say, and not diesel or kerosene. Doty explains the system as a kind of code, and he says, “The code for a particular odor is some combination of the proteins that get activated.” To create a machine that parses odors as well as dogs, science has to unlock the chemical codes and program artificial receptors to alert for multiple odors as well as combinations.

In some ways, Atkinson’s machine is the first step in this process. He’s unlocked the codes for a few critical explosives and has built a device sensitive enough to detect them, simply by sniffing the air. But he has not had the benefit of many thousands of years of bioengineering. Canine olfaction, Doty says, is sophisticated in ways that humans can barely imagine. For instance, humans don’t dream in smells, he says, but dogs might. “They may have the ability to conceptualize smells,” he says, meaning that instead of visualizing an idea in their mind’s eye, they might smell it.

Animals can also convey metadata with scent. When a dog smells a telephone pole, he’s reading a bulletin board of information: which dogs have passed by, which ones are in heat, etc. Dogs can also sense pheromones in other species. The old adage is that they can smell fear, but scientists have proved that they can smell other things, like cancer or diabetes. Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, says that a “mouse sniffing another mouse can obtain much more information about that mouse than you or I could by looking at someone.”

If breaking chemical codes is simple spelling, deciphering this sort of metadata is grammar and syntax. And while dogs are fluent in this mysterious language, scientists are only now learning the ABC’s.

THERE ARE FEW people who better appreciate the complexities of smell than Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist and the associate director of Auburn’s Canine Research Detection Institute. He has been hacking the dog’s nose for more than 20 years.

“By the time you leave, you won’t look at a dog the same way again,” he says, walking me down a hall where military intelligence trainees were once taught to administer polygraphs and out a door and past some pens where new puppies spend their days. The CRDI occupies part of a former Army base in the Appalachian foothills and breeds and trains between 100 and 200 dogs—mostly Labrador retrievers, but also Belgian Malinois, German shepherds, and German shorthaired pointers—a year for Amtrak, the Department of Homeland Security, police departments across the US, and the military. Training begins in the first weeks of life, and Waggoner points out that the floor of the puppy corrals is made from a shiny tile meant to mimic the slick surfaces they will encounter at malls, airports, and sporting arenas. Once weaned, the puppies go to prisons in Florida and Georgia, where they get socialized among prisoners in a loud, busy, and unpredictable environment. And then they come home to Waggoner.

What Waggoner has done over tens of thousands of hours of careful study is begin to quantify a dog’s olfactory abilities. For instance, how small a sample dogs can detect (parts per trillion, at least); how many different types of scents they can detect (within a certain subset, explosives for instance, there seems to be no limit, and a new odor can be learned in hours); whether training a dog on multiple odors degrades its overall detection accuracy (typically, no); and how certain factors like temperature and fatigue affect performance.

The idea that the dog is a static technology just waiting to be obviated really bothers Waggoner, because he feels like he’s innovating every bit as much as Atkinson and the other lab scientists. “We’re still learning how to select, breed, and get a better dog to start with—then how to better train it and, perhaps most importantly, how to train the people who operate those dogs.”

Waggoner even taught his dogs to climb into an MRI machine and endure the noise and tedium of a scan. If he can identify exactly which neurons are firing in the presence of specific chemicals and develop a system to convey that information to trainers, he says it could go a long way toward eliminating false alarms. And if he could get even more specific—whether, say, RDX fires different cells than PETN—that information might inform more targeted responses from bomb squads.

After a full day of watching trainers demonstrate the multitudinous abilities of CRDI’s dogs, Waggoner leads me back to his sparsely furnished office and clicks a video file on his computer. It was from a lecture he’d given at an explosives conference, and it featured Major, a yellow lab wearing what looked like a shrunken version of the Google Street View car array on its back. Waggoner calls this experiment Autonomous Canine Navigation. Working with preloaded maps, a computer delivered specific directions to the dog. By transmitting beeps that indicated left, right, and back, it helped Major navigate an abandoned “town” used for urban warfare training. From a laptop, Waggoner could monitor the dog’s position using both cameras and a GPS dot, while tracking its sniff rate. When the dog signaled the presence of explosives, the laptop flashed an alert, and a pin was dropped on the map.

It’s not hard to imagine this being very useful in urban battlefield situations or in the case of a large area and a fast-ticking clock—say, an anonymous threat of a bomb inside an office building set to detonate in 30 minutes. Take away the human and the leash, and a dog can sweep entire floors at a near sprint. “To be as versatile as a dog, to have all capabilities in one device, might not be possible,” Waggoner says.

Both the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. It’s important to recognize that both sides—the dog people and the scientists working to emulate the canine nose—have a common goal: to stop bombs from blowing up. And the most effective result of this technology race, Waggoner thinks, is a complementary relationship between dog and machine. It’s impractical, for instance, to expect even a team of Vapor Wake dogs to protect Grand Central Terminal, but railroad police could perhaps one day install a version of Atkinson’s sniffer at that station’s different entrances. If one alerts, they could call in the dogs.

There’s a reason Flir Systems, the maker of Fido, has a dog research group, and it’s not just for comparative study, says the man who runs it, Kip Schultz. “I think where the industry is headed, if it has forethought, is a combination,” he told me. “There are some things a dog does very well. And some things a machine does very well. You can use one’s strengths against the other’s weaknesses and come out with a far better solution.”

Despite working for a company that is focused mostly on sensor innovation, Schultz agrees with Waggoner that we should be simultaneously pushing the dog as a technology. “No one makes the research investment to try to get an Apple approach to the dog,” he says. “What could he do for us 10 or 15 years from now that we haven’t thought of yet?”

On the other hand, dogs aren’t always the right choice; they’re probably a bad solution for screening airline cargo, for example. It’s a critical task, but it’s tedious work sniffing thousands of bags per day as they roll by on a conveyor belt. There, a sniffer mounted over the belt makes far more sense. It never gets bored.

“The perception that sensors will put dogs out of business—I’m telling you that’s not going to happen,” Schultz told me, at the end of a long conference call. Mark Fisher, who was also on the line, laughed. “Dogs aren’t going to put sensors out of business either.”

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

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Last week, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) introduced the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act alongside Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) and numerous other bipartisan co-sponsors. The bill’s objective is as straightforward as its name: ensuring AI will never have a final say in American nuclear strategy.

“While we all try to grapple with the pace at which AI is accelerating, the future of AI and its role in society remains unclear. It is our job as Members of Congress to have responsible foresight when it comes to protecting future generations from potentially devastating consequences,” Rep. Lieu said in the bill’s announcement, adding, “AI can never be a substitute for human judgment when it comes to launching nuclear weapons.”

He’s not the only one to think so—a 2021 Human Rights Watch report co-authored by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic stated that “[r]obots lack the compassion, empathy, mercy, and judgment necessary to treat humans humanely, and they cannot understand the inherent worth of human life.”

[Related: This AI-powered brain scanner can paraphrase your thoughts.]

If passed, the bill would legally codify existing Department of Defense procedures found in its  2022 Nuclear Posture Review, which states that “in all cases, the United States will maintain a human ‘in the loop’ for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the President to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.’’ Additionally, the DOD said that no federal funds could be used to launch nukes by an automated system without “meaningful human control,” according to the bill’s announcement.

The proposed legislation comes at a time when the power of generative AI, including chatbots like ChatGPT, is increasingly part of the public discourse. But the surreal spectrum between “amusing chatbot responses” and “potential existential threats to humanity” is not lost on Lieu. He certainly never thought part of his civic responsibilities would include crafting legislation to stave off a Skynet scenario, he tells PopSci.

As a self-described “recovering computer science major,” Lieu says he is amazed by what AI programs can now accomplish. “Voice recognition is pretty amazing now. Facial recognition is pretty amazing now, although it is more inaccurate for people with darker skin,” he says, referring to long-documented patterns of algorithmic bias. 

The past year’s release of generative AI programs such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, however, is when Lieu began to see the potential for harm.

[Related: ‘Godfather of AI’ quits Google to talk openly about the dangers of the rapidly emerging tech.]

“It’s creating information and predicting scenarios,” he says of the available tech. “That leads to different concerns, including my view that AI, no matter how smart it gets, should never have operative control of nuclear weapons.”

Lieu believes it’s vital to begin discussing AI regulations to curtail three major consequences: Firs, the proliferation of misinformation and other content “harmful to society.” Second is reining in AI that, while not existentially threatening for humanity, “can still just straight-up kill you.” He references San Francisco’s November 2022 multi-vehicle crash that injured multiple people and was allegedly caused by a Tesla engaged in its controversial Autopilot self-driving mode.

“When your cellphone malfunctions, it isn’t going at 50 miles-per-hour,” he says.

Finally, there is the “AI that can destroy the world, literally,” says Lieu. And this is where he believes the Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act can help, at least in some capacity. Essentially, if the bill becomes law, AI systems could still provide analysis and strategic suggestions regarding nuclear events, but ultimate say-so will rest firmly within human hands.

