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In the midst of the nation’s dire financial crisis, the U.S. government has given a former astronaut half a million dollars to launch a seemingly delusional idea to send “explorers” to another star system. By the government’s own account it’s a “dream” that may never come true considering these facts published in the mainstream newspaper that reported the grant; trips to the moon take three days each way and Mars, the next planet over, takes a robotic flier nine months to reach. Based on those speeds the journey to the nearest neighboring star would take tens of thousands of years....

How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business How do you hide an airplane behind a bird? Very skillfully. Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor (ret.) flew the F-117 Nighthawk during the Bosnia Conflict, and in Stealth Fighter, he explains the history, operation, and soul America's most advanced stealth jet. While the United States had never embraced a defensive mindset and had only fielded one strategic SAM system to that point, the Nike-Hercules dating from the 1950s, and one real medium-range tactical system, the HAWK (homing all the way...

Last August Lockheed Martin, the Air Force, and DARPA tested the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2), which traveled 20 times the speed of sound and could hypothetically deliver a bomb anyplace on the planet inside one hour. It was a spectacular failure that was much publicized by the press, but no details about what went wrong were made available — until now.

Click here to watch DARPA and Boston Dynamic robot strut his stuff This video shows versions of DARPA and Boston Dynamics robots climbing stairs, walking on a treadmill and doing pushups. A modified platform resembling these robots is expected to be used as government-funded equipment (GFE) for performers in Tracks B and C of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/04/10.aspx). The GFE Platform is expected to have two arms, two legs, a torso and a head, and will be physically capable of performing all of the tasks required for the disaster...more at link..

DARPA to the robotics community: the challenge is on. Today the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is announcing a bold new program aiming to advance robotics technology for disaster response. The DARPA Robotics Challenge is offering tens of million of dollars in funding to teams from anywhere in the world to build robots capable of performing complex mobility and manipulation tasks such as walking over rubble and operating power tools. It all will culminate with an audacious competition with robots driving trucks, breaking through walls, and attempting to perform repairs in a simulated industrial-disaster setting. The winner takes all:...

Developed by Boston Dynamic as a tool to obtain information for the U.S. military, the Sand Flea, aptly named because of its incredible jumping ability, will hopefully aid soldiers in war zones by revealing potential threats, CNET reported. The robot has four wheels and weighs 11 pounds. It can jump up to 30 feet high when not actually in a forward moving motion by using CO2 fired from a piston. And it can jump 25 times in a row before having to be recharged, IEEE Spectrum reported. The Sand Flea has such precision, that when properly controlled, it can...

What payloads are aboard the Air Force’s X-37B space plane, which has been orbiting the Earth for more than a year, remains top secret. Gen. William L. Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, was peppered with questions about its purpose at a gathering of Washington, D.C.-based defense reporters March 22. He remained tight-lipped about the mystery spacecraft’s mission, but did say that the service has no intention of purchasing any more of the winged, reusable vehicles, which resemble a smaller version of NASA’s now returned space shuttle. “It is doing very well on orbit,” he said. “It has had...

One of the most top-secret Pentagon departments —the same that spawned America’s drones, military robots, electromagnetic guns and other sci-fi weaponry —is about to lose its top officer to Google. Regina Dugan oversaw the development of some of the US military’s most marvelous high tech accomplishments as director of Darpa, but the head of the DoD’s research lab is parting ways with the Pentagon to take on a role with Google. Not even three years after she took on the role as the first female director of the America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, Regina Dugan is now...

DARPA is unveiling a portable laser weapons system, HELLADS, which seems like something out of a sci-fi movie. The new laser application, created by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems with a custom power system from Saft Batteries, will help change the way the American military fights future wars. Current military laser systems are bulky contraptions which are mainly the size of a passenger jet, while the proposed DARPA weapon can fit on the back of a flatbed truck. The 150-kilowatt, solid state laser weapon is strong enough to take down drones or other aerial targets; a prototype is expected to be...

The U.S. military is researching ways for its troops can use their minds to remotely control androids who will take human soldiers' place on the battlefield. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon's hi-tech research arm, has earmarked $7million for research into the project, nicknamed Avatar. In the James Cameron movie, set far in the future, human soldiers use mind control to inhabit the bodies of human alien hybrids as they carry out a war against the inhabitants of a distant world. According to the Darpa's 2013 budget: 'The Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable...

This New Military Satellite Will Watch The Ground Like Nothing Else Ever Before Robert Johnson Dec. 18, 2011, 6:56 AM The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that its plans to pick up Scud missile launches from space in well underway. The agency responsible for the new technology used by the military awarded a contract to Bell Aerospace for work on its Membrane Optic Imager Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) program. Graham Warwick from Aviation Week reports MOIRE will park in space over the earth, and once there will unleash a "micron-thin diffractive-optics membrane" to form a 65-foot super-thin lens...

