Happy 2025! Yes, it's been awhile - last time I posted in this blog was in 2023. A lot has happened since then in the world. But it was busy time for Ascent and for me.
After the successful demonstration at the final phase of the IDEaS Pop Up City contest at the Canadian Forces Base in Suffield Alberta, Ascent Systems Technologies was awarded a government contract to deliver Autonomous Environment Monitoring & Surveillance (AEMS) module to be tested by Transport Canada.
In the meantime:
In February 2024 I participated in the Canadian Trade Mission to the Caribbean organized by Decentralized Energy Canada. I have no doubt, the region, vulnerable to hurricanes, with its thousands of islands, many of which are with no infrastructure whatsoever, would benefit tremendously by having our autonomous environment monitoring modules (AEMS) deployed on some of the islands and, ideally, having a fleet of few ready to be deployed in case of emergency to provide communication and other critical services.
In May 2024 I attended CANSEC convention organized by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI).
In September 2024 I attended Canadian Emergency Preparedness and Climate Adaptation (CEPCA) in Ottawa. I am reflecting on it today as unprecedented wildfires rage in California and think of the role our AEMS technology could play in if not preventing but at least foreseeing it coming, had it been deployed.
Finally, in December I attended WiSEE 2024 - Conference on Wireless in Space and Extreme Environments at Daytona Beach, Florida. That was a very packed event, starting with the inspiring talk by Dr. Janet Cavandi, a former astronaut, who flew three times on the Space Shuttle, then in charge of training US astronauts, then working in Blue Origin, and now a space consultant. There were a number of very interesting sessions, including the IEEE LEO workshop, and a tour to the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. And, of course, I couldn't miss the opportunity to visit the Kennedy Space Centre.
2025 is promising to be even more busy and eventful. Looking forward to the first deployment of our AEMS module at the Transport Canada site in Ontario. Stay tuned for more updates.
LOUISVILLE, Colorado—The first Dream Chaser spaceplane built to go
into orbit is starting to look the part. Its foldable wings and fuselage
are covered in custom-fitted ceramic tiles to shield the spacecraft's
composite structure from the scorching heat of atmospheric reentry as it
flies back to Earth. It has its landing gear, and technicians buzz
around the vehicle to add the finishing touches before it leaves the
factory.
Inside the spacecraft, workers are installing the final ducts for the
environmental control system, which will make the pressurized
compartment within Dream Chaser livable for astronauts at the
International Space Station. The Dream Chaser's job, at least for now,
is to ferry cargo to and from the research complex orbiting some 240
miles (385 kilometers) above Earth. It will launch on top of a
conventional rocket, maneuver in space like a satellite, and then land
on a runway.
Across the hall from the production floor, Sierra Space has set up a
mission control room, where engineers will monitor and command the
spacecraft when it's in orbit. Down the hall, a mock-up is in place for
astronauts to train on how to enter the Dream Chaser and pack and unpack
cargo while it's docked at the station.
This was the scene Monday as Ars visited Sierra Space in Louisville,
Colorado, a suburb northwest of Denver. Several hundred workers took a
short break for congratulatory remarks from leaders at Sierra Space, a
subsidiary spun off of privately held Sierra Nevada Corp. in 2021.
Within a few weeks, the Dream Chaser spaceplane, named "Tenacity" and
carrying the serial number DC-101, will be out the door on the way to a
NASA facility in Ohio for a battery of tests to prove it can survive the
rigors of spaceflight.
Assembly complete
There are still some covers and tiles missing from the spacecraft.
Tom Vice, Sierra Space's CEO and a former executive at Northrop Grumman,
said engineers have intentionally left some of those components off
Dream Chaser for its next round of tests.
“We’re almost done with everything," said Angie Wise, Sierra Space's
chief safety officer. "We’re finishing all the closeout panels. We’re
essentially getting it ready for shipping. We’ve checked out the landing
gear. We’re going to put everything back in, stow it, and then move it
onto the (transport) fixture and get it out of here.”
Dream Chaser is undeniably a neat spaceship, and its story is
remarkable. It taps into a vision for the future of spaceflight with
roots at the dawn of the Space Age, combining the elements of rockets
with aircraft. NASA has been studying or flying spaceplanes almost
continuously since the agency's founding, and the military has been a
big fan of spaceplanes for close to 60 years. Virgin Galactic operates a
suborbital spaceplane for space tourists and research flights.
So Sierra Space isn't by itself in the spaceplane arena.
