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“The event that we have coming up April 8 is going to be massive,” Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Will Roper said at a media roundtable at the Pentagon. Among the new test elements will be live-fire exercises such as taking down an unmanned aerial vehicle, a cruise missile shootdown, and service-wide activities taking place all across the country, including at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, Nellis AFB, Nevada, Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, and White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
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Space X’s Starlink satellites will participate “to a greater degree” in the April exercise, and hopefully connect to additional air- and land-based platforms, Roper said. The Air Force is in talks with Virgin Orbit about including the company’s LauncherOne two-stage orbital launch vehicle in the exercise. “It helps [the company] because they’re thinking through” concepts of operation, Roper said. “It helps us think about, how would the force be different if we’re able to launch satellites on demand?”
As a result of the December demonstration, Air Mobility Command is considering placing the GatewayONE translator on a KC-46A Pegasus aerial refueler, “and hanging it on the tanker so that the tanker can become a translator and has a different role on the battlefield,” he added. “That’s something that wouldn’t exist right now had the first demonstration not been done.”
Northrop Grumman has offered a battle management command and control (BMC2) prototype to the US Air Force (USAF) for use in the development of its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) Internet-of-Things (IoT) combat concept.
This prototype, called Distributed Autonomy/Responsive Control (DA/RC), was originally developed 15 years ago for the company’s work on the US Navy (USN) X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D) programme.
originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: RadioRobert
Satellites on demand. NIRTSats.