The high-tech researchers at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) say they're reviewing two "feasible" designs for a flying Humvee vehicle called the "Transformer." The tank-like machine is supposed to be able to take off and land vertically. The plan is for it to be operated by a person without flight training--or by no one at all, Aviation Week reports. AAI and Lockheed Martin have each submitted potential designs, in tandem with Piasecki Aircraft. AAI's prototype would weigh 7,500 pounds and combine traditional plane wings with a helicopter rotor on top. Lockheed Martin's design, above, is 500 pounds...

After five years behind locked doors, researchers at Lockheed Martin's Intelligent Robotics Laboratories in New Jersey have emerged with a working prototype of the "Samarai," a tiny DARPA-commissioned surveillance drone. The nano air vehicles (NAVs), modeled after falling Maple leaf seeds, are designed to be super light weight and agile for vertical lift off, hovering, and navigation in tight spaces. Like your favorite $5 Subway sammie, these surveillance bots are a foot long, but instead of being shoveled in your mouth, they're thrown like boomerangs into flight and controlled using a tablet app or a basic remote. These eyes in...

An unmanned hypersonic glider developed for U.S. defense research into super-fast global strike capability was launched atop a rocket early Thursday but contact was lost after the experimental craft began flying on its own, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said. There was no immediate information on how much of the mission's goals were achieved. It was the second of two planned flights of a Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2. Contact was also lost during the first mission. The small craft is part of a U.S. military initiative to develop technology to respond to threats at 20 times the speed of...

I never give time frames, because you never know where you'll have sufficient evidence to go public with a prosecution, " Mueller said.

When Local Motors won DARPA's XC2V private "crowd-sourced" competition about 14 weeks ago, they secured the right to build a prototype that could eventually serve as a next-gen military vehicle for U.S. armed forces. Not a lot of time! As you can see, however, they delivered. The fruits of their labor are on display above. Now, while a new kick-ass military vehicle is cool, the true goal of DARPA's competition was to see how much faster a crowd-sourced project could go from concept to prototype than traditional means. Turns out the answer was "much faster," with Local Motors completing their...

DARPA-developed Space Surveillance Telescope is supposed to see objects in deep space like no ground-based system before itYou can bet that if there are little red aliens running around on Mars or spaceships patrolling other planet in our solar system for that matter, a recently powered-up telescope built by the researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency might just be able to see them. The Air Force, which operates the DARPA-developed Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) says the telescope's design, featuring unique image-capturing technology known as a curved charge coupled device (CCD) system, as well as very wide field-of-view, large-aperture...

An interesting discussion started on tor-talk about Iran cracking down on "web dissident technology" before Cryptome posted, "TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker." There is an interesting post on Cryptome, TOR Made for USG Open Source Spying Says Maker, in which one of Tor's creators, Michael Reed, says to look at why the government created Tor from a common sense point-of-view instead of as conspiracy theory. The Tor Project is free software that lets people be anonymous online but it's not an invisibility cloak that's meant to protect privacy. People use Tor to be anonymous for all...

In the last three years, America’s military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest. It’s the latest episode in Washington’s four-decade dalliance with future-spotting programs. But if any of these algorithms saw the upheaval in Egypt coming, the spooks and the generals are keeping the predictions very quiet. Instead, the head of the CIA is getting hauled in front of Congress, making calls about Egypt’s future based on what he read in the press, and getting proven wrong hours later. Meanwhile, an array of Pentagon-backed social scientists, software...

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency, has given us a lot of strange gadgets over the years, and they’ll carry the streak right on with their SCENICC system, which is currently up for bid to create. It’s been a while since we heard from the folks out at DARPA, so it’s good to hear that they haven’t accidentally torn open a hole in the space-time continuum that caused them to fall backward into time and emerge on the other side in a parallel universe where velociraptors evolved from men or something. This time, we’re getting a look at the...

The vehicle would function just like a big four-wheel-drive Humvee when on the ground. But it would also be able to take off like a helicopter and fly away from trouble or to avoid enemy road blocks. Part of the American research and development money, worth £41 million and led by American defence and aerospace firm AAI, has gone to US firm Terrafugia which is already developing the world's first flying production car.  The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to develop a four person flyable and road worthy vehicle. Terrafugia, which has developed the Transition Flying Car...

