🔷 Saved Rounds! 5.7.24

Welcome to Tuesday's Saved Rounds, where we send out all the goodies we couldn't squeeze into our Sunday newsletter.

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They Said It
“Right now, you and I can go to a Cabela’s, we can buy a radio, we can go to a trade show, put it out on a table, and we can say it’s a form of resilient communication, because there’s no standard.”

— Samir Mehta, L3Harris’s president of communication systems, on the lack of a definition or standard for ‘resilient communication’ in the Department of Defense, which is leading to confusion with the rise of commercial communications providers claiming resiliency. He further compared the call to action to something akin to NSA encryption standards.

pop culture footnote: Cabela's is a retailer that specializes in hunting/fishing/outdoors—like Bass Pro Shops (which owns Cabela’s).

Zoom in

Spend any time in defense tech, and inevitably, you’ll come across an “evil incumbent prime” vs. “disruptive start-up” narrative and how Lockmart/Boeing/Northrop/RTX have too much market share and too much power. But what if there were a way to cut costs, increase competition, and foster innovation….by boosting valuations of the primes?!?

Zoom in here on a completely counter-intuitive idea to reset the defense industry and prime the pump for innovation.

In that Number

22.5 hours

An Air Force project capstone recently demoed the ability to design, build, and fly autonomous drones in less than 24 hours. They did it in 22.5 hours.

A big enabler was software from startup Titan Dynamics, which permits ultra-rapid attribute-based designing of drones for 3D printing.

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Saved Rounds

• Aurora Flight Sciences was selected by DARPA to build its proposed high-speed VTOL X-plane as part of the SPRINT program  

• AeroVironment introduced a quick-connect autonomy retrofit kit for its drone products that includes computer vision and multi-agent autonomy

• Sikorsky plans to pitch its X2 coaxial high-speed helicopter design for NATO’s Next Generation Rotorcraft Capability (NGRC) program

• SES is acquiring rival satellite operator Intelsat for $3.1B, merging 2 of the major GEO satellite operators

• Boeing’s O3b mPOWER satellites began service with SES for broadband communication

• The UK plans to deploy its first domestically made hypersonic cruise missile by 2030

• BlueHalo and Kraken are partnering to integrate autonomy into maritime drones

• The Pentagon’s floating pier for Gaza will cost $320m

• Special Aerospace Services acquired Willbrook Solutions to expand its defense and intel analytical services

• Lockheed Martin and Howmet settled their lawsuit over F-35 titanium

• The Marine Corps is transforming an unspecified Air Force missile into a long-range attack weapon for the AH-1Z attack helicopter to strike moving targets 150+ miles ways

• Primoco UAV, a Czech Republic drone company (and one of the largest medium-sized drone makers) reported a 6X increase in sales in the past year

• Airbus unveiled a conceptual unmanned UH-72B helo to pitch to the Marine Corps for ship-to-shore cargo missions

• Boeing pitched the F-15EX for Saudi Arabia’s fighter competition

• The Pentagon selected 4 projects to go into production as part of its Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) initiative

• Northrop Grumman received a $7B B-2 bomber contract for modernization and sustainment support services

• Germany declared its Israeli Heron TP drones ready for operational use

• Aerostar announced one of its high-altitude stratospheric balloons has been aloft for 500 days

• Lockheed Martin withdrew its bid to acquire smallsat manufacturer Terran Orbital

• The Marine Corps is trialing mixed reality telemaintenance for field maintenance

• HII delivered its latest Virginia-class nuclear sub to the Navy

• Congress may revive the Defense Ventures fellowship program

• Germany’s Army is re-establishing its air defense force

• Israel retired its Patriot air defense systems in favor of indigenous systems

• DARPA released images of its Manta Ray underwater drone during in-water testing

• Northrop Grumman awarded a $387m RQ-4 Global Hawk contract for sustainment support for Italy, Japan, and Korea

• The UK is seeking a mobile launcher for aerial drones of varying configurations

• Boeing demoed the capability of a F/A-18 Super Hornet directly commanding an MQ-25 Stingray to facilitate aerial refueling

• Kaman's Kargo drone entered flight testing with the Marine Corps

• Millennium Space Systems won a $414m contract to build 8 satellites for SDA’s FOO Fighter program (A+ acronym)

• Tesseract Ventures is building nano-sized drones for US Special Operations

• The UAE’s chances of buying F-35s are getting slimmer amid warming China relations

• Honeywell released an AI-based platform that helps improve operations at aerospace manufacturing and maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) facilities

• DARPA selected Northrop Grumman and Umbra for the next phase of its DRIFT multi-static SAR satellite program

• Kuva Space won a hyperspectral data contract for the European Space Agency

• Australia added $100m to its Ukraine military aid, mostly for drones and air defenses

• The Coast Guard plans to assess a proliferated low-Earth orbit (pLEO) satellite system on one of its cutters in the Arctic region for broadband and GPS-alternate navigation

• Danti raised $5m to advance its AI-powered search engine that sifts through satellite imagery and drone photos

And finally…

• The Pentagon confirmed Russia is developing an ‘indiscriminate’ space nuke that could render Low Earth Orbit (LEO) unusable for a year

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