Lifeboat Foundation

The US Navy will be taking its futuristic Railgun out of the lab where it has been tested for to past eight years. Over the next two years, railguns will be tested in open firing ranges and eventually at sea, where the futuristic electromagnetic gun will be able to demonstrate its full capacity to fire projectiles at targets 50–100 nautical miles (92 – 185 kilometers) away.

The Navy is evaluating two electromagnetic railgun models. A 32-megajoule prototype built by BAE Systems and the 32 megajoule Blitzer developed by General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS). The company has also developed a 3-megajoule railgun variant. In the future, the Navy plans to deploy railguns rated to 64-megajoule.

A railgun can deliver muzzle velocities greater than twice those of conventional guns. Using electromagnetic power, where magnetic fields created by strong electrical currents accelerate a sliding metal conductor between two rails, the railgun achieves muzzle speeds of more than Mach 7.5 without the use of chemical propellant.

Continue reading “Shipping containers full of capacitors will enable flexible railgun designs for shipboard and fixed or mobile land based railguns” »

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The military just unveiled a device that turns soldiers into Spider-Men.

US Navy paying D-Wave to train them on QC.

A division of the U.S. Navy intends to pay Canadian company D-Wave $11 million to learn how to use its quantum computing infrastructure, according to a federal filing posted online on Monday.

The unit seeking this training is the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, known as SPAWAR or SSC-PAC for short, which is headquartered in San Diego and has previously researched amphibious throwable robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, virtual reality, and many other technologies. The filing does not actually cover the cost of quantum computing hardware. But NASA has been allowing SPAWAR scientists to learn how to use the D-Wave machine that it operates with Google at the NASA Ames Research Center, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month.

Continue reading “U.S. Navy’s SPAWAR will pay D-Wave $11 million for quantum computer training” »

Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.

The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.

A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.

Continue reading “DARPA Speeds-up Work on ‘Soft Exosuit’ that will Strengthen US Soldiers” »

So, the US Military has developed a way to eliminate bad memories/ PTSD and another method to restore memories. Wish the US Government would make their minds up on this one — LOL.

A scientist in DARPA’s biological technologies offices explains how the agency is developing implants that could bring back memories.

US Government may have discovered a new method of safely getting rid of old chemical and other old stockpile weapons.

Getting rid of chemical weapons is one of the military’s most unpleasant duties. But in the future, it may be no more difficult than incinerating garbage, thanks to a team of DARPA-funded scientists who think they can turn some of the world’s deadliest poisons into harmless dirt.

Chemical weapons, including nerve agents and mustards, have been banned under international law since the 1990s, but many countries still harbor large stockpiles. In 2013, a horrific chemical weapons attack in Syria—called the Ghouta attack —claimed hundreds of civilian lives, prompting the international community to intervene and eliminate the country’s chemical weapons reserves. By August 2014, 600 metric tons of deadly weapons had been destroyed (in the military parlance, “demilitarized”) aboard the US Navy vessel MV Cape Ray.

Continue reading “DARPA Has a Simple Plan to Clean Up the World’s Deadliest Weapons” »

Another Nvidia success.

A game-changing technology from Pentagon researchers could save the lives of soldiers fighting in urban environments.

Someone could trigger these UAVs to emerge from the ocean depths from thousands of miles away.

By Jennings Brown.

Excellent read about future Commerce in Space — could we see an Amazon or a HomeDepot in space?

In space there are no service stations to pull into and get replacement parts for your satellite. Nor is there a towing service if a satellite is in the wrong orbit, a construction contractor to help you build structures, or a “Space Depot” for those who wish to “do-it-themselves” on orbit. In other words, we still operate within a first-generation space industrial enterprise, i.e. all commerce is on Earth, and we only focus on bits (data) coming from monolithic things that go up (i.e., satellites), which eventually die or just come down with no chance of repair or reuse.

Today the commercial space industry focuses exclusively on applications that support launching science, exploration, military, or established earth-bound data communication or delivery services, focusing data to/from space. The lack of technology to support or “markets” to enter has resulted in nebulous, unconsolidated and without-a-critical-mass investment in space-based infrastructure, industrialization, space resources (survey and process maturation) and global utility creation and delivery applications in space. However, all that may finally be changing.

Continue reading “From data to service: the transition to ‘space-to-space’ commerce” »