DARPA, DTRA Cranking Again
* The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded a $965K contract to Lockheed Martin for a trade study covering “Phase 0” of the High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW). Raytheon received what looks like a similar award a month ago. Back in May the Air Force cancelled a demonstration requirement they had been working on for about a year. The Air Force and the agency are consolidating their hypersonic efforts and aiming for more reachable goals than FALCON and its Hypersonic Technology Vehicle.
* DARPA reinstated the XS-1 industry day it had postponed during the shutdown. Get briefed on this program meant to lead to low-cost, high-frequency low earth orbit launch aircraft, on Nov. 6 in Arlington, VA.
* Likewise, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency rescheduled its Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) treaty escort mission to Oct. 29 in Lorton, VA. This is for work in chemical agent disposal facilities currently in construction in Colorado and Kentucky, not Syria!
US DoD Patent Patterns
* RAND Corporation gathered and analyzed swathes of data on the US military laboratory efforts – spread through many organizations in the services – and their patent application patterns.
NSA Row Erupts in France
* Newspaper Le Monde mostly publishes its content in French, but they have coverage in English of the NSA’s massive spying in France just revealed by another batch of documents they obtained from Edward Snowden. “It can be seen that over a period of thirty days – from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70,3 million recordings of French citizens’ telephone data were made by the NSA.” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius summoned the US ambassador to dress him down, just as US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris to start a week of meetings in Europe.
Tankers for Korea
* South Korea confirms they intend to start a bidding process for 4 tankers in February 2014, if approved by Parliament, and wrap up selection by the end of the year. They had already signaled that intent back in August.
China Moving Upmarket
* China’s 2012 armament exports where dominated by small arms sales to South Asian and South American countries, but their recent win for a big air defense contract with Turkey should be seen as a sign of a broader effort to move into big ticket sales worldwide.
Dreaming of Electric Sheep
* Georgia Tech hosted the 2013 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots last week. The video below shows some of (creepy) robots that were on display: