Details of the Ares I Upper Stage

The committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight is listening to Ares I team members describe how the rocket will work. They must convince the independent panel of experts that the rocket's design is safe and reliable, and that Ares I should be the vehicle the U.S. uses to send humans to the moon and eventually Mars.

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Russian Navy ends first stage of Nerpa sub trials in Far East

The first stage of new sea trials of Russia's Nerpa nuclear attack submarine, which was damaged in a fatal accident in previous tests, has been successfully completed, the Amur shipyard said on Monday.

The vessel resumed sea trials on July 10 in the Sea of Japan following extensive repairs.

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Self-Healing Wiring May Be Future Electrical Standard

elf-healing wire technology, developed as part of an FAA initiative to combat the problems associated with aging aircraft, has been licensed to Ohio-based Pinnacle Systems–its first commercial licensee. As part of a suite of research projects at the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) aimed at eliminating the time-consuming task of tracing wire faults, wire that can repair its own insulation after it is damaged was developed by research chemist Robert Kauffman.

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Air Force tests anti-ground C-130 laser

An Air Force C-130 incinerated a dummy ground target by firing a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser at White Sands Missile Range, N.M, during a June 13 test of the service’s Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), Boeing officials said.

“We fired the laser in-flight. We hit a target board on the ground,” said Gary Fitzmire, vice president of Boeing’s directed energy systems.

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Total Recall: Pentagon Looks to ‘Optimize’ Troops’ Minds

The U.S. military is racing to master the mind. Last year, Pentagon researchers kick-started a program to replicate a cat’s brain. In April, they requested proposals that would reproduce a monkey mind — and then test its neural pathways to understand brain damage. They’re even trying to create an entirely new model for human cognition that’s based on thermodynamics; your brain as heat energy.

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Organic LED

Silicon Valley-based SRI International and the Japanese firm SDK have produced an efficient organic light-emitting diode (OLED) light source that could one day replace incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs.

A combination of SDK's light-emitting polymer materials and SRI's cavity organic light-emitting diode (COLED) technology has enabled researchers to achieve an output of 30 lumen per watt for blue light – higher than any other reported polymer OLED device.

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Point Blank, DuPont launch new armor line

U.S. company Point Blank Solutions Inc. in collaboration with DuPont Protection Technologies announced the launch of new ballistic armor systems.

Point Blank Solutions announced the release of its Hi-Lite XP ballistic armor integrated with DuPont's Kevlar XP woven fabric technologies for a new protective body armor system. Tennessee-based Protective Apparel Corporation of America is also releasing its Perform XP armor system with the DuPont woven fabric.

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Raytheon's GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II Completes Captive Flight Testing

Raytheon Company completed a series of captive carry flight tests of its proposed solution for the GBU-53/B Small Diameter Bomb II competition, demonstrating the weapon's form-factored seeker is ready for guided test shots.

"The test series demonstrated our form-factored tri-mode seeker and guidance receiver navigator are ready to enter the engineering and manufacturing development phase," said Harry Schulte, vice president of Raytheon Missile System's Air Warfare Systems' product line. "We have proved the technical readiness of a superior and affordable solution."

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Navy Reveals Details of Submarine-Based Drones

Between scientists warning of autonomous killer robots and a Predator drone killing Osama bin Laden's son, news about killer robots has been eating up a lot of bandwidth lately. But most of that press has focused on the Air Force's Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Well, the Air Force needs to make some room in the spotlight, because the Navy's getting in on the act, too.

In an oddly revealing interview, Rear Admiral Mark Kenny, the head of the Navy's irregular warfare operations, not only stated that the Navy's submarines have been equipped with unmanned vehicles, but even detailed which vehicles and how they are used.

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Laser-Powered Lightcraft "At the Cusp of Commercial Reality"

Future business travelers may literally ride a laser to work. The U.S. and Brazilian Air Forces are experimenting with Lightcraft technology that could become part of your daily commute, using plain old air to fuel 45-minute transcontinental jaunts.