[Related: A brief but terrifying history of tactical nuclear weapons.]

Going forward, Lieu says there needs to be a larger regulatory approach to handling AI issues due to the fact Congress “doesn’t have the bandwidth or capacity to regulate AI in every single application.” He’s open to a set of AI risk standards agreed upon by federal agencies, or potentially a separate agency dedicated to generative and future advanced AI. On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled plans to offer $140 million in funding to new research centers aimed at monitoring and regulating AI development.

When asked if he fears society faces a new “AI arms race,” Lieu concedes it is “certainly a possibility,” but points to the existence of current nuclear treaties. “Yes, there is a nuclear weapons arms race, but it’s not [currently] an all-out arms race. And so it’s possible to not have an all-out AI arms race,” says Lieu.

“Countries are looking at this, and hopefully they will get together to say, ‘Here are just some things we are not going to let AI do.’”

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LIFE IS RARELY WORRY-FREE, but unprecedented angst has become a constant. Beyond the regular challenges of everyday existence—chaotic households, traffic jams, overbearing bosses—the looming presence of a deadly virus over the past three years has made even mundane decisions feel fraught.

Any number of things can spark stress, but they all share a common origin. “It’s when the demands on somebody outstrip the resources they have,” says Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the American Psychological Association (APA). The results of that are rarely good. Face a difficult situation, unrealistic expectation, or sudden conflict without the right skills or tools, and you risk melting down or freezing up. That danger increases when you are pressed for time or cannot influence a challenging variable. “The feeling of not having control is anxiety-provoking,” Bufka says. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

Most people had no experience dealing with the kind of prolonged pressure that came along with the pandemic. But for those with some of the world’s most intense occupations, it’s all just part of the job. Losing their cool is simply not an option. The strategies they employ to keep calm while facing a classroom, saving a life, or defusing a bomb just might help the rest of us deal with whatever’s pushing us to the edge of reason.

The fishing boat captain

THE STRESSORS: In 2021, the people bringing in Dungeness crab, black cod, and other bounties of the earth—the workers in America’s fishing and hunting industries—had the second deadliest job in the United States, coming in just behind loggers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “It is extremely hazardous,” says Richard Ogg, captain of the troller Karen Jeanne, which is based in Bodega Bay, California. The gale-force dangers he and his crew face include rough seas, miserable weather, and sleep deprivation. Pulling in a catch big enough to earn the money they need weighs heavily on his mind too. Above all else, though, Ogg feels a sense of guardianship over his team, and finds the biggest challenge can be coping with conflicts that arise among a crew corralled on a 54.5-foot boat miles from shore. That’s no easy feat when dealing with workers who don’t necessarily respect the hazards, the gear, or each other.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Effective communication is essential to keeping cool. Ogg tends to be egalitarian, even if he as the captain has the final say and will pull rank if he must. He often discusses problems or disagreements with everyone aboard, seeks their perspectives, and considers their viewpoints to zero in on the best solution. He finds that this approach, and accepting that things sometimes go sideways despite his best efforts, helps everyone stay on an even keel whenever things get choppy.

The air traffic controller

THE STRESSORS: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hosted nearly 2,000 flights on average every day in 2022, making it the busiest hub in the world last year. “Almost every bit of airspace that we have, there’s going to be planes there,” says air traffic controller Nichole Surunis. Shepherding those thousands of passengers in and out safely requires tremendous concentration and the ability to process information quickly. Variables like bad weather or an unexpected move by a pilot can make an already challenging task even more dynamic at a second’s notice. There’s no time to dwell on what’s at stake. “You have to focus on all these pilots you’re talking to, with all these people on these planes,” Surunis says. In total, there are about 2.9 million travelers who fly into or out of the United States on a given day—and costly delays add to the strain of those minding the traffic. It’s only after the craft are safe that a controller might notice their racing heart and realize just how tense they were.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Training and experience are key to handling rapidly shifting situations, and Surunis, like all controllers, has lots of both. “You have your Plan A—but you also must have a Plan B and Plan C,” she says. The occupation requires practicing self-care too. Stepping away from her workstation is essential, and mandated: Controllers typically aren’t allowed to go more than two hours without a break. Surunis doesn’t hesitate to tap a union-run support service after an especially grueling day, and she makes a point of unwinding by making time for hobbies like baking. That helps ensure she’s rested and ready to focus on keeping the sky safe.

The trauma surgeon

THE STRESSORS: Doctors who specialize in emergency care rarely have two days that are alike. A routine case like a ruptured appendix can end up on their table as readily as massive trauma. “They can be injured all over their body,” says Daniel Hagler, a critical care surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in New York. “What you do within seconds or minutes of them arriving can be the difference between life and death.” The tension ramps up if he must handle many patients simultaneously. Over time, the strain takes a toll: A study published in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that nearly one-quarter of doctors in Hagler’s shoes experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Keeping it together requires the ability to triage, focus on what’s important, and put lesser priorities aside. Hagler employs “deliberate and algorithmic thinking”: If you see this, do that. Trust your intuition, using past experience to guide you to the best decision—while accepting that you may be wrong. “Take a step to just ready yourself and settle your nerves, and do what needs to be done,” he says.

The bomb tech

THE STRESSORS: Pipe bombs are the most common homemade explosive devices on American soil, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but the people who specialize in preventing them from blowing up are rare. Techs like Carl Makins, formerly of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, often face incendiaries crudely fashioned in someone’s kitchen or basement, so the safest way of deactivating them isn’t always clear. It doesn’t help that the gear includes 85 pounds of hot, uncomfortable Kevlar, making it hard to move. But the biggest source of anxiety is not knowing if someone tampered with the suspicious package or tried to move it in an effort to be helpful before he arrived. “What did you do to it?” Makins often found himself wondering. “Did you make it mad?”

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Makins always tried to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t get angry,” he says. “That limits your ability to see everything that you need to see.” He also used humor to help defuse tense situations—pointing out that, say, handling a bomb next to that shiny new pickup might not end well for the truck. He also remained mindful of his limits. If he was too tired, too tense, or just not up to the task, he’d say so and let someone else on the team step in to do the job. “You just tap out,” he says.

The teacher

THE STRESSORS: Teachers—despite diminishing resources, growing technological distractions, and students who often want to be anywhere but the classroom—are nevertheless saddled with the responsibility of shaping the future. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why Gallup polls put teaching in a dead heat with nursing for the most stressful profession in the country, and why a RAND Corporation survey shows stress is the number one reason educators quit. And that was before COVID-19 compounded their challenges. When Teresa BlackCloud’s high school students in West Fargo, North Dakota, began taking turns attending class in person and learning from home in the fall of 2020, for example, she had to divide her attention between the pupils in front of her and the “online kids” who might need tech support. “I felt like my brain was split in two,” she says. “If only there were two Miss BlackClouds.” Like many educators, she had to quickly pivot between helping the teens in the classroom and assisting those working remotely.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Setting clear boundaries is key to handling trying circumstances. BlackCloud had to put the kibosh on responding to pings from kids at all hours because it limited her ability to recharge. “I had to get really good at setting boundaries,” she says. She strives to practice mindfulness and sets aside specific parts of her day for mentally wandering into stressy places. “While I’m brushing my teeth is my time to worry about things,” she says.

The Alaska rescue pilot

THE STRESSORS: Flying a rescue helicopter in Alaska is so intense the Coast Guard requires pilots to complete a tour elsewhere before they can get the gig. The assignment often demands they travel long distances—​Air Station Kodiak monitors 4 million square miles of land and sea, an area larger than the entire lower 48 states—in the dark and through extreme conditions. Due to the environs, the Last Frontier has an aviation accident rate more than twice that of the rest of the country. “It is very challenging,” says Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, who flies MH-60 Jayhawks and often dons night-vision goggles to navigate the inky sky. The haste of operations compounds the tension: Pilots must be airborne within 30 minutes of getting the call to pull someone out of danger. That leaves little time to prepare and sometimes gives Carbajal scant knowledge of what he’ll find when he arrives at the scene. (Carbajal now flies out of US Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, also in Alaska.)

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Managing complex and uncertain scenarios requires focusing only on what you can control. Everything else is a distraction. Carbajal concentrates on one task at a time—​calculating flight distance, estimating how much fuel he’ll need, requesting the necessary gear, and so on—​that he tackles systematically. He avoids looking too far ahead on his to-do list or fixating on situations he cannot influence, like unusually turbulent waves. “If there’s something that you can’t make a contingency plan for, don’t even waste your time on it,” he says.

An earlier version of this article appeared on popsci.com in January 2021, and this feature first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue. It has been updated since that time.

