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Ahead of this years' Farnborough International Airshow, engineers and scientists at BAE Systems and the University of Glasgow have outlined their current thinking about military aircraft and how they might be designed and manufactured in the future.
The concepts have been developed collaboratively as part of BAE Systems' 'open innovation' approach to sharing technology and scientific ideas which sees large and established companies working with academia and small technology start-ups.

During this century, the scientists and engineers envisage that small Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) bespoke to specific military operations, could be 'grown' in large-scale labs through chemistry, speeding up evolutionary processes and creating bespoke aircraft in weeks, rather than years.

A radical new machine called a Chemputer™ could enable advanced chemical processes to grow aircraft and some of their complex electronic systems, conceivably from a molecular level upwards. This unique UK technology could use environmentally sustainable materials and support military operations where a multitude of small UAVs with a combination of technologies serving a specific purpose might be needed quickly. It could also be used to produce multi-functional parts for large manned aircraft.

Flying at such speeds and high altitude would allow them to outpace adversary missiles. The aircraft could perform a variety of missions where a rapid response is needed. These include deploying emergency supplies for Special Forces inside enemy territory using a sophisticated release system and deploying small surveillance aircraft.

“The world of military and civil aircraft is constantly evolving and it's been exciting to work with scientists and engineers outside BAE Systems and to consider how some unique British technologies could tackle the military threats of the future” said Professor Nick Colosimo, a BAE Systems Global Engineering Fellow.

Regius Professor Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow, and Founding Scientific Director at Cronin Group PLC – who is developing the Chemputer™ added; ‘This is a very exciting time in the development of chemistry. We have been developing routes to digitize synthetic and materials chemistry and at some point in the future hope to assemble complex objects in a machine from the bottom up, or with minimal human assistance. Creating small aircraft would be very challenging but I’m confident that creative thinking and convergent digital technologies will eventually lead to the digital programming of complex chemical and material systems.’

BAE Systems has developed some of the world’s most innovative technologies and continues to invest in research and development to generate future products and capabilities.

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Jura said:

oh ...
Report of active shooter at Joint Base Andrews

it's most recent (dated 10:06 a.m. EDT June 30, 2016):

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The Navy and Raytheon are set to start testing the AN/SPY-6(v) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) at the service’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii, the company’s AMDR program director told USNI News on Thursday.

The company and the service have installed a production representative face from the S-band volume search on a specialized testing tower at the PMRF, Raytheon’s Tad Dickenson said in a telephone interview.

“Last week we did initial light off at low power of the array and are just now working to graduate up to full power and head toward satellite tracking by the end of summer,” he said.
“Throughout the next 12 months – ending in the summer of 2017 – we will be doing live fire, anti-air warfare and ballistic missile defense testing.”

The radar face on the tower is paired with a Northrop Grumman X-band AN/SPQ-9B for the testing – the same pairing that will be used on the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers. The first Flight III will be awarded to

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“We should being long lead material before the end of the year for the first FY 2016 ship and we’ll be seeing an award option for the entire array system for the first ship — following Milestone C which will be the end of Fiscal Year 2017,” he said.
“Currently the program is nearing 80 percent complete and the majority of all the design is completed. We still have a couple of software builds to complete which give the final capabilities.”

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An artist’s conception of the AMDR AN/SPY-6(v) radar onboard an Arleigh Burke Flight III guided missile destroyer (DDG-51). Raytheon Image

The yearlong testing program in Hawaii will be followed by combat system validation at the Navy’s Surface Combat Systems Center (SCSC) on Wallops Island.

Part of the testing regime at Wallops will include integration with the service’s networked Naval Integrated Fire Control Counter Air (NIFC-CA) targeting concept, Dickenson said.

The radar promise to provide a 30-times boost in sensitivity over the current Lockheed Martin AV/SPY-1D radars found on current Burkes, the Navy has said.
Raytheon won a $363 million development contract for

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.

