DARPA

DARPA has announced the four companies that will compete for the contract to design, build and test an X-Plane demonstrator capable of high-speed cruise, hover and VTOL for its Speed and Runway Independent Technologies (SPRINT) project.

DARPA has contracted Raytheon to develop a practical version of a revolutionary air-breathing rotating detonation engine called Gambit, which would have no moving parts and could lead to lighter missiles with longer ranges at lower cost.

Boeing has been tapped by DARPA to develop and test the technology that will be required to build a prototype to intercept hypersonic missiles in the upper atmosphere as part of the agency's four-year Glide Breaker program.

DARPA and General Atomics are readying their fighter-launched LongShot missile-firing drone for flight testing. The aircraft is part of an effort to haul 4th-generation fighter planes into the 21st-century aerial battlefield.

In a move that sounds like the wildest of science fiction, DARPA has announced its new Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay (POWER) program that plans to use lasers relayed by airborne platforms to power machines thousands of miles away.

The first crewed mission to Mars may get there and back a bit faster and safer if a contract DARPA has awarded to Lockheed Martin bears fruit. The contract is to rapidly advance and fabricate a nuclear thermal rocket engine scheduled to fly by 2027.

DARPA has announced its new Anesthetics for Battlefield Care (ABC) program, which is aiming to develop a new combat anesthesia that can be applied to casualties in the field without requiring specialized medical training or complex monitoring apparatus.

Taking a plot point from the 1990 Sean Connery movie thriller The Hunt for Red October, DARPA is working on a super-silent submarine drive that has no moving parts and provides propulsion through the water using magnets and electricity.

DARPA has chosen two radically different designs from teams led by General Atomics and Aurora Flight Systems for development of the Liberty Lifter Seaplane Wing-in-Ground Effect full-scale seaborne strategic and tactical heavy lift demonstrator.

A DARPA-led project has successfully completed the final test of Lockheed Martin's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) missile. Powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet, the craft reached a speed in excess of Mach 5 over a course 300 nm.

NASA and DARPA have agreed to develop and test a nuclear rocket engine in space as soon as 2027. Using a nuclear reactor as its power source, it would outperform chemical rockets and greatly reduce the time for the first crewed Mars mission.

DARPA has awarded Aurora Flight Sciences a phase 2 contract for its CRANE (Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors) program, following wind tunnel testing of a small-scale X-plane that uses compressed air bursts instead of control surfaces.