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On April 4, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the award of $12.9 million to defense giant QinetiQ for a laser weapon. The move followed years of work and interest by Australia’s government in developing lasers for the battlefields of tomorrow. What is most ambitious about the Australian research into laser weapons is not the modest funding to QinetiQ, but a powerful goal set by the Department of Defence in 2020: Australia wants a laser weapon powerful enough to stop a tank.

Laser weapons, more broadly referred to as directed energy, are a science fiction concept with a profoundly mundane reality. Instead of the flashy beams or targeted phasers of Star Wars or Star Trek, lasers work most similarly to a magnifying lens held to fry a dry leaf, concentrating photons into an invisible beam that destroys with heat and time. Unlike the child’s tool for starting fires, modern directed energy weapons derive their power from electricity, either generated on site or stored in batteries. 

Most of the work of laser weapons, in development and testing, has so far focused on relatively small and fragile targets, like drones, missiles, or mortar rounds. Lasers are energy intensive. When PopSci had a chance to try using a 10-kilowatt laser against commercial drones, it still took seconds to destroy each target, a process aided by all the sensors and accouterments of a targeting pod. Because lasers are concentrated heat energy over time, cameras to track targets, and gimbals to hold and stabilize the beam against the target, all ensure that as much of the beam as possible stays focused. Once part of a drone was burned through, the whole system would crash to the ground, gravity completing the task.

Tanks, by design and definition, are the opposite of lightly armored and fragile flying machines. That makes Australia’s plan to destroy tanks by laser all the more daring.

Tanks for the idea

In the summer of 2020, Australia’s Department of Defence released a strategy called the 2020 Force Structure Plan. This document, like similar versions in other militaries, offers a holistic vision of what kinds of conflicts the country is prepared to fight in the future. Because the strategy is also focused on procurement, it offers useful insight into the weapons and vehicles the military will want to buy to meet those challenges.

The tank-killing laser comes in the section on Land Combat Support. “A future program to develop a directed energy weapon system able to be integrated onto [Australian Defence Forces] protected and armoured vehicles, and capable of defeating armoured vehicles up to and including main battle tanks. The eventual deployment of directed energy weapons may also improve land force resilience by reducing the force’s dependence on ammunition stocks and supply lines,” reads the strategy.

The latter part of the statement is a fairly universal claim across energy weapons development. While laser weapons are power-intensive, they do not need individual missiles, bullets, or shells, the same as what a chemical explosive or kinetic weapon might. Using stored and generated energy, instead of specifically manufactured ammunition pieces, could enable long-term operation on even field-renewable sources, if available. This could also get the shot per weapon use down below the cost of a bullet, though it will take many shots for that to equal the whole cost of developing a laser system.

But getting a laser to punch through the armor of a tank is a distinct and challenging task. A drone susceptible to melting by laser might have a plastic casing a couple millimeters thick. Tank armor, even for older versions of modern tanks, can be at least 600 mm thick steel or composite, and is often thicker. This armor can be enhanced by a range of add-ons, including reactive plating that detonates outward in response to impact by explosive projectiles.

Defeating tank armor with lasers means finding a way to not just hold a beam of light against the tank, but to ensure that the beam is powerful and long-lasting enough to get the job done. 

“One problem faced by laser weapons is the huge amount of power required to destroy useful targets such as missiles. To destroy something of this size requires lasers with hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts of power. And these devices are only around 20% efficient, so we would require five times as much power to run the device itself,” wrote Sean O’Byrne, an engineering professor at UNSW Canberra and UNSW Sydney, in a piece explaining the promise and peril of anti-tank lasers.

O’Byrne continued: “We are well into megawatt territory here — that’s the kind of power consumed by a small town. For this reason, even portable directed energy devices are very large. (It’s only recently that the US has been able to make a relatively small 50kW laser compact enough to fit on an armoured vehicle, although devices operating at powers up to 300kW have been developed.)”

April’s announcement of a modest sum to develop a domestic laser weapon capability in Australia is a starting point for eventually getting to the scale of lasers powerful enough to melt tanks. Should the feat be accomplished, Australia will find itself with an energy-hunger tool, but one that can defeat hostile armor for as long as it is charged to do so.

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To fly at supersonic speeds is to punch through an invisible threshold in the sky. Rocketing through the air at a rate faster than sound waves can travel through it means surpassing a specific airspeed, but that exact airspeed varies. On Mars, the speed of sound is different from the speed of sound on Earth. And on Earth, the speed of sound varies depending on the temperature of the air an aircraft is traveling through. 

Breaking the so-called sound barrier in 1947 made Chuck Yeager famous. But today, if a person in a military jet flies faster than the speed of sound, it’s not a significant or even noticeable moment, at least from the perspective of the occupants of the aircraft. “Man, in the airplane you feel nothing,” says Jessica Peterson, a flight test engineer for the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. People on the ground may beg to differ, depending on how close they are to the plane. 

Here’s what to know about the speed of supersonic flight, a type of travel that’s been inaccessible to civilians who want to experience it in an aircraft ever since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. 

Ripples in the water, shockwaves in the air 

Traveling at supersonic speed involves cruising “faster than the sound waves can move out of the way,” says Edward Haering, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center who has been researching sonic booms since the 1990s.

One way to think about the topic is to picture a boat in the water. “If you’re in a rowboat, sitting on a lake, not moving, there might be some ripples that come out, but you’re not going any faster than the ripples are,” he says. “But if you’re in a motorboat or a sailboat, you’ll start to see a V-wake coming off the nose of your boat, because you’re going faster than those ripples can get out of the way.” That’s like a plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

But, he adds, a supersonic plane pushes through those ripples in three-dimensional space. “You have a cone of these disturbances that you’re pushing through,” he says. 

The temperature of the air determines how fast sound waves move through it. In a zone of the atmosphere on Earth between about 36,000 feet up to around 65,600 feet, the temperature is consistent enough that the speed of sound theoretically stays about the same. And in that zone, on a typical day, the speed of sound is about 660 mph. That’s also referred to as Mach 1. Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would be about 1,320 mph in that altitude range. However, since a real-world day will likely be different from what’s considered standard, your actual speed when attempting to fly supersonic may vary.

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

If you wanted to fly a plane at supersonic speeds at lower altitudes, the speed of sound is faster in that warmer air. At 10,000 feet, supersonic flight begins at 735 mph, NASA says. The thicker air takes more work to fly through at those speeds, though.

For the record books: the first supersonic flight

Chuck Yeager became the first documented person to fly at supersonic speeds on October 14, 1947. He recalled in his autobiography, Yeager, that he was at 42,000 feet flying at 0.96 Mach on that autumn day. “I noted that the faster I got, the smoother the ride,” he wrote. 

“Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach—then tipped right off the scale,” he recalled. “I thought I was seeing things! We were flying supersonic!” He learned afterwards that he had been going 700 mph, or 1.07 Mach. 

Over the radio, from below, Yeagar wrote that people in a “tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom!” 

Sonic booms happen thanks to shock waves forming off different features on the aircraft. For example, the canopy of a fighter jet, or the inlet for its engine, can produce them. The problem occurs because of the way those various shock waves join up, coalescing into two. “When they combine, they just get higher and higher pressure,” says Haering. The way they combine is for one shock wave to come from the front of the plane, and one from the rear. People on the ground will detect a “boom, boom,” Haering says. 

Interestingly, the length of the aircraft matters in this case, affecting how far apart those booms are in time. The space shuttle, for example, measured more than 100 feet long. In that case, people would notice a “boom… boom,” Haering says. “And a very short plane, it’s booboom. And if it’s really short, and really far away, sometimes the time between those two booms [is] so short, you can’t really tell that there’s two distinct booms, so you just hear boom.” 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

The issue with these booms is leading NASA to develop a new experimental aircraft, along with Lockheed Martin, called the X-59. Its goal is to fly faster than the speed of sound, but in a quieter way than a typical supersonic plane would. Remarkably, instead of a canopy for the pilot to see the scene in front of them, the aviator will rely on an external vision system—a monitor on the inside that shows what’s in front of the plane. NASA said that the testing wrapped up in 2021 for this design, which helps keep the aircraft sleek. The ultimate goal is to manage any shock waves coming off that aircraft through its design. “On the X-59, from the tip of the nose to the back of the tail, everything is tailored to try to keep those shock waves separated,” Haering says. 

NASA says they plan to fly it this year, with the goal of seeing how much noise it makes and how people react to its sound signature. The X-59 could make a noise that’s “a lot like if your neighbor across the street slams their car door,” Haering speculates. “If you’re engaged in conversation, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.” But actual flights will be the test of that hypothesis.

The X-59 has a goal of flying at Mach 1.4, at an altitude of around 55,000 feet. Translated into miles per hour, that rate is 924 mph. Then imagine that the aircraft has a tailwind, and its ground speed could surpass 1,000 mph. (Note that winds in the atmosphere will affect a plane’s ground speed—the speed the plane is moving compared to the ground below. A tailwind will make it faster and a headwind will make it slower.) 