The design uses a ground-based laser to beam the Lightcraft skyward on a series of blast waves. A parabolic mirror on the back of the craft would capture and focus the pulsing laser beam so that it heats air to 5 times the sun's temperature, creating mini-explosions that propel human passengers or cargo to any point on the planet in under an hour, or into orbit.

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Nextreme and Lockheed cooperate on next-generation thermal management

Nextreme Thermal Solutions (Durham, NC), provider of microscale thermal and power management products for the electronics industry (see "Thin-film thermoelectric technology makes optoelectronics 'cool'"), and Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MD) entered into a cooperation agreement to develop new products based on Nextreme's thin-film thermoelectric materials. Lockheed Martin will use Nextreme's thin-film thermoelectric products and thermal and power management design services in solutions it is developing for government and civil applications. Lockheed Martin was recently in the news for its acquisition of Gyrocam Systems.

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Thinnest semiconductor laser holds promise for on-chip interconnects

Semiconductor lasers with thicknesses down to 80 nm have been built by researchers at Arizona State University (ASU; Tempe, AZ) and the Technical University of Eindhoven (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).1 The work opens up possibilities for using nanoscale lasers in optical integrated circuits to significantly improve the performance of computers and speed up Internet access.

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Fiber Lasers for Extreme Photons

The light sources powering the next-generation chipmaking technique, extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL), are too dim, according to industry experts. And that’s one of the main reasons why semiconductor manufacturers worry that the technology will not be ready to produce advanced chips a few years from now. But Almantas Galvanauskas, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, believes he has a way to boost their power by using a type of industrial laser called a fiber laser. He presented his research two weeks ago at the International Workshop on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography, in Honolulu.

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Lockheed Martin Rolls Out the F-35C

The U.S. Navy's first stealth fighter, F-35C rolled-out in a ceremony at Lockheed Martin's Ft. Worth TX facility July 28, 2009. Following the ceremonial roll-out the first F-35C, designated CF-1, will undergo a series of ground tests before its first flight, scheduled for late 2009. The aircraft is the ninth F-35 test aircraft to join the F-35 test fleet.

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Space Elevator Contest Held Up

A technical issue with a helicopter cable system is forcing the Spaceward Foundation to postpone the Space Elevator Power Beaming Challenge Games originally scheduled for this summer at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center.

The Spaceward Foundation, which conducts the competition as part of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, together with NASA, which is providing the $2 million prize money for this segment, said the problems cropped up during tests of the helicopter-mounted cable system last week.

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Future USAF Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Technology

Future United States Air Force UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) technology forms the subject of a recently-issued report covering the next four decades of envisaged US military airpower capabilities. The report - titled the 'Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047 - describes how UAVs are planned to figure within overall US military airborne capabilities, putting them into brand new contexts and giving them new roles such as air-to-air refuelling, the ability to operate in large scale air assaults and to operate autonomously, calling the shots in terms of deciding the decisive moment to unleash their weapons loads.

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Northrop Grumman Awarded Navy Contract to Study Air and Missile Defense Radar Concepts

Northrop Grumman Corporation has been awarded a $10 million firm-fixed price U.S. Navy contract to analyze and provide system concept studies for the Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), a next generation radar system planned for the U.S. Navy's CG(X) and Future Surface Combatant platforms.

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In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.

Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

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France Launches Minehunting UUV Effort

The Délégation Générale pour l'Armement (DGA), the French government's arms procurement office, has awarded a contract for an undisclosed amount to DCNS, ECA and Thales to study the use of unmanned underwater vehicles in mine countermeasures (MCM), DCNS said July 28.

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ASDS Mini-Sub Program Sinks, As Replacement Rises

In a program that began with great promise but soon spiraled out of control, Northrop Grumman has been building ASDS “Advanced SEAL delivery System” mini-subs as successors to the previous SDV (SEAL/Swimmer Delivery Vehicle) carried on US Benjamin Franklin class (SSBN-640) attack submarines.

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