Six months after the first test flight of the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle’s (HTV-2) which failed to meet its objective, an independent Engineering Review Board (ERB) identified the anomaly that caused the vehicle to exceeding the design flight control envelope. “No major changes to the vehicle or software are required to mitigate the first flight anomaly” said David Neyland, DARPA Tactical Technology Office director, “Engineers will adjust the vehicle’s center of gravity, decrease the angle of attack flown and use the onboard reaction control system to augment the vehicle flaps when HTV-2 flies next summer” Neyland added. DARPA is planning...

Sniper teams remain the most lethal force on the battlefield and have been credited with many successful engagements. As effective as sniper teams are however, their accuracy is fundamentally limited by random variables such as changing winds, muzzle velocity dispersions and round-to-round variations. The DARPA EXtreme ACcuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program aims to maximize the effectiveness of sniper teams while improving their safety. Through EXACTO, DARPA is developing a guided round capability in a .50 caliber platform. It is currently intended to provide snipers the capability to engage targets moving at much greater speeds, in tougher environmental conditions such as...

A sniper crouches near an open window and zooms in on his target, who sits a half-mile away. He peers through a scope and holds his breath, preparing to squeeze the trigger. But it’s windy outside, and he can't afford a miss. What to do? A new DARPA-funded electro-optical system will calculate the ballistics for him, telling him where to aim and ensuring a perfect shot, no matter the weather conditions. Lockheed Martin won a $6.9 million contract this week for the second phase of DARPA’s One-Shot system, which will provide direct observations of a target, measure every variable that...

It looks like our ever-diligent friends at DARPA have been busy creating a contingency plan for the OathKeeper movement. Thanks to a newly-developed pain modulator and behavior modification helmet, any US troops who decide they will obey the Constitution rather than the commands of the global puppet masters will now be getting some remote-controlled motivational persuasion. Reminiscent of the “Collar of Obedience” from Star Trek, this new helmet according to it’s creator William J Tyler at Arizona State University, will be able to non-invasively produce all the same effects that are now possible only through deep surgical implants. Employing a...

Just after the new year, DARPA put out a broad agency announcement requesting a flying car, specifically a one-to four-person, vertical takeoff and landing-capable vehicle that can negotiate off-road conditions as well as take to the skies. Today, Fort Worth-based AVX Aircraft has responded with a proposal, releasing some mock-ups of a dual-rotor, ducted-fan driven aircraft that’s also road-ready. AVX says the four-seater will be able to carry a 1,040-lb. payload 250 miles on a single tank of fuel, peaking at 80 miles per hour over land and 140 miles per hour in the air. It’s coaxial rotor design would...

As the venerable Tomahawk missile becomes too vulnerable for certain targets, naval observers have wondered why the Navy isn’t racing to fill the U.S. surface fleet’s 7,804 Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells with a new generation of anti-ship or fast land-attack munitions. Our wait is over. The big brains at DARPA are aiming to appropriate VLS cells for the Prompt Global Strike Mission. Meet ArcLight–the weapon that will change the way the world thinks about U.S. surface combatants: “The ArcLight program will design, build, and flight test a long range (> 2,000 nm) vehicle that carries a 100–200 lb payload(s)....

There is a wrinkle to Northrop Grumman's plans to demonstrate the autonomous aerial refuelling of one Global Hawk by another at high altitude - the tanker will fly behind the receiver. The tanker will be equipped with a refuelling probe and the receiver with a hose-drum unit - the opposite of the normal probe-and-drogue arrangement - and it is the tanker that will rendezvous with the receiver, maneuver into contact with the basket and "push" fuel forward to the receiver. Northrop says this "reverse" refueling arrangement reduces the cost of equipping a Global Hawk fleet for aerial refueling because fewer...

Northrop Grumman dropped out of the US Air Force tanker race nearly four months ago, but a new contract award revealed 1 July shows they remain in the aerial refueling market. In fact, Northrop plans to go one better than manned aerial refueling - the aerospace giant is now working with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on autonomous high-altitude refueling. Under a $33 million deal dubbed KQ-X, Northrop will demonstrate refueling with a pair of Block 10 RQ-4 Global Hawks the company is currently sharing with NASA The ability to refuel mid-air without the aid of a...

Computer scientists at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry for novel technologies and approaches that offer dramatic advances in high-performance military computer performance, and enable so-called extreme scale computing -- the notion of exceeding today's peta-scale computing to achieve one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. DARPA released a broad agency announcement Monday (DARPA-BAA-10-78) for the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) program to help develop tomorrow's high-performance computers to meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, dependability, and security in aerospace and defense computing for military...