Supersonic corridors 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, supersonic corridors permit pilots to fly at Mach 1 or faster above certain altitudes. In one corridor, the aircraft must be at 30,000 feet or higher. In another, the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor, the aircraft can be as low as 500 feet. Remember, the speed to fly supersonic will be higher at a low altitude than it will be at high altitudes, and it will take more effort to push through the denser air.

“From a flight-test perspective—so that’s what we do here at Edwards, and we’re focusing on testing the new aircraft, testing the new systems—we regularly go supersonic,” says Peterson, the flight test engineer at the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The fact that one of the supersonic corridors is over the base means that sonic booms are audible there, although the aircraft has to be above 30,000 feet. “We can boom the base, and we hear it all the time,” she adds. 

She notes that in a recent flight in a T-38, when she broke the sound barrier at 32,000 feet, her aircraft had a ground speed of 665 mph. But at 14,000 feet, she was supersonic at a ground speed of 734 mph.

But there’s a difference between flying at supersonic speeds in a test scenario and doing it for operational reasons. Corey Florendo, a pilot and instructor also at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, notes that he’d do it “only as often as I need to,” during a real-world mission.

“When I go supersonic, I’m using a lot of gas,” he adds. 

Supersonic flight thus remains available to the military in certain scenarios when they’re willing to burn the fuel, but not so for regular travelers. A Boeing 787, for example, is designed to cruise at 85 percent the speed of sound. However, one company, called Boom Supersonic, aims to bring that type of flight back for commercial travel; their aircraft, which they call Overture, could fly in tests in 2027. You may not want to hold your breath. 

Joe Jewell, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reflects that supersonic flight still has a “mystique” to it. 

“It’s still kind of a rare and special thing because the challenges that we collectively referred to as the sound barrier still are there, physically,” Jewell says. Pressure waves still accrue in front of the aircraft as it pushes through the air. “It’s still there, just the same as it was in 1947, we just know how to deal with it now.”

In the video below, watch an F-16 overtake a T-38; both aircraft are flying at supersonic speeds, and a subtle rocking motion is the only indication that shock waves are interacting with the aircraft. Courtesy Jessica Peterson and the US Air Force Test Pilot School.

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

The post The Marines are getting supersized drones for battlefield resupply appeared first on Popular Science.

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On July 12, 2020, the USS Bonhomme Richard caught fire. The vessel is officially described as an “amphibious assault ship,” a name that doesn’t truly capture the Bonhomme Richard’s role as troop and vehicle transport; its flat top also lets it launch helicopters, V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, and special fighter jets. It was a complex, powerful machine—one that would be considered an aircraft carrier in any other nation’s navy—which makes the fact that a single fire was able to do over $3 billion in damage to it so remarkable. 

This month, the Government Accountability Office published a study into fire safety on Navy ships, which reached a clear and blunt conclusion: The US Navy needs to do more to study, track, analyze, and prevent future fires.  

What is particularly jarring about the accident that ultimately led to the decommissioning of the Bonhomme Richard is that it happened in port, in San Diego. The amphibious assault ship was docked so that it could receive about $250 million in upgrades to better let it accommodate F-35B jet fighters. Instead of upgrading the ship to serve for decades into the future, a poorly managed accident and a days-long firefighting response removed what had been a wholly functional ship from operational use.

The July 12, 2020 fire “started in the lower vehicle storage compartment onboard the USS Bonhomme Richard,” the report notes. “The fire burned for several days, spread to 11 of 14 decks, and reached temperatures in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.”

The Bonhomme Richard fire was initially investigated as an arson, though the primary suspect was acquitted in court. The sailor’s defense made a compelling case that abundant other hazards on the ship, from poor lithium-ion battery storage to part of a lower deck being used like a junkyard, could be responsible for the fire.

Sparked, as it were, by Congressional inquiry into the destruction of the Bonhomme Richard, the GAO report set out to “review the Navy’s response to fire incidents aboard Navy ships as they undergo maintenance or modernization and to review the effects of the fires.” This inquiry specifically looked at how the Navy has responded to lessons learned, how the Navy has collected and analyzed data about such fires, what the Navy has done to manage staffing needs for fire response when ships are docked for maintenance, and how much of the Navy’s training for crew focuses on fire-safety for when the ship is docked for maintenance.

Such maintenance work is a dull inevitability of naval operations, and has been a fact of maritime life in some form or another for centuries. Sustainment work, the practice of ensuring long-lasting vehicles are able to actually function as desired, is far removed from the glamor and excitement of overseas patrol or active operation, but the consequences of leadership failures to maintain the ship can be just as severe as if the ship had been neglected in battle.

The GAO report cites several major incidents of fire on ships undergoing maintenance, starting with the USS Miami submarine in May 2012, up to the Bonhomme Richard in July 2020. While the Miami was docked in Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, a painter and sandblaster working on the submarine set a fire, which he later confessed to NCIS investigators was an action he took in order to get out of work. Such a small act ultimately led to the Miami’s full decommissioning, as the estimated cost to repair was over $700 million. Following the destruction of the Miami, the Navy reviewed its process for fire investigations, with the goal of preventing future such disasters.

What the GAO report finds, more than a decade after the devastation of the Miami, is that the Navy is unable to follow its own best advice for tracking and mitigating such risks. The report notes that “Navy organizations use processes that inconsistently collect, maintain, and share fire safety-related and damage control lessons and best practices to improve fire safety on ships undergoing maintenance.”

These reporting problems continue through work on ships, where workers may see evidence of past fire damage or signs of risk but do not know the most appropriate way to file and share that information. Data entry is a dull task, and one of the obstacles found by GAO is that the system used to log such risk is slow, making it less likely that fire risk is logged.

Another challenge is simply that a docked ship is crewed less than a ship deployed. At sea, the whole of a crew lives on and sustains a ship, corresponding to crisis with full strength as appropriate. In port, crew are assigned elsewhere, taking leave, deploying to other missions, or even just taking training courses on land. That means the baseline occupancy of a ship is reduced, often by 5 percent but in at least once incident cited by up to 30 percent. That makes having personnel on hand to spot and respond to fires as they happen harder.

Ensuring the ship doesn’t get burnt down while docked for repairs is an important job, and one that should be staffed adequately, even if most of the time it’s dull duty for the crew assigned to it.

Ultimately, the report notes, “If the Navy had a designated organization to use existing information to analyze and respond to Navy-wide effects of fire incidents, then the Navy could better understand the magnitude of risks associated with ship-fire incidents and their effects on Navy operations or the nation’s strategic resources.”

The post Watchdog sounds alarm on the Navy’s fire preparedness appeared first on Popular Science.

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On April 19, Nauticus Robotics announced that its work on the Terranaut, an amphibious machine designed to defeat explosive mines for the Defense Innovation Unit, had cleared its initial phase and was progressing to further development. The machine builds on Nauticus’ previous work with aquatic uncrewed vehicles. It fits into a holistic picture of untethered, autonomous underwater operations, where tools developed for commercial underwater work inform machines specifically built to tackle the special military needs below the ocean’s surface.

Nauticus teased this announcement of Terranaut on social media with a picture of tread lines on a beach leading into the ocean surface.

DIU, or the Defense Innovation Unit, is an organization within the larger Department of Defense designed to pull innovations from the commercial tech world into military use. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it is built to look at wagon wheels it could simply buy for its chariots.

“DIU gets intrigued when you have some commercial-facing technologies that they think they could orient towards a defense mission,” Nauticus CEO Nicolaus Radford tells Popular Science. “A lot of people focus on our big orange robots. But what’s between our robots’ ears is more important.” 

“So DIU is like, all right, you guys have made some commercial progress,” Radford adds. “You’ve got a commercial platform both in software and hardware. Maybe we can modify it a little bit towards some of these other missions that we’re interested in.”

In Nauticus’ announcement, they emphasized that Terranaut is being developed as an autonomous mine countermeasure robot, which can work in beaches and surf zones. These are the exact kind of areas where Marines train and plan to fight, especially in Pacific island warfare. Terranaut, as promised, will both swim and crawl, driven by an autonomous control system that can receive human direction through acoustic communication.

The Terranaut can navigate on treads and with powerful thrusters, with plans for manipulator arms that can emerge from the body to tackle any tasks, like disassembling an underwater mine.

“It’s able to fly through the water column and then also change its buoyancy in a way that it can get appreciable traction,” says Radford. “Let’s say you’re driving on the sub-sea bed and you encounter a rock. Well, you don’t know how long the rock is, it could take you a while to get around it, right?” The solution in that case would be to go above it. 

