Author: FlyMarshall Newsroom

ROME — British Defense Secretary John Healey resigned on Thursday, accusing U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer of skimping on defense spending at a time of “rising threats.”Healey took aim at the U.K. government’s long-delayed Defence Investment Plan (DIP), designed to shore up Britain’s military readiness but held up for months as government departments tussle over funding.In his resignation letter to Starmer, which Healey posted on Thursday, he said he had now seen the defense funding plan, and it “falls well short of what is required.”He added, ”You have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources…

“Once that is in place, as we move forward with new mission commitments, we will just be more focused, I think, and more process-oriented in being able to commit to new missions or not,” Heckler said. Key antenna offline One constraint on the DSN is an accident last year that knocked one of the network’s three 70-meter (230-foot) antennas offline at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California. This antenna, along with similar ones in Spain and Australia, is used to communicate with some of NASA’s most distant missions. The 70-meter dish was tracking NASA’s Juno spacecraft at…

The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. For decades, the massive MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter has served as the Navy’s primary airborne mine countermeasure platform, dragging massive mine hunting sleds through waters all around the globe. However, the Sea Dragon’s days are now numbered, with the last 11 aircraft scheduled to sunset sometime next year. With the MH-53E’s demise on the horizon, we reached out to one of its former pilots, Steve Jones — a man who came to know this monster intimately during the Global War On Terror.…

COLOGNE, Germany — German and Spanish companies involved the now-defunct Future Combat Air System program are appealing to their respective governments to keep funding sixth-generation fighter jet expertise gained under the developmental effort.Separate statements to that effect published Thursday by the lead companies of both nations, Airbus and Indra, come as news broke this week that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron had decided to drop the sixth-generation fighter jet segment of FCAS.That warplane was meant to be a centerpiece of the effort, with accompanying drones, sensors and communications equipment envisioned to act in concert as a…

Ars: You’re flying Artemis III without an ICPS upper stage because you don’t need the performance to reach low-Earth orbit. But you do need a second stage simulator. What’s the status of that? Parsons: That, to me, is really cool. It’s called a spacer, and we already have the design done. Metal is already being bump-formed at United Launch Alliance, and then we’re going to weld it in-house at Marshall Space Flight Center. We expect it to show up at Kennedy Space Center no later than December, and then we’ll stack Orion on top of that. We’re in really good…

The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. Welcome to Bunker Talk. This is a weekend open discussion post for the best commenting crew on the net, in which we can chat about all the stuff that went on this week that we didn’t cover. We can also talk about the stuff we did or whatever else grabs your interest. In other words, it’s an off-topic thread. This week’s caption reads: First Lt. Pamela Blanco-Coca, 319th Missile Squadron missile combat crew commander, and her deputy commander, 2nd Lt. John Anderson,…

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said two U.S. Army aviators “got very lucky” after an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter was downed by Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, emphasizing that American retaliation for the incident is not over. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, the president declared, “We hit them hard yesterday and we’re going to hit them hard again today.”Trump initially claimed in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that Iran had shot down the aircraft, before revising his account a day later to say it was struck by an Iranian ordnance that failed to detonate on impact.“That…

The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston. For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically. The four crew members are: NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, commander ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, pilot NASA astronaut Andre Douglas, mission specialist NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, mission…

NASA and its international partners are set to receive scientific research samples and hardware as a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to depart the International Space Station on Tuesday, June 16, for its return to Earth. Watch NASA’s live undocking coverage beginning at 11:45 a.m. EDT on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media. The Dragon spacecraft will undock from the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at about 12:05 p.m., after receiving a command from SpaceX ground controllers. The spacecraft then will…

The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. Yesterday, TWZ published an analysis of a thermal image purportedly showing a previously unseen advanced aircraft design, which appears to be a precursor to the U.S. Air Force’s forthcoming F-47 fighter from Boeing. The image, which went viral online and is from a video that has now been released, is said to have been captured near the U.S. military’s secretive Groom Lake test base, better known as Area 51. It turns out, as a number of our readers have pointed out, there…