Nevertheless, the company stands alone in its persistence in an industry
that has recently prioritized capsule-shaped spacecraft or
outside-the-box designs like SpaceX's reusable Starship rocket. Dream
Chaser will be the first commercial spaceplane capable of orbital
flight.
“We are introducing the world's first revolutionary space line," Vice
said. "This will change how we travel from Earth to space and back
again.”
Sierra
Space says its Dream Chaser will provide its cargo a gentle ride back
to Earth at no more than 1.5 Gs. This is useful for animal specimens and
other sensitive payloads. Dream Chaser will also deliver payloads
closer to the labs that analyze experiment results.
“Plunging into the ocean is awful," Vice said. "Landing on a runway is really nice."
Dream Chaser is about a quarter of the size of a space shuttle
orbiter, with roughly half of the shuttle's habitable volume. It's about
30 feet (9 meters) long, with a wingspan of 23 feet (7 meters). Those
wings fold up, like the wings of a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier,
to fit inside the payload envelope of its rocket. The first Dream Chaser
missions will lift off on United Launch Alliance Vulcan rockets from
Cape Canaveral, Florida, but Sierra Space says its spaceplane can fly on
different launch vehicles.
While the spaceplane itself is designed for a minimum of 15 flights,
it features an add-on cargo module that is not reusable. This
pressurized cargo pod, named "Shooting Star," has solar arrays that will
unfurl in orbit to generate power. It's attached to the rear of Dream
Chaser and will be the connecting point between the spaceplane and the
International Space Station.
All told, Dream Chaser can haul up to 12,000 pounds (5,500 kilograms)
of cargo to the station. The spaceplane's return cargo capacity is
about 4,000 pounds (1,850 kilograms), and the expendable Shooting Star
cargo module, which will be jettisoned at the end of the mission to burn
up in the atmosphere, can dispose of several tons of trash from the
space station.
Key tests still ahead
Dream Chaser's next stop after leaving Sierra Space's factory will be
NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum
Brook Station. The spacecraft will travel by road from Colorado, but
Sierra Space is keeping its route and shipment date secret for security
reasons. Wise said the spacecraft will stay at the Ohio test facility
for one to three months, depending on how the testing goes.
The disposable cargo module for the first Dream Chaser flight to the
space station has already departed Sierra Space's factory for Ohio. Once
the Tenacity spaceplane arrives there, ground teams will connect the
two segments of the Dream Chaser cargo freighter and run them through
integrated tests. Those will include vibration and acoustic tests to
check that the spacecraft can withstand the shaking and sound of a
rocket launch. Sierra Space will also place the spacecraft inside a
giant thermal vacuum chamber.
"We’re going to take it down to vacuum and put it through the highs
and lows of the temperature extremes it’s going to see," Wise said.
Then, if everything checks out, the spacecraft will ship out to
NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Sierra Space says the first
Dream Chaser flight to the space station is currently slated for April,
but there are risks to the schedule. The first flight of a new
spacecraft is typically susceptible to delays, and Sierra Space is no
stranger to this.
Sierra Space will put its spaceplane on the second flight of United
Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, which is still awaiting its first test
flight. The Dream Chaser team will be watching closely as ULA launches
its first Vulcan rocket, a mission now slated for December. The third schedule uncertainty, Wise said, is when the space station will have a port available to receive Dream Chaser.
NASA
engineers are reviewing Sierra Space data products, and government and
contractor teams are performing joint tests to ensure it's safe for
Dream Chaser to approach the space station, home to seven people. Wise
said Sierra Space is in Phase 3 of NASA's three-part safety review
process.
"We just finished up a major milestone where we and NASA looked at
all the flight control products for both Dream Chaser and the ISS," Vice
said. He told Ars he doesn't expect any hangups in NASA's reviews as
Sierra Space closes in on launch.
When it finally reaches orbit, Dream Chaser will go through several
more technical gates before NASA gives the green light to approach the
space station.
NASA wants to ensure the spacecraft can maintain control and respond
to emergency commands from the space station crew. Assuming it meets
those requirements, the spaceplane will fly underneath the station and
approach tail-first from below, then halt a little more than 30 feet (10
meters) from the complex, close enough for the Canadian robotic arm to
reach out, grapple it, and berth it an open port.
“There are going to be a series of challenges. We're a first flight
of a new design of a spacecraft," said Jeff Davis, Sierra Space's lead
flight director for the first Dream Chaser test flight. "I have full
confidence that United Launch Alliance will deliver us safely into a 200
nautical mile orbit, and then our spacecraft has to do its thing."