Much of the work that informed the creation and design of Terranaut comes from Nauticus’ work on Aquanaut, which is a 14.5-foot-long submersible robot that can operate at depths of almost 10,000 feet, and in regular versions at distances of up to 75 miles. Powered by an electric motor and carrying over 67 kilowatt hours of battery power, the aquanaut moves at a baseline speed of 3 knots, or almost 3.5 mph, underwater, and it can last on its battery power for over four days continuously. But what most distinguishes Aquanaut is its retractable manipulator arms that fold into its body when not needed, and its ability to operate without the direct communications control through an umbilical wire like another undersea robot.

The Aquanaut can perceive its environment thanks to sonar, optical sensors in stereo, native 3D cloud point imagery, and other sensors. This data can be collected at a higher resolution than is transmittable while deep undersea, with the Aquanaut able to surface or dock and transmit higher volumes and density of data faster

Like the Aquanaut, the Terranaut does not have an umbilical connecting it to a boat.

Typically, boats have umbilicals connecting them to robots “because you have to have an operator with joysticks looking at HD monitors, being able to drive this thing,” says Radford. “What we said is ‘let’s throw all that out.’ We can create a hybrid machine that doesn’t need an umbilical that can swim really far, but as it turns out, people just don’t want to take pictures. They want to pick something up, drop something off, cut something, plug something in, and we developed a whole new class of subsea machines that allows you to do manipulation underwater without the necessity of an umbilical.”

Removing the umbilical frees up the design for what kind of ships can launch and manage underwater robotics. It also comes with a whole new set of problems, like how to ensure that the robot is performing the tasks asked of it by a human operator, now that the operator is not driving but directing the machine. Communication through water is hard, as radio signals and light signals are both limited in range and efficacy, especially below the ocean’s surface.

Solving these twin problems means turning to on-board autonomy, and acoustic controls.  

“We have data rates akin to dial up networking in 1987,” says Radford. “You’re not gonna be streaming HD video underwater with a Netflix server, but there are ways in which you can send representative information in the 3D environment around you back to an operator, and then the operator flies the autopilot of the robot around.”

That means, in essence, that the robot itself is largely responsible for managing the specifics of its ballast and direction, and following commands transmitted acoustically through the water. In return it sends information back, allowing a human to select actions and behaviors already loaded onto the robot.

Like the Aquanaut before it, the Terranaut will come preloaded with the behaviors needed to navigate its environment and perform the tasks assigned to it. Once the Terranaut rolls through surfy shallows, onto beaches, and into visual range, it will apply those tools, adaptive autonomy and remote human guidance, to taking apart deadly obstacles, like underwater explosives.

“I think this is the beginning of a very vibrant portfolio of aquatic drones that I hope captures the public’s imagination on what’s possible underwater. I think it’s just as fascinating as space, if not more so, because it’s so much more near to us,” said Radford. “You know, five percent of the ocean seabed has been explored on any level. We live on an ocean planet stupidly called Earth.”

The post The Terranaut is a new mine-hunting bot designed for beaches appeared first on Popular Science.

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Reports from the Centers for Disease Control show gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States. In 2021, a separate study indicated over a third of its surveyed adolescents alleged being able to access a loaded household firearm in less than five minutes. When locked in a secure vault or cabinet, nearly one-in-four claimed they could access the stored gun within the same amount of time. In an effort to tackle this problem, a 26-year-old MIT dropout backed by billionaire Peter Thiel is now offering a biometrics-based solution. But experts question the solution’s efficacy, citing previous data on gun safety and usage.

Last Thursday, Kai Kloepfer, founder and CEO of Biofire, announced the Smart Gun, a 9mm pistol that only fires after recognizing an authorized user’s fingerprints and facial scans. Using “state-of-the-art” onboard software, Kloepfer claims their Smart Gun is the first “fire-by-wire” weapon, meaning that it relies on electronic signals to operate, rather than traditional firearms’ trigger mechanisms. Kloepfer claimed the product only takes “a millisecond” to unlock and said the gun otherwise operates and feels like a standard pistol, in a profile by Bloomberg. He hopes the Smart Gun could potentially save “tens of thousands of lives.”

In a statement provided to PopSci, Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer stated, “Firearm-related causes now take the lives of more American children than any other cause, and the problem is getting worse.” Kloepfer argued that accidents, suicides, homicides, and mass shootings among children reduced when gun owners have “faster, better tools that prevent the unwanted use of their firearms,” and claims the Smart Gun is “now the most secure option at a time when more solutions are urgently needed.”

[Related: A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material.]

Biometric scanning devices have extensive, documented histories of accuracy and privacy issues, particularly concerning racial bias and safety. Biofire claims that, to maintain the device’s security, the weapon relies upon a solid state, encrypted electronic fire control technology utilized by modern fighter jets and missile systems. Any biometric data stays solely on the firearm itself, the company says, which does not feature onboard Bluetooth, WiFi, or GPS capabilities. A portable, touchscreen-enabled Smart Dock also supplies an interface for the weapon’s owner to add or remove up to five users. The announcement declares the Smart Gun is “impossible to modify” or convert into a conventional handgun. The Smart Gun’s biometric capabilities are powered by a lithium-ion battery that purportedly lasts several months on a single charge, and “can fire continuously for several hours.” 

According to Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Violence Prevention and a Distinguished Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Biofire may have developed an advancement in gun safety, but Webster considers Biofire’s longterm impact on “firearm injury, violence, and suicide” to be “a very open ended question.”

[Related: Two alcohol recovery apps shared user data without their consent.]

“I’d be very cautious about [any] estimated deaths and injuries advertised by the technology,” Webster wrote to PopSci in an email. While Biofire boasts its safety capabilities, “Many of these estimates are based on an unrealistic assumption that these personalized or ‘smart guns’ would magically replace all existing guns that lack the technology… We have more guns than people in the US and I doubt that everyone will rush to melt down their guns and replace them with Biofire guns.”

Webster is also unsure who would purchase the Biofire Smart Gun. Citing a 2016 survey he co-conducted and published in 2019, Webster says there appears to be “noteworthy skepticism” among gun owners at the prospect of “personalized” or smart guns. “While we did not describe the exact technology that Biofire is using… interest or demand for personalized guns was greatest among gun owners who already stored their guns safely and were more safety-minded,” he explains.

[Related: Tesla employees allegedly viewed and joked about drivers’ car camera footage.]

For Webster, the main question boils down to how a Biofire Smart Gun will affect people’s exposure to firearms within various types of risk. Although he concedes the technology could hypothetically reduce the amount of underage and unauthorized use of improperly stored weapons, there’s no way to know how many new guns might enter people’s lives with the release of the Smart Gun. “How many people [would] bring [Smart Guns] into their homes because the guns are viewed as safe who otherwise wouldn’t?” he asks. Webster also worries Biofire’s new product arguably won’t deal with the statistically biggest problem within gun ownership.

While some self-inflicted harm could be reduced by biometric locks, the vast majority of firearm suicides occur via the gun’s original owner—according to Pew Research Center, approximately 54-percent (24,292) of all gun deaths in 2020 resulted from self-inflicted wounds. Additionally, guns within a home roughly doubles the risk for domestic homicides, nearly all of which are committed by the guns’ owners.

“Biofire is strongly committed to expanding access to safe and informed gun ownership and emphasizes the importance of education and training to every current and future gun owner,” the company stated in its official announcement. The company plans to begin shipping their Smart Gun in early 2024 at a starting price of $1,499, “in adherence with all applicable state and local regulations.”

The post Startup claims biometric scanning can make a ‘secure’ gun appeared first on Popular Science.

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Body armor has a clear purpose: to prevent a bullet, or perhaps a shard from an explosion, from puncturing the fragile human tissue behind it. But donning it doesn’t come lightly, and its weight is measured in pounds. For example, the traditional Kevlar fabric that would go into soft body armor weighs about 1 pound per square foot, and you need more than one square foot to do the job. 

But a new kind of Kevlar is coming out, and it aims to be just as resistant to projectiles as the original material, while also being thinner and lighter. It will not be tailored into a John Wick-style suit, which is the stuff of Hollywood, but DuPont, the company that makes it, says that it’s about 30 percent lighter. If the regular Kevlar has that approximate weight of 1 pound per square foot, the new stuff weighs in at about .65 or .7 pounds per square foot. 

“We’ve invented a new fiber technology,” says Steven LaGanke, a global segment leader at DuPont.

Here’s what to know about how bullet-resistant material works in general, and how the new stuff is different. 

A bullet-resistant layer needs to do two tasks: ensure that the bullet cannot penetrate it, and also absorb its energy—and translate that energy into the bullet itself, which ideally deforms when it hits. A layer of fabric that could catch a bullet but then acted like a loose net after it was hit by a baseball would be bad, explains Joseph Hovanec, a global technology manager at the company. “You don’t want that net to fully extend either, because now that bullet is extending into your body.”

The key is how strong the fibers are, plus the fact that “they do not elongate very far,” says Hovanec. “It’s the resistance of those fibers that will then cause the bullet—because it has such large momentum, [or] kinetic energy—to deform. So you’re actually catching it, and the energy is going into deforming the bullet versus breaking the fiber.” The bullet, he says, should “mushroom.” Here’s a simulation video.

Kevlar is a type of synthetic fiber called a para-aramid, and it’s not the only para-aramid in town: Another para-aramid that can be used in body armor is called Twaron, made by a company called Teijin Limited. Some body armor is also made out of polyethylene, a type of plastic. 

The new form of Kevlar, which the company calls Kevlar EXO, is also a type of aramid fiber, although slightly different from the original Kevlar. Regular Kevlar is made up of two monomers, which is a kind of molecule, and the new kind has one more monomer, for a total of three. “That third monomer allows us to gain additional alignment of those molecules in the final fiber, which gives us the additional strength, over your traditional aramid, or Kevlar, or polyethylene,” says Hovanec.

Body armor in general needs to meet a specific standard in the US from the National Institute of Justice. The goal of the new kind of Kevlar is that because it’s stronger, it could still meet the same standard while being used in thinner quantities in body armor. For example, regular Kevlar is roughly 0.26 or .27 inches thick, and the new material could be as thin as 0.19 inches, says Hovanec. “It’s a noticeable decrease in thickness of the material.”  

And the ballistic layer that’s made up of a material like Kevlar or Twaron is just one part of what goes into body armor. “There’s ballistics [protection], but then the ballistics is in a sealed carrier to protect it, and then there’s the fabric that goes over it,” says Hovanec. “When you finally see the end article, there’s a lot of additional material that goes on top of it.”

The post A new kind of Kevlar aims to stop bullets with less material appeared first on Popular Science.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

ON THE WEBSITE Soar.Earth, you’ll find a map of the world that at first looks a lot like the one on Google Earth. But zoom in, and rectangles appear. Click on one, and you might find an image from a 1960s spy satellite showing a fresh crater from a nuclear-weapons test. Scoot to different coordinates, and see high-resolution satellite shots of last year’s floods in Western Australia. Northwest of that, there’s a map showing where Saudi Arabia has excavated for a futuristic, 110-mile-long city called The Line. 

The site’s founder, Amir Farhand, has big dreams for Soar: He hopes it will become the world’s biggest atlas, allowing users to see all the information that people have gathered about any point on Earth.

While achieving that dream is perhaps impossible, or at least a long way away, Soar already hosts oodles of historical maps, satellite shots from sources like NASA, and even cartography from scientific papers. Containing past and present maps while allowing users to also commission images from satellites, Soar can track the intersecting interests of many different groups: climate scientists, developers, intelligence analysts, mining experts, and defense contractors. 

The interests of the last two groups are, in fact, what spurred Soar’s creation.

Charted territory

Farhand, who lives in Australia, was always a plot-the-world kind of guy. He moved a lot as a kid, but wherever he was, he would ride his bike around his neighborhood and make maps of the surroundings.

After learning about satellite imagery and its relevance to Earth science in college, and then dropping out of a PhD program, Farhand became a consultant. He worked all over the world on geospatial projects. 

“Then I thought, You know what, I love atlases,” he says. “And I thought to myself, Why aren’t all the world’s atlases in one place?” 

Why wasn’t there a spot where he could overlay a leopard habitat range over a climatic map and so see the correlation? Why couldn’t he also see how someone had baroquely hand-drawn the area’s layout hundreds of years ago? Who wouldn’t want that?

Back then, around 2011, those were relatively idle questions for him. But in the years to come, Farhand would take them to work. In 2013, he created an application called Mappt—it contained the early seeds of what Soar would become. A few years after Mappt became available, a new customer took an interest: the US government. In 2017, a defense-centric version called Mappt Military appeared on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s official app store. Verified Department of Defense or intelligence community members could use it for free. It’s still available today, allowing users to map hazards, plan logistics and transport, and plot place-based risks, among other things. 

Defense users and also people in the mining industry were interested in using the technology to build their own private atlases, storing all their geospatial data in one spot, accessible from anywhere. The contents of those atlases ranged from modern drone and satellite photos to pictures taken from airplanes in the 1960s, and they wanted it in the field, offline. 

“It was all based on that premise of flexibility of having mapping data on your hands,” Farhand says. 

Soar rose, in a way, out of Mappt’s iterations. On the site, users can create their own private atlases—as the defense and mining companies wanted to—and include proprietary data, like satellite images they buy through the site. Or they can upload content for everyone to see, as long as they own its copyright or do their best to attribute public domain and out-of-copyright images. Or they can do both. Interacting with the site is free, as is creating an account, although some features (like making a private atlas) do cost money. Today, both Mappt and Soar.Earth are part of the parent company, Soar. 

On the Soar site, users can whip across the screen to anywhere on the planet and see if someone has uploaded an aerial photo from the 1950s, maps of flooding, maps of drought, and plots of elevation—all of which are available for, say, the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. They can make measurements, add annotations, make different layers transparent and see how they overlap. 

The team is currently working through how best to moderate content on the platform to ensure it fits with Soar’s guidelines. Right now, anyone can upload maps in near real time if they agree their data fits with copyright and community guidelines. The Soar team generally logs in and checks on new uploads several times a day. Users can also report violations. Soon, though, the company will split users into two tiers: one of trusted power users who can automatically upload, and another that will have to await Soar’s approval before their maps appear. Farhand compares their policy to what you might find with Google Reviews or YouTube, noting that he’s “hopeful we can use precursor crowdsourcing platforms for directions on what to not to do, as much as what to do.”

If Soar doesn’t yet have the maps a user is looking for, they can request free NASA or Sentinel (a European satellite program) data of the area, buy brand-new shots from commercial satellites, or order archival images—all of which can be done through Soar and added to the public atlas of atlases. “They were very, very early into making it possible to just log into a website and buy satellite imagery,” says Joe Morrison, a vice president at Umbra, a company that takes radar-based data from space. 

Morrison writes a popular industry newsletter called “A Closer Look,” about “maps, satellites, and the businesses that create them,” and his analysis often laments the typical difficulty of buying shots from space: The pricing is opaque, the licensing is often restrictive, and actually opening the shutter can take so long the picture is no longer relevant. Soar aims to solve a lot of those problems. 

The combination and chronology of the data is interesting to people doing, say, climate research, tracking a conflict, or trying to suss out secret goings-on by using public data. Soar provides a platform on which users can do a form of what’s known as open-source intelligence, or OSINT, which can be a powerful way to track intra- or inter-country dynamics.

Morrison says what sets Soar apart from other geospatial endeavors is that it has focused on creating a community that publicly shares interactive maps. Most people aren’t going to pay for their own shiny satellite pictures, or spend all their free time aligning old National Geographic maps to the Soar lat-long grid, or adding daily updates on the big construction project across town. But some people will. 

Farhand thinks of the dynamic like that of YouTube: Many more people watch videos than create them. “We get this beautiful, enriching content from incredible specialists around the world,” he says of Soar’s homegrown influencers. “And then you’ve got these hordes of viewers that come on board.”

Spatial storytelling

One big-audience user who shares regular info on Soar goes by the handle War Mapper. They regularly post maps that consolidate updates on the conflict in Ukraine, showing the extent of territory controlled by Ukraine, or Russian-occupied territory, among other data. 

Another popular presence is Harry Stranger, a 23-year-old from Brisbane. “I would consider him an open-source analyst,” Morrison says. “He’s not really a journalist. He’s not really a military analyst. And he’s not just the normal amateur sleuth. He’s somewhere between.”

A while ago, Stranger, a space nerd, wanted to see a picture of a particular launchpad. Like so many interesting things, space infrastructure is hard to reach. You can’t just stroll up to a rocket’s spot on Cape Canaveral. And you definitely cannot do so at China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center. “People can’t just walk up to and take a picture of it,” he says of such secure spots. But space offers a view of it all. And there aren’t really restrictions—despite rumors to the contrary—on what civilians can nab shots of.  

At some point, Stranger heard that he could get satellite images of the launchpad, for free, from Sentinel. “I became addicted,” he says.

Stranger started to keep an eye on various aerospace places in the world, particularly those located in countries that don’t give much public notice of their activities, like China. Was there construction? Is there a rocket rocking on the pad? Sometimes he hears a rumor and starts monitoring the site via satellite. Without having any insider knowledge, he could know more than he ever had before. “Space from space,” he calls his endeavors now.

When you can’t go through, don’t go around: Go above and look down. It is, after all, what the intelligence apparatus has been doing since the satellites that took the photos were invented. 

Stranger’s interest in monitoring earthly activity from above mirrors the more automated interests of intelligence programs, like the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s SMART program, which aims to create software that can spot terrestrial changes, like heavy construction or new crop growth, from satellite imagery. 