Northrop Grumman has surpassed Phase I goals for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Revolution in Fiber Lasers (RIFL) program that seeks to mature fiber laser technology. As a result, the company has received a contract for Phase II. "This is an important step in the maturation of fiber laser technology," said Dan Wildt, vice president of Directed Energy Systems for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector. "By surpassing Phase I goals, we are in an excellent position for success in Phase II. Success in Phase II will create a powerful springboard for scaling fiber lasers to weapons-class performance levels."...

A recent United States Air Force scramjet test has hinted at a future where hypersonic vehicles streak through the sky at many times the speed of sound around the world, and perhaps even open up access to space. The experimental X-51A Waverider used a rocket booster and an air-breathing scramjet to reach a speed of Mach 5 and achieve the longest hypersonic flight ever powered by such an engine on May 26. That technology might not only deliver cargo quickly to different parts of the globe, but could also transform the space industry and spawn true space planes that take...

Following the longest flight yet by an air-breathing scramjet engine, the X-51A Waverider team is waiting to see whether the largely successful first launch of the hypersonic demonstrator will unlock funding for further development of the ­technology. The X-51A was launched over the Pacific on May 26, achieving scramjet ignition and acceleration, but the engine ran for only 200 sec. rather than the 300 sec. planned, and the vehicle reached around Mach 5 instead of accelerating beyond Mach 6. When it began to slow down and telemetry was lost, the flight was terminated and the vehicle destroyed, says Charles Brink,...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Lockheed Martin a $3.93 million contract to develop a rifle-scope attachment to enhance soldiers’ marksmanship capabilities. The Dynamic Image Gunsight Optic or DInGO system will enable soldiers to accurately view targets at varying distances without changing scopes or suffering a decrease in optical resolution. The system will enhance soldiers’ ability to accurately hit targets at a range of between three and 600 meters. DInGO automatically calculates the range with a low power laser rangefinder, digitally zooms in on it and accounts for environmental conditions such as wind using sensors built into the...

The US Air Force on Wednesday test launched a hypersonic cruise missile, with the vehicle accelerating to Mach 6 before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, officials said. The Air Force said the test flight of the X-15A Waverider lasted more than 200 seconds, the longest ever hypersonic flight powered by scramjet propulsion. The previous record was 12 seconds in a NASA X-43 vehicle. "We are ecstatic to have accomplished most of our test points on the X-51A's very first hypersonic mission," Charlie Brink, program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. "We...

AKRON, Ohio (AP) -- Lockheed Martin landed a $3.9 million contract to develop a rifle scope attachment meant to improve accuracy in the U.S. military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract authorized the development of system using a low-power laser rangefinder that adjusts for wind and other environmental conditions. The system is meant to allow soldiers to accurately view targets at varying distances without changing scopes. Scopes currently focus primarily on a single target range "impacting soldiers' effectiveness and survivability when engaging targets at different distances during a single mission," said Dan Schultz, a Lockheed Martin vice president.

After more than a century of popular sci-fi fantasies that feature deadly energy weapons, including War of the Worlds, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Trek and Star Wars, it looks like the ray gun has finally arrived in the real world. And even if the first ray guns out of the lab can barely fit on the bed of a 30-ton off-road truck rather than in a soldier’s palm, the novel, "speed-of-light" capabilities that lasers could bring to the battlefield has drawn the keen interest of the Pentagon brass, which spends about $400 million a year on directed-energy beam weapons....

The U.S. Air Force is set to successfully launch a Boeing X-51 for 300 seconds of hypersonic flight By the end of this month, the U.S. Air Force will begin a series of hypersonic tests that will send a scramjet into the atmosphere for about five minutes, at nearly five times the speed of sound. A scramjet is a supersonic combustion ramjet, while a ramjet is a jet engine using the engine's forward motion to compress air. If all goes as planned, this will be the first time that an aircraft will have flown at such speeds for more than...

Boeing Monday unveiled its fighter-sized Phantom Ray unmanned aircraft, which is scheduled to fly in December. "We are on a fast track, and first flight is in sight," Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, said in a news release, noting that the program just started two years ago. Phantom Ray, which evolved from the X-45C program, is designed to be a test bed for advanced technologies and support such missions as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic attack, strike and autonomous aerial refueling, Boeing said. The Phantom Ray is 36-feet long, with a 50-foot wingspan,...

