Author: FlyMarshall Newsroom

The U.S. needs to ramp up focus on building a variety of cheaper weapons systems at scale to ensure sufficient supply for future fights, according to Anduril’s president and chief strategy officer.U.S. industry became complacent and got “ambushed by the future,” said Christian Brose, who was on hand last week at the Washington Post’s inaugural Building America Summit to discuss defense industry developments. “There was just no way of thinking that this formidable capability institution could be disrupted, and I think that there was a failure of imagination,” Brose said. Brose added that the nation has been “systematically failing” at…

Log-in here if you’re already a subscriber The U.S. Navy will resume operations on Wake Island — a largely dormant contingency airfield — after over 70 years of reduced staffing, as the service works to re-establish a competitive presence in the Pacific while a growing Chinese military deploys its Navy farther from home. The resumption is part of a broader effort in the Pentagon to rehabilitate World War II-era airfields like those in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. In recent years, Wake Island, located in a remote expanse of the Pacific Ocean between Guam and Hawaii, has been…

Vrbo is piloting sponsored listings for vacation rentals and plans for an official launch later this year. Tim Rosolio, Expedia Group’s vice president of vacation rental partnerships, said the sponsored listings could be another “massive unlock,” similar to a suite of supplier-funded promotions that generated one-third of Vrbo’s bookings in the first quarter. “We are already piloting it and it is working absolutely fantastic,” Rosolio said, referring to the sponsored listings. “It is our intent to do sponsored listings, which will enable people to pay for play for visibility, which will enable partners to get more of the travelers they…

Then there is the larger Blue Moon Mark 2 lander, which is due to fly on a larger and more powerful version of the New Glenn rocket with nine first stage engines, known as 9×4. NASA is counting on the Mark 2 lander, alongside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, to carry humans to the Moon on a regular basis—and soon. Pad infrastructure severely damaged It is too early to determine the impacts from this failure, but they will be considerable. Early reports from sources suggest that the launch infrastructure at LC-36A is severely damaged. A source indicated that one of the lightning…

An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin In the wake of the catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, NASA wants to find an alternative launcher for the first of the company’s Blue Moon landers. In an interview with FOX Business on Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described a “whole of government response” to the May 28 incident, which badly damaged Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. “We are also de-coupling the lander from the launch vehicle and the pad itself,” he said. “NASA is…

As NASA plans long-term missions on the Moon, the agency could use robots to perform routine tasks, allowing crew members to dedicate more time to science and exploration. However, robotic motion control requires complex technology and advances in features like robotic decision-making and object recognition. These are the challenges a Boulder, Colorado-based robotics company is teaming up with NASA to overcome.  PickNik Inc. recently worked with Shaun Azimi, who leads the Dexterous Robotics team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and other agency roboticists. The team tested software that enabled a robotic arm to recognize a spacecraft hatch, then…

The TWZ Newsletter Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy. From an early point in the Russian war in Ukraine, we’ve seen many unorthodox efforts to try to improve the chances of survival of fighting vehicles. Now, Russian trucks are receiving ‘dazzle paint,’ borrowing the same kind of tactic Russia has used for some of its most important military aircraft, to try to confuse seekers on standoff weaponry that use image-matching capability. KAMAZ truck with zebra-style pattern. via X via X via X Several images showing the unusually painted Russian trucks have…

WARSAW, Poland — Polish-Ukrainian anti-drone radar company Molfar Defence said it is developing a new generation of tactical radar systems for drone types that have doggedly managed to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.The technology aims to find small, low-altitude drones, including those connected to operators via long command wires, a setup that makes them immune to defensive electronic warfare.Maks Dzherikhov, the co-founder of Molfar Defence, told Defense News the company is working on solutions to complement the existing air-defense infrastructure, which is increasingly struggling to identify smaller and slower-moving airborne threats.“We see how quickly drone production is scaling up globally, and how…

Log-in here if you’re already a subscriber The Federal Aviation Administration has opened the door to commercial passenger and cargo operations by advanced air mobility aircraft under the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), potentially in advance of type certification. The FAA told The Air Current in August last year that “commercial operations will not take place in non-certificated eVTOL aircraft under the program,” a three-year effort that aims to accelerate the integration of electric vertical take-off and landing and other AAM aircraft into the national airspace system. Now, the agency says that “commercial operations were always a possibility” under the…

Every Gulf hub airport is a three-dimensional foreign policy document, and the design choices each one makes — what to curate, what to scale, what to borrow, what to commission — reveal more about each country’s theory of national relevance than any white paper or tourism strategy could. I arrived at this watching the concourse last week at Hamad International past midnight, five hours into a Doha layover on the way from New York to Riyadh, jet-lagged and walking the terminal for something to do. My half-formed thought bubbles became clearer in a way that a daytime transit through any…