We have a whole series of demonstrations we have to do," Davis said.
"Just knowing that ISS has human beings onboard, and we're a big heavy
spacecraft that's approaching them, is a lot of responsibility."
After a 45-day stay at the space station, Dream Chaser will head back
to Earth, aiming to return to the old space shuttle landing strip in
Florida. A prototype of the Dream Chaser already tested the spaceplane's
autonomous approach and landing algorithms during a drop test over California in 2017.
The Dream Chaser story
Sierra Space and its parent company, Sierra Nevada, have pursued the
Dream Chaser spaceplane concept for 15 years. Before that, the program
originated in a commercial space startup called SpaceDev, which Sierra
Nevada purchased in 2008. Going back further, Dream Chaser's shape is
based on the HL-20 lifting body design developed by NASA's Langley
Research Center more than 30 years ago.
But that's not the whole story. Dream Chaser's origin can be traced to the Soviet Union,
which launched a lifting body named BOR-4 into space several times in
the early 1980s. This was a sub-scale model of a spaceplane the Soviets
studied since the 1960s and a precursor to the Russian Buran space
shuttle. After one of the BOR-4 test flights, an Australian military
aircraft took photos of the spaceplane as it was recovered in the Indian
Ocean. The Australians shared these images with US intelligence
officials, who turned to NASA to help them understand what they were
seeing.
NASA researchers used the pictures to reverse-engineer the BOR-4 as
the basis for a concept called the HL-20. The HL-20 never flew, but NASA
was briefly interested in it as an alternative to the space shuttle for
crew transportation after the space shuttle Challenger accident. In
2006, SpaceDev licensed the HL-20 concept from NASA as the starting point for the commercial Dream Chaser.
Once Sierra Nevada took control of the program, after its acquisition
of SpaceDev, the company proposed Dream Chaser for NASA's commercial
crew program to fly astronauts to and from the space station. It was one
of NASA's three finalists.
In
2014, NASA selected Boeing and SpaceX and awarded each company
multibillion-dollar contracts to finish developing their Starliner and
Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX has now launched 11 human spaceflight missions. Boeing's Starliner is languishing and still hasn't flown any astronauts.
Sierra Nevada revamped the Dream Chaser program as a cargo-only
spacecraft, temporarily ditching the human-rated design. Gone were the
cockpit, windows, and docking mechanism for Dream Chaser to link up with
the space station on its own. The company saw another opportunity to
win NASA support when the agency announced it would select a third
contractor to deliver cargo to the space station, alongside incumbents
SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, which started flying equipment to the
orbiting outpost a decade ago.
The bet paid off. In 2016, NASA selected Sierra Nevada to join SpaceX
and Northrop Grumman on the agency's roster of cargo transportation
providers. This was a huge win for Sierra Nevada, which has wealthy
owners, but it was not equal to the fortune of Elon Musk or the investor
base of a defense contractor like Northrop Grumman. It gave Sierra
Nevada a sorely needed anchor customer.
NASA's fixed-price service contract covers seven Dream Chaser
missions to resupply the space station and return cargo to Earth. The
space agency hasn't released the exact value of the contract, citing the
competitive nature of the commercial resupply program, but NASA
procurement databases show the agency has obligated $1.2 billion to date
to Sierra Space for the Dream Chaser cargo program. This doesn't
include the more than $350 million NASA provided to Sierra Nevada years
ago for the crew variant of Dream Chaser.
“An invention per week”
When NASA awarded Sierra Nevada the Dream Chaser cargo contract, the
company targeted 2019 for the first flight to the space station. It's
now five years late. Vice said one of the reasons for the delay was the
COVID pandemic, which strained supply chains across the space industry.
Parts came in and out of sequence, forcing managers to continually
change the steps to put Dream Chaser together.
"COVID really slowed us down with the supply chain," he said. "We are
now almost totally vertically integrated as a company so we don’t have
those kinds of challenges in the future.”
Sierra Space builds its own thrusters, heat shield tiles, solar
arrays, and the bulk of the spacecraft's wiring harnesses. "We really
have thought about where there were bottlenecks, and we've eliminated
those bottlenecks by bringing the work in-house," Vice said. "What we
found almost immediately is we can move faster, make products much
cheaper, and we don’t have that risk.”
Vice singled out Dream Chaser's propulsion system as one of the
program's major technical hurdles. The spacecraft has 26 small rocket
engines, each capable of operating at three discrete levels of thrust
for fine control or more significant orbit adjustments. Uniquely in the
space industry, these thrusters consume a mix of kerosene and hydrogen
peroxide propellants rather than toxic hypergolic propellants that
ignite on contact with one another.
"We wanted to have a fuel system that was green instead of using
hypergolics, so we could land it on a runway and we could walk up to the
vehicle without being in hazmat suits," Vice said. "That was hard, I
have to say."
Dream Chaser is designed to fly in orbit for up to six months. A
limiting factor in the spacecraft's operating life is its use of
hydrogen peroxide propellant.
"We are now the world’s experts on hydrogen peroxide, decomposition
of hydrogen peroxide, contamination of systems, pumps, valves, lines,"
Vice said. Hydrogen peroxide is corrosive to many metals and is prone to
decompose into water and oxygen.
"We are experts on zirconium," Vice added. Zirconium is resistant to
the corrosive effects of hydrogen peroxide and is one of the few metals
whose ions do not catalyze hydrogen peroxide's decomposition reaction, according to ATI, a producer of specialty metals.
"There was, it seemed like, an invention per week to make a green vehicle, but we did it," Vice said.
Going forward, Vice said he may decide to bring more supplier work
under Sierra Space's roof. He's considering what to do about an
agreement announced last year for Spirit AeroSystems to help Sierra
Space produce Shooting Star cargo modules. "We continue to evaluate what
we want to outsource and what we want to insource, and we'll see where
that ultimately goes."
Lockheed Martin is one supplier Sierra Space has counted on. The
aerospace and defense juggernaut built the composite primary structure
for Dream Chaser at the plant where it assembles F-35 fighter jets.
Lockheed Martin has delivered a second bare Dream Chaser structure,
which sits a few dozen feet away from the Tenacity spaceplane.
Once Tenacity is out the door, Sierra Space's technicians will start
work on the second spacecraft's secondary structure and install tubing,
harnesses, and avionics. It will take about two years to fully outfit
the second cargo spaceplane, designated DC-102, and Sierra Space
projects will cost half as much as the first one, according to Vice.
That will handle the demand for at least 30 cargo missions, whether they
go to the International Space Station or future commercial space
stations or fly as standalone missions for private or government
customers.
In the longer term, Sierra Space is studying how to make the Shooting
Star cargo section recoverable and reusable. One idea, Vice said, is to
add an inflatable heat shield to try to get the cargo module back to
the ground intact.
"We’re doing a series of tests on this technology," Vice said. "We’ll
start small. We’ll be launching things up and bringing small stuff
back, and we’ll scale to (full) size and we’ll see if it works. If it
does, it’s a complete game changer because even on (SpaceX's) Dragon,
the trunk of Dragon gets burned up every time. We took a step back and
said, 'Can we reuse the entire system?'"
Sierra’s lofty ambitions
The real dream, however, is to turn Dream Chaser into a transporter
for people, a second version of the spaceplane that Sierra Space calls
the DC-200.
"Right now, we’re focused on getting a crew Dream Chaser ready in the
’26 timeframe," Vice said. "There’s still a lot of work to do on the
DC-200, but we’re still very focused on that."
The company's work on the crew version of Dream Chaser is coming out
of its own private coffers. Sierra Space has raised $1.7 billion from
private investors, primarily equity and venture capital funds, since
spinning off from Sierra Nevada in 2021. The company reported a
valuation of $5.3 billion last month, with $3.4 billion in "active
contracts."
Vice said Sierra Space is "heavy into the design phase" of the
human-rated Dream Chaser. "Right now, the focus for us is how to we
really think about the abort system."
A crew-capable version of Dream Chaser would fly exposed to the
aerodynamic airflow during launch, without the protection of a rocket's
payload fairing. "We're trying to think very differently about how to do
an abort system that's not like anything that's been done before, so
it's not so expensive and time-consuming," Vice said. He declined to
offer additional details about the launch abort system, which would be
required to separate the spaceplane from a failing rocket.
While Dream Chaser is Sierra Space's most famous product, the company
is also working on inflatable habitats that could be used to build
future commercial space stations. Sierra Space has partnered with Blue
Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, on a space station concept known as
Orbital Reef. This is one of several private space stations under study
to follow the International Space Station, which is due for retirement
in 2030.
But recent reports, including from Ars, have suggested that lead partner Blue Origin may be losing interest in a low-Earth orbit space station. CNBC reported last month that the Blue Origin-Sierra Space partnership was "on rocky footing." A report from Reuters said Blue Origin has reassigned personnel from the space station program.
Vice pushed back on those reports Monday: "I think it was a lot in
the press over nothing. I feel very good that we have a strong
relationship with Blue Origin."
Whether Blue Origin keeps its interest in a space station or not,
Sierra Space views a commercial platform in low-Earth orbit as central
to the company's long-term strategy. It sounds like Vice is full steam
ahead in this area.
"The real beauty of our approach at Sierra Space is we’re building
the entire platform going forward, a commercial platform," Vice said.
"So we build both the transportation systems and the in-space
destinations. Of course, Dream Chaser is going to provide cargo and crew
to our commercial station. That's the way that we think about our
strategy. Instead of relying on who else builds the follow-on to the
ISS, it’s us.”
From: IEEE Wireless Power Technology Conference and Expo 2023, San Diego, CA
Energy underpins every human activity, including defense. It
is a fundamental currency in the battlespace. It is required to cause
and transport military effects. Recognizing energy as a key aspect of
warfare provides a new optimization surface to balance energy
generation, storage, and distribution to more effectively achieve
military objectives. In this way, generating and delivering military
effects can be seen as an interconnected web of energy transactions.
Dominating the energy web to more rapidly and reliably move energy
through the battlespace and deliver military effects is the essence of
warfare. DARPA perceives an opportunity to disrupt distribution by
leveraging power beaming for near- instantaneous energy transport in a
resilient, multi-path network. POWER (Persistent Optical Wireless
Energy Relay) is a meaningful step toward building a new, more resilient
energy distribution network. The POWER project has the potential to advance power beaming by orders of magnitude, which
could radically reshape society’s relationship with energy,” said Dr.
Paul Jaffe, who leads the POWER program at DARPA. “A wireless energy web
could unlock power from new and diverse sources, including from space,
and rapidly and reliably connect them to energy-starved consumers.”
By leveraging optical power beaming at high altitude for energy
delivery over significant distances, DARPA will build the high
throughput backbone for the wireless energy web. This will enable
robust connections between secure energy sources and places of high
need. Speed-of-light energy transport through a multipath network
enables rapid reconstitution under attack, graceful degradation, and
maximum resilience. As needed, energy can be rerouted through the
network in a matter of seconds or minutes, and full capability can be
restored by replacing nodes in minutes or hours. Furthermore, an
established optical power network over a large geographical area allows
for immediate redirection and focusing of military effects. This
disruptive flexibility will enable a paradigm shift in tactics as
commanders can pivot capability nearly instantaneously without
reconfiguring supply lines. This is in stark contrast to the
vulnerabilities and slow speeds associated with legacy liquid fuel-based
supply lines.
POWER is the next critical step to enable energy web dominance by
developing effective optical energy relays capable of creating the
wireless multipath supply lines for distributed systems at meaningful
ranges. While point-to-point power beaming continues to mature, relays
unlock network capabilities for scalable range and energy throughput.
High-altitude relays combine ground-based lasers with high-altitude beam
propagation. This mitigates the thermal challenges of airborne lasers
while also allowing for efficient long-range propagation through the
thin, stable upper atmosphere.
Energy web transactions may also involve radio-frequency power
beaming methods for transferring or relaying energy. This can permit
distribution to locations that have line of sight limitations due to
foliage, weather, or other optical obscurants while also offering other
advantages for shorter-range applications. Additionally, sources of
energy that are currently impractical to reach, such as remote ocean
wave, wind, and solar installations become available unlocking cleaner
means to power societal productivity. Ongoing and future planned work
will explore architectures that combine the benefits of various power
beaming modalities within a coherent energy web framework. Ultimately
DARPA envisions a future where energy can be seamlessly and autonomously
flowed through this network flexibly connecting energy sources to
energy starved consumers anywhere in the world.
To support rapid development, the optical energy relays designed in
POWER’s phase one will be demonstrated in pods carried by existing
aircraft in the project’s second phase. Additionally, power beaming will
enable smaller, less expensive future aircraft since fuel storage and
engine volume could be dramatically reduced. This will be explored
through conceptual designs in phase one. Eventually these new, small,
distributed platforms could provide cost-effective aircraft with
unlimited range and endurance to support military missions. Each relay
design will be evaluated based on accurate and efficient energy
redirection, wavefront correction for high beam quality, and
throttleable energy harvesting. In the third and final phase of the
program, the relays will be demonstrated through an airborne optical
pathway that aims to deliver 10 kilowatts of optical energy to a ground
receiver that is 200 kilometers away from the ground source laser.
Ascent Systems Technologies envisions its Autonomous Mobile Energy System (AMES) to become a platform for future ground segment of such an energy web.
Much of the Western military hardware used in Ukraine sounds familiar to
any student of 20th-century warfare: surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank
weapons, rocket launchers and howitzers. But Ukraine’s use of Western
information technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and
autonomous surveillance systems, has also had a powerful, if less
visible, impact on Russian forces. Commercial vendors supply Ukrainian
troops with satellites, sensors, unmanned drones and software. The
products provide reams of battlefield data which are condensed into apps
to help soldiers on the ground target the enemy. One American defence
official calls them, appreciatively, “Uber for artillery”.
Behind this new form of warfare are some of the most unconventional minds. Everyone knows about Elon Musk, whose rocket company SpaceX put their Starlink satellites at the service of Ukraine. There are some other iconoclastic entrepreneurs. One of them is Palmer Luckey, a 30-year old who in 2017 co-founded Anduril, a maker of surveillance towers, drones, unmanned submarines and an AI-driven system that supports them, called Lattice. It provides autonomous systems to Ukraine.
The other is Alex Karp. His Denver-based company Palantir, builds digital infrastructure to help clients manage large amounts on data, particularly on security threats and other. Alex claims that Palantir changed the way Ukrainian troops target the enemy, and even the nature of counter-terrorism.Palantir is supporting Ukraine both on the ground and as a part of NATO's intelligence network.
Both companies, to a lesser or greater degree, are linked to Peter Thiel, famous hedge fund manager and venture capitalist. (To him belongs the quote: "We dreamed of flying cars but we got 140 characters"). Mr. Thiel chairs Palantir, and his Founders Fund was an early backer of Anduril (both names echo Peter's love of J.R.R. Tolkien). Using different business models, both highlight how sclerotic the traditional system of "prime" defence contracting has become. They offer intriguing alternatives.
Like a prime contractor, Anduril sells to military customers. But unlike defence giants such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, it does so while taking all the R&D risk on its own shoulders. Palmer Luckey is a born innovator. As a teenager, he invented the Oculus virtual-reality headset that he later sold to Facebook for $3bn. His business acumen is sharp. He and his executives have no time for Pentagon's traditional "cost-plus" procurement system. Though it may be necessary for big projects like fighter planes and aircraft-carriers, they say, in general it distorts incentives, creating a risk-averse, expensive and slow-moving defence juggernaut. Rather than waiting for government contracts, Anduril creates what it thinks defence departments need, and uses iterative manufacturing and a lean supply chain to make products quickly and relatively cheaply. It is fiercely competitive. Compared with the prolix, PowerPoint-heavy bidding process for prime contractors, Anduril relishes the cut-and-thrust of "shoot-offs", or competitions in which the US Department of Defence (DOD) tests commercial products against each other. A similar concept is used by the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) with the IDEaS program. Anduril's success rate is high. In 2020 it won a big contract to provide surveillance towers on America's border with Mexico. In 2022 it secured $1bn from DOD to provide autonomous counter-drone systems. It is building underwater vehicles the size of buses to patrol waters of Australia.
Palantir achieved the mysterious status with its technology. It works for some private clients, as well as governments, albeit only ones friendly with America. Both on a battlefield and in security business, its software cuts through the thickening fog of data to enable quick decision-making. Other dual-use technology firms are increasingly winning defence contracts. The Pentagon's Defence Innovation Unit (DIU), set up in 2015, support s a big increase in the use of commercial technologies, such as AI, autonomy and integrated systems, to speed up the responsiveness to global threats. (Source: The Economist, February 18, 2023)
The Canadian IDEaS (Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security) program strives to achieve a similar goal. Its Pop Up City contest puts a number of competitors against each other to evaluate and select the best integrated utilities system for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) relocated temporary camp. Ascent Systems Technologies is one of the contestants in the final round of the competition. Also through the IDEaS program, Ascent was awarded a contract to develop a prototype of the autonomous monitoring and surveillance system for the DND assets in the Arctic, based on its flagship AMES platform. The AMES is a dual-use system - it can be used for a number of military as well as civilian applications, including providing quick support to Ukraine's damaged energy infrastructure.
