Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution calling for a halt to one type of anti-satellite (ASAT) testing, a largely symbolic move intended to support broader space sustainability initiatives.

The resolution, introduced by the United States and several other nations, was approved by the U.N. General Assembly Dec. 7 among dozens of other resolutions on arms control and related topics with little discussion or debate. A total of 155 nations voted in favor of the resolution, with 9 voting against it and 9 others abstaining.

The resolution calls on countries to halt destructive testing of direct-ascent ASAT weapons, citing concern that such creates large amounts of debris that threaten the safety of other satellites. An example is the November 2021 ASAT test by Russia that destroyed the Cosmos 1,408 satellite, creating nearly 1,800 tracked pieces of debris and likely many more objects too small to be tracked. About a third of the tracked debris from that test was still in orbit nearly a year later.

It reached speeds greater than Mach 5, maybe even Mach 20.

The U.S. Air Force has successfully completed the test of its full prototype operational hypersonic missile at the Elgin Air Force Base off the Southern California coast on December 9, a press release said. The hypersonic missile, dubbed Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), met all objectives of the test flight.

Designed and developed by Lockheed Martin, ARRW, an air-to-ground missile, is a boost-glide vehicle that can strike “fixed, high-value and time-sensitive targets”, as per the press release. The missile can be carried under the wing of an aircraft such as the B-52 bomber.

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Decades-old US silos holding Minuteman III missiles that have been a key nuclear deterrent since the 1970s will be assessed by robots that can crawl straight up walls.

“The ARRW team successfully designed and tested an air-launched hypersonic missile in five years,” Brig. Gen. Jason Bartolomei, program executive officer for the Air Force’s armament directorate. “I am immensely proud of the tenacity and dedication this team has shown to provide a vital capability to our warfighter.”

Hypersonic weapons can travel at speeds greater than Mach 5 and maneuver mid-flight, making them much harder to track and shoot down than conventional ballistic missiles and capable of penetrating defenses. Russia and China have invested heavily in developing their own hypersonic weapons, and the U.S. military has faced pressure, including from lawmakers, to show more progress on its own hypersonic capabilities.

The successful test of the operational ARRW prototype continues a series of successful tests for the program in 2022, marking a turnaround from a disappointing 2021 that left the effort in trouble.

Christopher Nolan revealed to Total Film magazine that he recreated the first nuclear weapon detonation without CGI effects as part of the production for his new movie “Oppenehimer.” The film stars longtime Nolan collaborator Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading figure of the Manhattan Project and the creation the atomic bomb during World War II. Nolan has always favored practical effects over VFX (he even blew up a real Boeing 747 for “Tenet”), so it’s no surprise he went the practical route when it came time to film a nuclear weapon explosion.

“I think recreating the Trinity test [the first nuclear weapon detonation, in New Mexico] without the use of computer graphics was a huge challenge to take on,” Nolan said. “Andrew Jackson — my visual effects supervisor, I got him on board early on — was looking at how we could do a lot of the visual elements of the film practically, from representing quantum dynamics and quantum physics to the Trinity test itself, to recreating, with my team, Los Alamos up on a mesa in New Mexico in extraordinary weather, a lot of which was needed for the film, in terms of the very harsh conditions out there — there were huge practical challenges.”

According to press releases, it has now been confirmed that the UK will team up with Japan and Italy to develop a new 6th-generation jet fighter called “Tempest.”

Britain, Italy, and Japan said in a joint statement, as reported by Defense News, that they would be working together to create a new sixth-generation fighter. Before this release, there were rumors of such a project under the so-called Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), but nothing more was known beyond the fact that the partners wanted to have the fighter ready by 2035.

Continue reading “Team Tempest: The UK, Japan, and Italy will work together to make a new 6th-gen fighter” »

The UK government has announced it will collaborate with Italy and Japan to develop the Tempest, a new fighter jet featuring a plethora of futuristic technologies.

A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

In a press conference that Ars attended today, Department of Defense officials discussed the benefits of partnering with Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon to build the Pentagon’s new cloud computing network. The multi-cloud strategy was described as a necessary move to keep military personnel current as technology has progressed and officials’ familiarity with cloud technology has matured.

Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Skinner said that this Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract—worth $9 billion—would help quickly expand cloud capabilities across all defense departments. He described new accelerator capabilities like preconfigured templates and infrastructure as code that will make it so that even “people who don’t understand cloud can leverage cloud” technologies. Such capabilities could help troops on the ground easily access data gathered by unmanned aircraft or space communications satellites.

“JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will provide the DOD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) at the speed of mission, at all classification levels, from headquarters to the tactical edge,” DOD’s press release said.