Soon, Stranger was interested in what the intelligence types of the past had seen, which he was able to access through the lenses of old spy satellite systems whose images had since been cleared for public release. “I knew it existed out there,” he says of the declassified images. He didn’t think “out there” would end up being as easy as logging into the United States Geological Survey website, but it was.

If the formerly hushed images had already been scanned, he could download them for free, and he soon set up a GoFundMe to pay for the digitization of more. Soar, which Stranger hadn’t really used yet, donated $750.

“That’s where we kind of kicked off our relationship,” he says.

He started uploading the declassified imagery to Soar. Now, anyone can see US spy satellite shots of the Jiuquan Launch Center in China from the 1970s, along with a 2022 commercial-satellite image of a rocket test stand at the site, which was hit by an explosion the year before.

Guide to the planet

Right now, Soar hosts just under 100,000 different maps (excluding the shots from satellites like Sentinel, which add data all the time). Farhand estimates that this six-digit number is less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s total extant maps. “I don’t think that’s good enough,” he says. 

But if the company can get up to 1 or 2 percent of the total, he thinks, Soar could become as ubiquitous as Google Maps but with more context and community. That’s the dream anyway—a castle in the air that he’d like to tether to Earth. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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On March 27, Gecko Robotics announced its hull-inspecting robots will be used to assess a US Navy destroyer and an amphibious assault ship, expanding work already done to inspect Navy ships. These robots map surfaces as they climb them, creating useful and data-rich models to better help crews and maintainers find flaws and fix them. As the Navy looks to sustain and expand the role of its fleet while minimizing the number of new sailors needed, enlisting the aid of robot climbers can guide present and future repairs, and help ensure more ships are seaworthy for more time.

Getting ships into the sea means making sure they’re seaworthy, and it’s as important to naval operations as ensuring the crew is fed and the supplies are stocked. Maintenance can be time-intensive, and the Navy already has a backlog of work that needs to be done on the over 280 ships it has. Part of getting that maintenance right, and ensuring the effort is spent where it needs to be, is identifying the specific parts of a ship worn down by time at sea.

Enter a robotic critter called Gecko.

“The Navy found that using Gecko achieved incredible time savings and improvement in data quantity and quality. Before Gecko, the Navy’s inspection process produced 6,000 data points. Gecko provides significantly more coverage by collecting over 3.3 million data points for the hull and over 463,000 data points for the outboard side of the starboard rudder,” Ed Bryner, director of engineering at Gecko Robotics, tells Popular Science via email.

Those data points are collected by a hull-climbing robot. Gecko makes several varieties of the Toka robot, and the Navy inspections use the Toka 4. This machine can crawl over 30 feet a minute, recording details of the hull as it goes. 

“It is a versatile, multi-function robot designed initially to help hundreds of commercial customers in the power, manufacturing and oil and gas industries. It utilizes advanced sensors, cameras, and ultrasonics to detect potential defects and damages in flight decks, hulls and rudders,” says Bryner.

To climb the walls, the Toka uses wheels with neodymium permanent rare earth magnets that work on the carbon steel of the ship’s hull. The sensors are used to detect how thick walls are, if there is pitting or other degradation in the walls, and then to plot a map of all that damage. This is done with computers on-board the robot as it works, and then also processed in the cloud, through a service offered in Gecko’s Cantilever Platform.

“The millions of data points collected by the Toka 4 are used to build a high-fidelity digital twin to detect damage, automatically build repair plans, forecast service life and ensure structural integrity,” says Bryner.

A digital twin is a model and map based on the scanned information. Working on that model, maintainers can see where the ship may have deteriorated—perhaps a storm with greater force or a gritty patch of ocean that pockmarked the hull in real but hard to see ways. This model can guide repairs at port, and then it can also serve as a reference tool for maintainers when the ship returns after a deployment. Having a record of previous stress can guide repairs and work, and over time build a portrait of what kinds of degradation happen where.

“Gecko’s Cantilever Platform allows customers to pinpoint & optimize precise areas of damage in need of remediation (rather than replacing large swaths of a flight deck, for example), track their physical assets over time to identify trends and patterns, prioritize and build repair plans, deploy repair budgets efficiently, and make detailed maintenance plans for the service life of the asset,” says Bryner.

The robot is a tool for guiding repairs, operated by one or two people while it inspects and maps. This map then guides maintenance to where it is most needed, and in turn shapes maintenance that comes after. It’s a way of modernizing the slow but important work of keeping ships ship-shape. 

So far, reports Breaking Defense, Gecko’s system has scanned six ships, with two more announced this week. Deck maintenance is a dull duty, but it’s vital that it be done, and done well. In moments of action, everyone on a ship needs to know they can trust the vessel they are standing on to work as intended. Finding and fixing hidden flaws, or bolstering weaker areas before going back out to sea, ensures that the routine parts of ship operation can operate as expected. 

Watch a video of the robot below: 

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

ON THE COLORADO PLAINS just below the Rocky Mountains, near the quaint town of Berthoud, lies the headquarters of a space company called Ursa Major. There, just about an hour’s drive north of Denver, the company regularly test-fires rocket engines straight out the back of an onsite bunker. 

These engines, which are mostly 3D printed, aren’t just for launching satellites into space: They’re also of interest to the US military for propelling hypersonic vehicles. And their dual-use nature is a modern manifestation of the two faces that rocket technology has always had, which is that it is simultaneously useful for defensive and offensive purposes, and for cosmic exploration.

With this technology in hand, the company hopes to get both civilian and military projects off the ground.

3… 2…1… liftoff

Joe Laurienti, who founded Ursa Major in 2015, grew up not too far from Berthoud. His father worked for Ball Aerospace—the cosmic arm of the company that makes a whole lot of aluminum cans, and the former owner of Ursa Major’s current 90-acre site. “He was always working on satellites,” says Laurienti. But when Laurienti went to see one of his father’s payloads launch, he thought, “The thing my dad worked on is really important. It’s on top of this rocket. But the fire coming out the bottom is way more exciting.”

Laurienti has been chasing that fire ever since, his life consumed by propulsion: the technology that makes rockets go up fast enough to counteract gravity and reach orbit. As an adult, he joined SpaceX’s propulsion team, then slipped over to Blue Origin—hitting two of the trifecta of space-launch companies owned by famous billionaires. (The third is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.)

Soon, Laurienti saw others in the industry trying to start commercial rocket companies. He, perhaps biased, didn’t think that was a good idea: The heavy hitters that were founded first would obviously win, and the others would just be also-rans.

Nevertheless, he thought he had a startup to contribute to the mix: one that wouldn’t make entire rockets but just engines, to sell to rocket companies—much like General Electric makes engines that propel aircraft from Boeing or Airbus. “I spent my career on the engines, and that was always kind of a pain point” for the industry, says Laurienti.

Rocket engines, of course, are pretty important for heaving the space-bound vehicle upward. “A little over 50 percent of launch failures in the last 10 years are propulsion-related,” explains Bill Murray, Ursa’s vice president of engineering, who’s known Laurienti since they were both undergrads at the University of Southern California. You can take that to mean that half the complexity of a rocket exists inside the engines. Take that out of some rocket maker’s equation for them? Their job theoretically gets a lot easier.

“That’s the next wave of aerospace,” thought Laurienti. “It’s specialization.” 

With that idea, he sold his SpaceX stock in preparation for his new venture. “Instead of buying a house and starting a family, I bought a 3D printer, started the company, and made my mom cry,” he says.

3D printing engines—and entire rockets

The 3D printer was key to Laurienti’s vision. Today, 80 percent of a given Ursa engine is 3D printed with a metal alloy—and printed as a unit, rather than as separate spat-out elements welded together later. Most space companies use additive manufacturing (another way to refer to 3D printing) to some degree, but in general, they aren’t 3D printing the majority of their hardware. And they also aren’t, in general, designing their space toys to take advantage of 3D printing’s special traits, like making a complicated piece of hardware as one single part rather than hundreds.

That kind of mindset is also important at another company, Relativity Space, which has 3D printed basically an entire rocket—including the engines. Its Terran 1 rocket is the largest 3D printed object on Earth. The team attempted to launch the rocket on March 8 and 11, but it ultimately scrubbed the shots both times due to issues with ground equipment, fuel pressure, and automation systems.

Like Laurienti, Relativity founder Tim Ellis noticed a reluctance to fully embrace 3D printing tech at traditional space companies. At Blue Origin, his former employer, Ellis was the first person to do metal 3D printing; he was an intern desperate to finish creating a turbo pump assembly before his apprenticeship was over. Later, as a full employee, Ellis would go on to start and lead a metal 3D printing division at the company. 

But the way traditional space companies like Blue Origin usually do 3D printing didn’t work for him, because he felt that it didn’t always include designing parts to take advantage of additive manufacturing’s unique capabilities. “Every 3D printed part that Relativity has made would not be possible to build with traditional manufacturing,” says Ellis. The result of that approach has been “structures that ended up looking highly integrated, [because] so many parts of our rocket engine, for example, are built in single pieces.” Those one-part pieces would, in traditional manufacturing, have been made of up to thousands of individual pieces.