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Jura said:

LOL I think in the past here I kinda criticized "A Raytheon-made Sea-Based X-band radar" mentioned below:
Homeland Missile Defense System Successful in Non-Intercept Flight Test

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If North Korea ever unleashed nuclear-armed missiles against America, the defense of U.S. cities and towns would depend to no small degree on something called a divert thruster.

These small rocket motors would be counted on to keep U.S. anti-missile interceptors on target as they hurtled through space toward the incoming warheads.

If the thrusters malfunctioned – and they have a record of performance problems – an interceptor could veer off-course, allowing a warhead to slip through. The consequences could be catastrophic.

So a lot was at stake when the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency conducted the first flight test of a new and supposedly improved version of the thruster on Jan. 28.

An interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was to make a close fly-by of a mock enemy warhead high above the Pacific. The interceptor’s four attached thrusters would provide precision steering.

The missile agency issued a news release that day touting a “successful flight test.” The agency’s lead contractors were no less effusive. Aerojet Rocketdyne Inc., maker of the thrusters, said the new model “successfully performed its mission-critical role.”

Raytheon Co., which assembles the interceptors, said the “successful mission proved the effectiveness of a recent redesign of the … thrusters, which provides the control necessary for lethal impact with incoming threats.”

In fact, the test was not a success, the Los Angeles Times has learned. One of the thrusters malfunctioned, causing the interceptor to fly far off-course, according to Pentagon scientists.

The mishap raises fresh questions about the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, the network of ground-launched interceptors that is supposed to protect the United States against a nuclear attack.

The system, known as GMD, has cost taxpayers more than $40 billion since it was declared operational in 2004. It is being expanded at a rapid pace

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.

In carefully scripted tests, the system has failed to intercept and destroy mock warheads about half the time.

Project engineers for the Jan. 28 test had planned for the interceptor to fly within a narrow “miss distance” of its target to test the new thrusters’ effectiveness.

That is not what happened. The closest the interceptor came to the target was a distance 20 times greater than what was expected, said the Pentagon scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified.

“The mission wasn’t successful,” one of the scientists said. “Did the thruster perform as expected? No, it did not provide the control necessary for a lethal impact of an incoming threat.”

A second scientist said the claims of success by the Missile Defense Agency and the contractors were “hyperbole, unsupported by any test data.”

Asked for comment by The Times, the agency acknowledged, for the first time publicly, that a problem surfaced during the Jan. 28 exercise.

“There was an observation unrelated to the new thruster hardware that has been investigated and successfully root-caused,” the agency said in a written response to questions. “Any necessary corrective actions will be taken for the next flight test.”

Among aerospace scientists, “root cause” refers to the source of a system failure or malfunction. It is typically identified through an exhaustive review by an expert panel called a “failure review board.”

The agency statement did not offer any detail on the “observation,” or explain what went wrong during the test that required an investigation. It did say that “the new thrusters performed as designed” and within “critical performance parameters.”

Asked whether any of the thrusters stopped working at any time during the exercise, the agency declined to comment.

It also declined to say how close to its target the interceptor was supposed to fly, or how close it had actually flown. That information is “classified and not releasable,” the statement said.

A spokeswoman for Raytheon referred questions to the missile agency. Aerojet Rocketdyne representatives did not respond to emailed questions.

In appearances before Congress, the agency’s director, Vice Adm. James D. Syring, has expressed no concerns about any aspect of the test, including the thrusters’ performance.

On April 13, he told a Senate defense appropriations subcommittee that the test had “enhanced” the agency’s confidence in the GMD system.

Syring was unavailable to comment for this article, according to an agency spokesman.

When Syring was delivering his positive message on Capitol Hill, engineers and technicians at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., were analyzing data from the test to figure out what went wrong, according to the Pentagon scientists interviewed by The Times.

The scientists said a possible culprit is a faulty solenoid valve — a circuit that supplies power to the thrusters from the interceptor’s battery.

If that circuit turns out to have caused the malfunction, it would represent a serious technical problem in the complex web of components that the thrusters depend on. A breakdown at any point can spell failure.

Philip R. Coyle III, a former director of operational testing for the Defense Department, said any malfunction involving the thrusters should prompt serious concern.

