“The sort of lowest hanging fruit there are probably contested logistics, counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and electronic warfare,” Joby Executive Chairman Paul Sciarra told Breaking Defense.
The company's capability to precisely measure land surface temperatures — using data from a wide variety or Earth monitoring satellites and a software suite for data fusion — has potential military and national security applications.
The BRIDGES project is Scout's first with DARPA, but the company's SDA-related software and hardware — including its "plug and play" optical sensor packages designed as hosted payloads — already have caught the eye of Space Force officials.
As the Defense Department and Congress strive to streamline clumsy Authorization To Operate (ATO) procedures for software, the Pentagon also needs more computing infrastructure to test and experiment with new code.
Rep. Elise Stefanik criticized the Air Force’s decision to terminate a fellowship program that paired DoD personnel with the private sector as “shortsighted and misguided,”
“The involvement of the military massively augments our velocity on the commercial side because the military's expectation of an airplane is fundamentally the same as the FAA’s. They want a safe, reliable, repeatedly produced aircraft,” said BETA founder and CEO Kyle Clark.
Cybersecurity skills must evolve in near-real time as Zero Day threats continue and AI provides new challenges.
“There's a transformative vertical lift industry that's emerging and we need to be partners in it," said AFWERX Director Col. Elliot Leigh.
“This isn't a thought experiment anymore," Lt. Col. Bryan Ralston said. "We've actually done something and seeing how it works and how we can adapt these technologies.”
“We can’t do our best work unless we’re involved a lot earlier,” said Mandy Long, CEO of BigBear.ai.
The company will use its sensor simulation software product Spectral, which can be used to “place sensors anywhere on a platform to visualize the sensor field of view, occlusion, and coverage,” Nicholas Pisciotta told Breaking Defense ahead of the contract announcement.
Michigan’s defense ecosystem and expertise makes it a special asset for production.
Under a new grant, the company will demonstrate to the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center its ability to take very high resolution images at night using a thermal infrared sensor.
While the company currently is using already available data from satellites like NASA's Landsat and ESA's Sentinel-2, Hydrosat also intends to launch its own constellation of 16 microsats to low Earth orbit (LEO).
The company has demonstrated the capability to do 'pattern of life' monitoring, staying over a 40 kilometer area for more than four days, said CEO Ryan Hartman.
Sergio Gallucci, SCOUT co-founder and chief technology officer, told Breaking Defense that its new AFWERX contract is focused on demonstrating its software for integrating and streamlining unclassified data from multiple satellites.