More has emerged on the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Electric Laser on Large Aircraft (ELLA) program and, as anticipated, it's an effort to fit DARPA's Hellads laser into the weapons bay of a B-1B bomber to flight-test a high-power electric laser against tactical targets. General Atomics and Textron Systems are developing rival 150kW lasers under Hellads, with the goal of demonstrating a laser weapon system weighing less than 5kg/kW - substantially smaller and lighter than any previous airborne laser. Lockheed Martin is designing the laser weapon system module (LWSM), including power, cooling and beam director. Answers to bidder questions...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants an organization that develops spacecraft to join its System F6 satellite demonstration to show that a third-party payload can plug into an on-orbit network and share communications, processing and other functions across several spacecraft, reports Graham Warwick at Aviation Week’s Ares blog. A request for information for the third-party payload spacecraft module of the System Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying (F6) Spacecraft project was issued April 26. Responses are due by May 17. Having a non-DARPA satellite successfully connect to the network on orbit will be a key test of the System F6...

Cruise missiles are highly accurate but they have to be fired from a distance and they take a fair amount of time to get where they are going. So they are great for fixed targets, but their limitations have left the Pentagon scratching its head for half a decade trying to find something that can be launched and hit its target anywhere in the world within an hour or so. One of the key drivers behind this effort has been to develop a weapon that could kill a terrorist like Osama bin Laden anywhere in the world without having to...

A new U.S. launcher based on strategic missile hardware made its successful suborbital debut April 22, but the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) lost contact with the payload, an experimental hypersonic vehicle, soon thereafter, the agency said April 23. DARPA’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV)-2 was the first in a series of flight experiments meant to demonstrate technologies that could be the foundation for the United States’ next long-range conventional missile. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., atop a Minotaur 4 rocket. Built by Lockheed Martin Corp., the HTV-2 craft was supposed to glide over...

"Secret US Air Force unmanned space plane set for launch ...The 4.9-ton spacecraft - which has a wingspan of 4.27 meters and is 8.84 meters long - will be testing the long-duration ability of reusable space vehicles to stay in space for up to 270 days at an altitude of 200-800 km from earth before making an automatic landing at the Vandenberg Air force Base in California. The duration and exact nature of the Orbital Test Vehicle's mission have not been disclosed by the US Air Force Capabilities Office which oversees the project. Some space experts are calling its launch...

Air Force officials are scheduled to launch the U.S.'s newest and most advanced unmanned re-entry spacecraft April 21 at Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla. The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle will provide a flexible space test platform to conduct various experiments and allow satellite sensors, subsystems, components and associated technology to be efficiently transported to and from the space environment where it will need to function. The X-37B will also prove new technology and components before they are committed to operational satellites. The OTV is the first vehicle since NASA's shuttle orbiter that has the ability to return experiments to Earth...

Regina Dugan last summer took over as chief of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In a profile of the 47-year-old PhD in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, The New York Times noted that in recent years DARPA has lost some of the luster it gained over decades as an agency that develops cutting edge military technologies that also filter into the consumer and civilian arena. The agency has been criticized in recent years for shifting its focus too closely to tools and technologies that could have an immediate impact for U.S. soldiers on the front...

The first launch of the Minotaur IV Space Launch Vehicle is scheduled to occur April 20 at noon PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The Minotaur IV is the newest variant in the Minotaur family of rockets built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. It is a four-stage solid rocket vehicle consisting of three decommissioned Peacekeeper missile stages and a fourth commercially built stage developed by OSC. For this maiden lift-off, the rocket will be in a "lite" configuration consisting of only the first three stages and no fourth stage due to mission requirements. The payload for this first launch is...

secretive military spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle orbiter is undergoing final processing in Florida for launch on April 19. The Air Force confirmed the critical preflight milestone in a response to written questions on Thursday. The 29-foot-long, 15-foot-wide Orbital Test Vehicle arrived in Cape Canaveral, Fla., last month according to the Air Force. The OTV spaceplane was built at a Boeing Phantom Works facility in Southern California. Managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, the OTV program is shrouded in secrecy, but military officials occasionally release information on the the spaceplane's progress. "It is now undergoing spacecraft processing...

The U.S. Air Force is gearing up for the first of four planned test flights of a hypersonic aircraft designed to operate for much longer durations and cover far greater distances than previous platforms of its type. The maiden flight of the X-51 Waverider aircraft — the first U.S. hypersonic vehicle to fly in six years — is scheduled to take place later in March. Boeing Defense, Space & Security Systems of St. Louis has been developing the aircraft since 2003 on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The missile-shaped X-51 will be...

The U.S. Air Force is gearing up for the first of four planned test flights of a hypersonic aircraft designed to operate for much longer durations and cover far greater distances than previous platforms of its type. The maiden flight of the X-51 Waverider aircraft — the first U.S. hypersonic vehicle to fly in six years — is scheduled to take place later in March. Boeing Defense, Space & Security Systems of St. Louis has been developing the aircraft since 2003 on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The missile-shaped X-51 will be...