“It tells you that there is a problem that you really need to get your arms around, or else it’s going to bite you,” Coyle said.

The GMD system is intended to thwart a “limited” nuclear attack by a non-superpower adversary. Its roots go back to the Clinton administration, when concern began to mount over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Rocket interceptors based at Vandenberg, along the Santa Barbara County coast, and Ft. Greely, Alaska, form the backbone of the system.

There are 30 operational interceptors – four at Vandenberg and 26 at Ft. Greely. With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama administration is moving ahead with plans to add 14 by the end of 2017, all at Ft. Greely.

America’s defense against a massive nuclear attack by Russia or China relies on deterrence—the assumption that none of the major nuclear powers would launch a first strike, for fear of a devastating counterattack.

The GMD system emerged out of concern that a rogue state with unstable leadership might not be deterred by the threat of retaliation. Advocates said the United States needed a homeland defense system that could intercept and destroy incoming warheads -- a feat that has been compared to hitting one speeding bullet with another.

The Clinton administration funded research and testing for what became GMD, but declined to make the system operational, saying more work was needed to overcome technical problems.

That changed after President George W. Bush took office in 2001. As a candidate, he had called for deploying a domestic missile defense system without delay. In 2002, Bush ordered “an initial set of missile defense capabilities” to be put in place within two years.

To accelerate deployment, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld exempted the missile agency from the Pentagon’s standard procurement rules and testing standards.

Government officials and independent scientists have traced the system’s difficulties to the breakneck pace at which components were designed, produced and fielded.

In response to an attack, rocket interceptors would rise from their underground silos and climb toward the upper atmosphere. At the edge of space, the 5-foot-long, 150-pound interceptors, known as “kill vehicles,” would separate from their boost rockets and fly independently at 4 miles per second.

This is where the divert thrusters would play a crucial role. Four of them are attached to each kill vehicle.

The thrusters would burn liquid propellant and expel exhaust to point the kill vehicle toward its target. As the interceptor closed in on a warhead, the thrusters would fire repeatedly, making high-precision adjustments to ensure a successful “kill.”

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That is how it’s supposed to work. In fact, the thrusters have performed erratically. They are prone to uneven, rough combustion of fuel — akin to a coughing engine in an old car. The resulting vibrations are believed to have caused or contributed to some of the GMD system’s test failures.

The thrusters came under heightened scrutiny after interceptors failed to hit their targets in successive test flights in 2010.

The missile agency blamed the first failure on a missing fastener in the thruster assembly. This caused “an inflight failure of one of the … divert thrusters,” according to the Pentagon’s office of operational testing and evaluation.

A failure review board attributed the second miss to severe vibrations from the thrusters, which disrupted the interceptor’s internal guidance system.

In 2011, the missile agency and its contractors began designing a new version, an “alternate divert thruster,” that would burn fuel more smoothly.

The agency intended to retrofit existing interceptors with the new model -- and also install it in the 14 new interceptors to be deployed at Ft. Greely.

But the new thruster failed a ground test in late 2013, and officials scrapped those plans.

Instead, they said they would leave the original, flawed model in the 30 currently deployed interceptors. As for the 14 new interceptors, officials decided to equip the first four with the old thruster and put the redesigned version in the remaining 10.

Driving these decisions was the tight timetable for expanding the system to 44 interceptors by the end of 2017, according to government auditors and independent scientists.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, faulted agency officials for rushing the engineering work on the new thrusters and

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In March 2014, a panel of outside experts appointed by the missile agency recommended that each of the redesigned thrusters, or a sampling, be subjected to rigorous, “hot-fire” testing before being installed in interceptors. The motors would be revved up on the ground to see whether they burned smoothly and delivered sufficient propulsion.

But the testing might have slowed the expansion of the interceptor fleet, and agency officials rejected the recommendation. The GAO

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, saying that forgoing the tests “increases the risk for reliability issues going undetected.”

In December 2014, Syring said the redesigned thrusters would be put through their paces in an upcoming launch. The exercise, he said, would show whether engineers had eliminated the “vibration and oscillation” that had undermined the GMD system’s performance.

“If we’re going to 44 [interceptors] by 2017, we must remain dedicated to making those 44 as effective as possible,” Syring told a defense policy conference in Washington.

Nine days before the test flight — ultimately scheduled for Jan. 28 of this year — Syring again underlined its importance.

The “primary objective,” he told a gathering of defense specialists, was to “fully flush out and fully test” the new thruster and find out whether the redesign had fixed its “fundamental problem.”

At 1:57 p.m. on that sunny Thursday, a three-stage rocket and its attached kill vehicle rose amid a fiery plume from a silo at Vandenberg, a scene framed by the Pacific on one side and the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains on the other.

Minutes earlier, a C-17 military transport flying west of Hawaii had launched a mock enemy missile into space.

The test involved hundreds of technicians and support staff stationed on vessels in the Pacific and at various military installations. Land and sea-based radars were mobilized to track the target. Commercial ships and aircraft were excluded from thousands of square miles of airspace and sea lanes as a precaution. The total cost of the exercise: about $250 million.

In an attempted intercept, the kill vehicle tries to crash into its target. In this test, the kill vehicle would instead execute a series of intricate maneuvers.

One of the four thrusters stopped working during the maneuvers, and the interceptor peeled away from its intended course, according to the Pentagon scientists. One of them said the thruster remained inoperable through the final, “homing phase” of the test, when the kill vehicle was supposed to make a close fly-by of the target.

Within a few hours, the missile agency and the contractors had issued their news releases, using the words “success” and “successful” repeatedly. The contractors’ releases were approved in advance by the agency, according to its then-spokesman, Richard Lehner.

On April 14, Syring told a House Armed Services panel that the flight test had been “successfully executed,” adding: “We were able to exercise fully the new alternate divert thruster.”

Syring was not asked, nor did he volunteer, how the thrusters performed.

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Raytheon’ Delivers SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar for Live Target Testing

TEWKSBURY, Mass. — Raytheon Co. delivered the first AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) array to the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii ahead of schedule, the company announced in a July 7 release.

The array is being installed according to plan, in preparation for first radar light-off this month. SPY-6(V) is the next-generation integrated air and ballistic missile defense radar for the U.S. Navy, filling a critical capability gap for the surface fleet.

This delivery is the latest in a series of milestones achieved on time or ahead of schedule, as SPY-6(V) advances through the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase, which is now close to 80 percent complete. In less than 30 months, the SPY-6(V) array completed design, fabrication and initial testing. Soon to transition to Low-Rate Initial Production, SPY-6(V) remains on track for delivery in 2019 for the first DDG 51 Flight III destroyer.

“Several months of testing at our near-field range facility, where the array completed characterization and calibration, have proven the system ready for live target tracking,” said Raytheon’s Tad Dickenson, AMDR program director. “The array was the last component to ship. With all other components, including the back-end processing equipment, delivered earlier and already integrated at the range, AMDR will be up and running in short order.”

“The extensive testing to date has demonstrated good compliance to the radar’s key technical performance parameters,” said U.S. Navy Capt. Seiko Okano, major program manager, Above Water Sensors. “The technologies are proven mature and ready for testing in the far-field range, against live targets, to verify and validate the radar’s exceptional capabilities.”

SPY-6(V) is the first scalable radar, built with RMAs [Radar Modular Assemblies] — radar building blocks. Each RMA is a standalone radar that can be grouped to build any size radar aperture, from a single RMA to configurations larger than currently fielded radars. All cooling, power, command logic and software are scalable, allowing for new instantiations without significant radar development costs.

Providing greater capability — in range, sensitivity and discrimination accuracy — than currently deployed radars, SPY-6(V) increases battlespace, situational awareness and reaction time to effectively counter current and future threats. Designed for scalability, reliability and ease of production, SPY-6(V) incorporates innovative and proven technologies, including RMAs, digital beamforming and Gallium Nitride, to offer exceptional radar capabilities to fit any ship for any mission.

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