He thought more people would have come over to this side by now. “It’s been a lot slower than I’ve expected, honestly, to adopt 3D printing,” he says. “And I think it’s because it’s been slower for people to realize this is not just a manufacturing technology. It’s a new way to develop products.”

Five times the speed of sound

Initially, Ursa Major’s business model focused on space launch: getting things to orbit, a process powered by the company’s first engine, called Hadley. The design, currently still in production, slurps liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s about the same as the engines on Rocket Lab’s small Electron vehicle, or VirginOrbit’s LauncherOne spaceplane. 

But then an early customer—whose name Laurienti did not share—approached the company about a different application: hypersonics. These vehicles are designed to fly within Earth’s atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound. Usually, when people discuss hypersonics, they’re talking about fast-moving, maneuverable weapons. 

“Hey, we were buying rocket engines from someone else, but they’re not really tailored for hypersonics,” Laurienti recalls this customer saying. “You’re [in] early development. Can you make some changes?” 

They could, although it wouldn’t be as easy as flipping a switch. Hypersonic vehicles often launch from the air—from the bottom of planes—whereas rockets typically shoot from the ground on their way to space. Hypersonics also remain within the atmosphere. That latter part is surprisingly hard, in the context of high speeds.  

Just like rubbing your hand on fabric warms both up, rubbing a hypersonic vehicle against the air raises the temperature of both. “The atmosphere around you is glowing red, trying to eat your vehicle,” says Laurienti. That heat, which creates a plasma around the craft, also makes it hard to send communications signals through. Sustaining high speeds and a working machine in that harsh environment remains a challenge.

But the company seems to have figured out how to make Hadley, which is now in its fourth iteration, work in the contexts of both launching a rocket to space and propelling a hypersonic vehicle that stays within Earth’s atmosphere. As part of one of Ursa Major’s contracts, the military wanted the engine to power an aircraft called the X-60A, a program run by the Air Force Research Lab. The X-60A was built as a system on which hypersonic technologies could fly, to test their mettle and give engineers a way to clock the weapons’ behavior.

Hypersonic weapons—fast, earthbound missiles—aren’t actually faster than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which carry nuclear warheads and arc up into space and then back down to their targets. But they’re of interest and concern to military types because they don’t have to follow trajectories as predictable as ICBMs do, meaning they’re harder to track and shoot down. Russia, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, both Koreas, and Iran all have hypersonic weapon research programs.

To intercept these fast-moving weapons, a country might need its own hypersonics, so there’s a defensive element and an offensive one. That’s partly why the Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in hypersonics research, in addition to its desire to keep up with other countries’ technological abilities. That, of course, often makes other countries want to keep pace or get ahead, which can lead to everyone investing more money in the research.

A long-standing duality

Rocket technology, often touted as a way for humans to explore and dream grandly, has always had a military connection—not implicitly, but in a burning-bright obvious way. “[Nazi Germany’s] V-2 rocket was the progenitor to the intercontinental ballistic missiles,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, an assistant professor of history at Caltech, who focuses on space technologies and their afterlives.

Space-destined rockets were, at least at first, basically ballistic missiles. After all, a powerful stick of fire is a powerful stick of fire, no matter where it is intended to go. And that was true from the Space Age’s very beginning. “The R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik was one of the first operational ICBMs,” says Rand. The first American astronauts, she continues, shot to space on the tip of a modified Redstone ballistic missile. Then came Atlas rockets and Titan rockets, which even share the same names as the US missiles that were souped up to make them.

Rockets and flying weapons also share a kind of philosophical lineage, in terms of the subconscious meaning they impart on those who experience their fire. “They really shrunk the world, in a lot of ways, in time and space,” says Rand. “Accessing another part of the world, whether you were launching a weapon or a satellite, really made the world smaller.”

Today, in general, the development of missile technology has been decoupled from space-launch technology, as the rockets intended for orbit have been built specifically for that purpose. But it’s important not to forget where they came from. “They still all descend from the V-2 and from these military rockets,” says Rand. “And also most of them still launch DOD payloads.”

In a lot of ways, a 3D printed rocket engine that can both power a hypersonic vehicle and launch a satellite into orbit is the 21st-century manifestation of the duality that’s been there from the beginning. “Maybe it’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” says Rand. “What’s happening here—that was always kind of the case. But now we’re just making it very clear that, ‘Yeah, this has got to be used for both. We are building a company and this is our market and, yes, rockets are used for two main things: satellites and launching weapons.’”

‘A shock hitting your chest’ 

It’s no surprise that hypersonic capabilities have gotten their share of American hype—not all of it totally deserved. As defense researchers pointed out in Scientific American recently, the US has for decades put ballistic missiles on steerable maneuvering reentry vehicles, or MaRVs. Although they can only shift around toward the end of their flight, they can nonetheless change their path. Similarly, the scientists continued, while a lower-flying hypersonic might evade radar until it approaches, the US doesn’t totally rely on radar for missile defense: It also has infrared-seeking satellites that could expose a burning rocket engine like Hadley.

Still, the Air Force has been interested in what Ursa Major might be able to contribute to its hypersonic research, having funded seven programs with the company, according to the website USA Spending, which tracks federal contracts and awards. In fact, the Air Force is Ursa’s only listed government customer, having invested a few million in both the hypersonic and space-launch sides of the business. It’s also responsible for two of four of Relativity’s federal awards. 

Also of national security interest, of late, is decreasing the country’s reliance on Russian rocket engines for space launch. To that end, Ursa Major has a new engine, called Arroway, in development, which boasts 200,000 pounds of thrust. “Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch companies,” the company said last June. It is also developing a third, in-between engine called Ripley, a scaled-up version of Hadley. 

Today, Ursa Major tests their 3D printed engines up to three times daily. On any given day, visitors in Berthoud might unknowingly be near six or nine high-powered experiments. When the static rocket engine begins its test, huge vapor clouds from the cryogenics can envelop an engineer. 

“When it lights, it’s just a shock hitting your chest,” says Laurienti. A cone of flames shoots from the back of the engine, toward a pile of sand in the field behind the bunker. Onlookers face the fire head-on, their backs to the mountains and their eyes on the prize.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Amid severe winter storms that have left parts of California flooded or trapped under feet of snow, the California National Guard is taking part in rescue efforts. That includes ongoing work to get supplies to people trapped in the snow covered San Bernardino Mountains, where many have been snowed in for two weeks.

Sixty California National Guard soldiers, part of Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, are deployed to the mountains, which include the towns of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline and Big Bear Lake. They’re helping local agencies as well as Caltrans and Cal Fire reach people who have been trapped for days. Heavy storms hit much of California hard last month. In the San Bernardino Mountains—with only limited access up and down, residents were unable to get down from their homes for days. Many were without power, and limited supplies. 

Snow plows only operated in a limited capacity, and it’s only in the last week that they have been able to get down the highway. Travel in and between mountain towns remains difficult, as roads remain blocked or partially blocked, and many people have to walk from their snow-covered homes in order to get to clear roads. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the area on March 1 and the National Guard went into action. After more than a week of work, they and local partners have set up supply distribution centers spread out around the mountains (many stores remain closed; one grocery store in Crestline had its roof cave in from the weight of the snow). They’ve also been going house to house to try and reach people. 

“The primary goal was snow removal from private property from homes that had elderly individuals that were in danger of collapsing,” Chloe Castillo, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, told Task & Purpose. “They cleared off snow from critical infrastructure, including the Crestline post office, and a large hotel at Lake Arrowhead Village, the location that was housing a large number of first responders. They ended up removing […] 1.1 million lbs. of snow.”

Joint Task Force Rattlesnake typically deploys during the state’s fire season, helping to fight wildfires and evacuate people. The dozens of National Guard soldiers mobilized after the storms instead have to deal with floods and ice. 

The rescue efforts are expected to continue for several more days. Many residents still choose to walk to these places instead of driving as not only are side streets blocked but many cars remain trapped under layers of snow. It’s not clear exactly how many people in total have been injured or killed by the storm in the area.

An additional challenge is that since rescue efforts started, a new storm, driven by an atmospheric river, hit Southern California starting on Thursday, March 9. It is expected to last several days, dropping 1.5-2 inches of precipitation on the area. The added weight of rain on top of snow could add additional pressure on buildings, presenting structural risks. 

That need has been exacerbated by this week’s storms. Roughly 100 additional California National Guard soldiers are currently responding to flooding in other parts of the state, including Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, using high water vehicles to reach people in danger. In the last several days the National Guard has helped in 56 rescues, according to the force. They have also assisted in aid and supply efforts in the state as well. The latter has included airdropping hay for cows in northern Humboldt County.

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