This will be the eighth mission for the Boeing-built space plane, which has served as an on-orbit, experimental testbed for emerging technologies being developed by the Pentagon and NASA. The platform is designed to conduct long-duration flights before returning to Earth, where it can be repurposed for future missions. The system has already spent more than 4,200 days in space, according to Boeing.

Personnel are currently preparing the vehicle — which will fly with a service module — for another launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to a press release issued Monday. Mission partners for OTV-8, as the effort has been dubbed, include the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit.

The service module will expand capacity for laser comms demonstrations, per the release.

Laser communications demos in low-Earth orbit “will contribute to more efficient and secure satellite communications in the future. The shorter wavelength of infrared light allows more data to be sent with each transmission,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman wrote in post on X.

“We’re also demoing the world’s highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space. Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied,” he added.

According to Boeing’s press release, the mission will include the first in-space demonstration of a “strategic grade” quantum inertial sensor.

“OTV 8’s quantum inertial sensor demonstration is a welcome step forward for the operational resilience of Guardians in space,” Space Delta 9 Commander Col. Ramsey Hom said in a statement. “Whether navigating beyond Earth-based orbits in cis-lunar space or operating in GPS-denied environments, quantum inertial sensing allows for robust navigation capabilities where GPS navigation is not possible. Ultimately, this technology contributes significantly to our thrust within the Fifth Space Operations Squadron and across the Space Force guaranteeing movement and maneuverability even in GPS-denied environments.”

The launch date is targeted for Aug. 21, according to Saltzman.

During the space plane’s most recent mission, which started in 2023 and wrapped up earlier this year, efforts included experimenting with operating in new orbital regimes, testing space domain awareness technologies and investigating radiation effects, according to officials.

For the mission before that, the X-37B spent a whopping 908 days in orbit.

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The Air Force Research Laboratory’s innovation hub, AFWERX, recently awarded Washington, D.C.-headquartered startup Base Operations a Direct-to-Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract for the new tool, which will visualize physical security threats across the globe using public and proprietary source data and modeling assets.

“For the U.S. Air Force, we will develop enhanced capabilities using custom datasets for small unmanned aerial system (sUAS) incident tracking, foreign land ownership analysis near military installations, and port security around AMC coastal bases,” company CEO and founder Cory Siskind told DefenseScoop.

“This addresses the 350 sUAS detections reported across 100 military installations last year, including concerning incidents like the Chinese national apprehended at Vandenberg” Space Force Base in California, she noted.

As Siskind suggested, this deal unfolded at a time when unauthorized drone activity — including over military bases or other sensitive sites around America — has been trending upwards and presenting serious national security concerns. Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen and legal permanent resident, was arrested late last year and charged for flying a drone above Vandenberg and violating defense airspace regulations. 

In response to questions from DefenseScoop regarding this contract announcement and whether it was directly motivated by recent reports of unattributed drone incursions over U.S. military facilities, AFWERX spokesman Rob Bardua said “Open Topic contracts are awarded based on Defense Need, Technical Approach and Commercialization.”

The Air Force’s innovation arm “is focusing its investments to rapidly transition emerging commercial and dual-use technologies to remain the strongest and most lethal force in the world,” Bardua said.

Air Mobility Command will be the primary customer for Base Operations’ platform under this new contract award. That command is broadly responsible for providing airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation, and global air mobility support to the joint force.  

“AMC’s specialized teams — Contingency Response Elements, Contingency Response Teams, and Airfield Assessment Teams — often operate in degraded environments where traditional intelligence is fragmented or unavailable. Our platform gives them a single pane of glass for data-driven threat intelligence,” Siskind noted.

The company is customizing the platform to pull datasets from multiple categories — such as waterborne threats near coastal bases, foreign land ownership and acquisitions near sensitive military installations, and small drone flight pattern tracking — with payload analysis and saturation mapping for high-incident areas. 

The technology will apply natural language processing to extract insights from more than 25,000 global data sources.

“The system processes data from 200+ million incidents worldwide, transforming raw intelligence into actionable security assessments in minutes rather than days,” Siskind said.

Base Operations’ platform will also help the command identify emerging risks, monitor threats across thousands of locations in a single dashboard and improve severity assessments, via the “BaseScore dynamic risk” index that will continuously update threat levels to reflect what’s happening in real-time.

According to Siskind, “current threat intelligence scores often rely on overly simplistic high/medium/low risk ratings determined by black box algorithms, raw crime numbers lacking context, or annual statistics that don’t reflect current reality.”

BaseScore “solves this with a precise 0-100 threat assessment scale that allows confident comparison of any location worldwide,” she said.

Before this SBIR award, Base Operations focused primarily on offering corporate security options to customers in the private sector.

“This Direct to Phase II award represents our first formal DOD engagement, but we’re exploring government use cases where we can add value quickly given our sole-source authority,” Siskind told DefenseScoop.

With this sole-source designation, defense organizations can purchase the Base Operations platform without competitive bidding — thus likely accelerating procurement and deployment.

“Our [contract award with AFWERX] moved very quickly — under three months — due to the urgency of the problem space, relevance to DOD objectives, and the streamlined Direct to Phase II SBIR contracting process,” Siskind said.

Sources did not disclose the value of this SBIR contract. 

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In 2023, Bonnell was tapped to serve as AFRL’s first-ever chief information officer and director of the laboratory’s Digital Capabilities Directorate, where she led the lab’s information technology strategy and overall modernization efforts. According to a Tuesday post on LinkedIn, Bonnell is now working at OpenAI as a partnership manager, a position she took on in March.

“The role [at AFRL] was truly one in a lifetime — serving the national security mission alongside some of the most brilliant scientists, engineers, and digital visionaries in the country,” Bonnell wrote. “From cybersecurity to networks and infrastructure, from enterprise service design to pushing the frontiers of AI, I couldn’t be more proud of what we built together—or more confident in the team carrying the mission forward.”

While at AFRL, Bonnell was at the forefront of the lab’s push to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighters. She was instrumental in launching the Air Force’s experimental generative AI chatbot known as NIPRGPT — a model that has since been scaled to other organizations across the Defense Department such as the Defense Information Systems Agency.

“Helping to launch one of the first human-machine teaming research platforms in DoD, built with open-source tools and volunteer effort, was a career highlight. So was advancing AI adoption across the force, making the theoretical practical,” Bonnell wrote.

Before joining AFRL, Bonnell was Google Public Sector’s emerging tech “evangelist,” where she helped the Defense Department and other federal agencies adopt new capabilities such as cloud, AI and zero-trust cybersecurity strategies.

As she returns to the private sector, she expects to dive deeper into artificial intelligence capabilities and explore how the technology can contribute to public service, she said on LinkedIn.

At OpenAI, Bonnell will “support extraordinary public sector organizations like the U.S. National Labs to research and apply frontier current and future AI models to the grand challenges of research, science, innovation, and national security,” she wrote.

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The one-step call for proposals falls under AFRL’s Autonomous Decisions, Algorithms, and Modeling multiple authority announcement that was released in March.

“The objectives for the program are to develop new algorithms for tracking and sensors resource management, modifying existing algorithms, conduct experiments to measure effectiveness of combat identification (CID), integrate with other CID algorithm improvement efforts, and simulate scenarios to measure algorithm performance,” officials wrote.

In U.S. military operations, combat identification of objects on the battlefield may include friendly forces, enemy forces, non-combatants or other entities. It’s used to support engagement decisions for the employment of fires.

A more detailed statement of objectives for the SOUP program hasn’t been publicly released because it contains controlled unclassified information. Interested vendors must request it from the Air Force.

However, officials have broadly described the technical areas of focus for the Autonomous Decisions, Algorithms, and Modeling multiple authority announcement, which include multi-domain sense making, sensing autonomy, sensing and effects analysis, multi-sensing knowledge, and sensing management.

To boost “multi-sensing knowledge,” officials aim to “provide techniques for timely, high confidence behavioral and physical knowledge generation from denied and difficult targets using multiple sensors, domains, and types to include algorithm development across multiple distributed, homogeneous and heterogeneous sensors. Efforts will commonly include data association, entity detect/track/ID, information fusion, contextual reasoning, training with limited measured data, data/performance modeling, and scenario specific algorithm performance assessment,” as well as the “application of machine learning techniques to address technical challenges in contested environments,” according to the announcement.

AFRL also intends to explore ways to improve sensing management across ISR, strike, electronic warfare and cyber “mission effects chains.”

“These efforts include techniques to manage sensor data flow through collection, communication, and reasoning for processing and dissemination; to generate anticipatory responses; sensor resource planning, allocation, and scheduling; and control flexibility across multiple distributed sensing capabilities. Efforts will focus on technologies including sensing interface/architecture development and assessment, experimentation, sensing decision-making strategies, representation, sensing data and knowledge management, cross-mode sensor management and registration, distributed processing, and joint inference and control,” officials wrote.

The AFRL initiatives come as the Defense Department is looking to make its ISR enterprise more effective and efficient through the integration of new AI tools that optimize system employment and reduce cognitive and physical burdens for human operators and analysts, via autonomous capabilities and decision-making aids.

The estimated program cost for SOUP is $3 million, and the anticipated award date is July 25, according to the solicitation.

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AFRL stood up an environment called the “LabVerse” around the time it created a new Digital Capabilities Directorate in March 2023.

“LabVerse is one of the ways, in essence, how we bring this information flow together more dynamically. So whether that is things from AI sandboxes, being able to let people play kind of that DevSecOps initial stage, all the way to being able to look at security as a service,” Alexis Bonnell, CIO and leader of the Digital Capabilities Directorate, told DefenseScoop Thursday at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit.

One “thing that I’m really excited about when we think about the types of experiments we’re doing in LabVerse is also things like looking at AI for system modernization. And I will tell you … the AI is actually very good at breaking down, for lack of a better term, itself. And so we’ve been able to take a lot of systems that might be in COBOL or Fortran, and you know, quite frankly, we don’t even have the talent in circulation anymore to be running these systems. So part of what we look at is not only how might the AI be able to help us go from those old system languages or programming languages to new, [but] what we didn’t expect is that the AI is also really good at showing us things like … this system has a lot of complex code, this system simple code,” Bonnell said. “We are seeing where partners built things in that maybe make it harder for other partners to follow, which I don’t think we expected to be able to see as easily as we can. And so there is a lot … in this learning by doing.”

She also highlighted the Air Force Research Lab’s experimental chatbot initiative, dubbed NIPRGPT because it’s intended to be used on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). The platform, released about five months ago, allows airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with generative artificial intelligence. Officials are seeking feedback from users that could inform future investments and applications of those types of capabilities.

At Thursday’s summit, Amanda Bullock, the artificial intelligence lead at the Air Force Research Lab, told DefenseScoop that there’s been a lot of enthusiasm about NIPRGPT. The main use cases that service members have been employing it for, so far, are summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance.

However, Bonnell noted that officials are trying to serve as honest brokers for advising people about artificial intelligence capabilities.

“One of the most exciting things about AFRL is we serve a little bit as like a third-party agnostic consultant, if you will. And especially in the area of AI, we have so many people coming to us saying, ‘Is this thing good for AI?’ And sometimes the answer is ‘no,’” Bonnell said.

“We have, you know, a team that can actually add some AI into your system. But also with Amanda’s team, she’s looking at all of the commercial tools,” Bonnell noted. “And so LabVerse also includes the ability to understand, if you have this use case, you know, this small business already solved that right, or this large company already has an app for that. We call it wormholing the OODA Loop — meaning taking someone from, you know, an observation state to an end state.”

AFRL aims to be flexible with the LabVerse as warfighters’ needs evolve.

“One of the things we’re trying to do with LabVerse is to make sure that it is flexible to meet the demands we’re getting. So as an example, you know, one of the recent questions was: Can we do a decision, you know, analytics that kind of goes through a lot of the same education process … as many of our airmen or guardians, and then have kind of a battle buddy, right, informationally? So that is not a question that we got asked a year ago. And so I think what we’re trying to do is to make sure that LabVerse, instead of being a time capsule, that functions with humility to say we don’t even know what’s coming two weeks from now, six months from now — so how do we make it as adaptable a spinal cord, if you will, to be able to meet those new requests, those moments? And then, quite frankly, really making sure that we are humble enough and smart enough to know that, if that’s not our jam, or if someone else has already solved that, to actually be the first people to say, ‘Don’t reinvent that. Don’t do that. You know, find that over there,'” Bonnell said.

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The capability, dubbed NIPRGPT because it’s intended to be used on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet), was released in June by the Air Force chief information officer and the Air Force Research Laboratory. It’s available to personnel with a Defense Department Common Access Card, and officials are seeking feedback from users that could inform future investments and applications for generative AI tools.

“It is, at its heart, a research experiment, right? We do not think that NIPRGPT is going to be the tool that goes forward. We really actually hope that as these commercial tools come online, they vastly surpass the capabilities of NIPRGPT. But what we’ve learned so far is that people are really excited to use this, and we provide a space in the NIPRGPT for them to use that in a space that they feel safe — I would call it like a safe space, almost — so that when we do get those commercial tools, they know what they’re doing, they don’t have a learning curve to get through,” Amanda Bullock, the artificial intelligence lead at AFRL, told DefenseScoop Thursday at the GovCIO Media & Research AI Summit.

There are three main use cases that service members are employing it for, so far: summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance.

The coding assistance capability isn’t just helping computer scientists and engineers, but also pilots and other personnel, she noted.

“We’re also finding out that they, as they get more and more excited about these tools, they want better and better features. And you know, that’s where we kind of meet with them and we say, ‘Look, this is not what you need. What you need is one of our commercial partner tools. What you need already exists out there from this small business.’ And so really learning that and talking to people when they get really excited and they’re like, ‘I want my own deployment of NIPRGPT.’ And we’re like, ‘Oh, do we really?’” Bullock said.

The experiments are also highlighting shortfalls in compute.

“We’re also learning the compute, right? The compute is not there. Unfortunately, our friends up on the hill have not planned for this type of technology … at the rapid pace that it’s come. And so we didn’t have the type of compute we needed in our HPCs. We didn’t have the type of compute that we needed in our commercial vendors. And so [we’re] having to pivot very quickly and realize that we need a modular architecture to be able to shift that and offer a hybrid approach to it,” Bullock said.

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The Air Force plans to spend approximately $99 million on the multiyear innovation effort and multiple awards are anticipated, according to the announcement.

The department is seeking research to “design, develop, test, evaluate, and deliver innovative technologies and techniques for Next Generation Target Tracking architectures, which exploit a wide array of data sources and leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Machine Inferencing (MI) algorithms in a High Performance Computing (HPC) enabled framework,” per the presolicitation.

That includes 3D pixel, vector, and point cloud processing and accelerations, as well as methods to use AI and machine learning for “identification, classification and pattern learning that inference over information from multiple data modalities” such as open-source intelligence, signals intelligence, imagery and geospatial intelligence.

The Air Force Research Lab, which will oversee the effort, also seeks tools to aid the ingestion and processing of GPS, non-GPS, inertial navigation system, radio frequency identification trackers, or telematic-based data into “traffic tracks that can measure utilization of lines of communication,” according to the announcement.

Additionally, the lab is interested in capabilities that can process cellphone GPS and non-GPS data — such as inertial navigation systems, accelerometers, altimeters and personal fitness devices. The technology could help first responders locate vulnerable individuals in disaster areas, Air Force officials say.

Successes prototyping efforts that are funded through other transaction agreements could result in awards for follow-on production contracts, the presolicitation noted.

Vendors seeking funding for fiscal 2025 are advised to submit their white papers by Nov. 30.

Next-generation target tracking is a top modernization priority for the Air Force. For example, a command, control, communications and battle management (C3BM) system for moving target indication is one of two programs that the department recently initiated through a Quick Start rapid acquisition authority granted by Congress in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. It’s aiming to field the first increment in 2027.

Although the service is trying to deploy next-generation target tracking capabilities faster, acquisition chief Andrew Hunter told lawmakers that fully building out a new networking architecture to support those types of tools will take some time.

“If you start talking about really being able to do entire mission threads at scale, anywhere in the world, it’s going to be another few years before we can really say we’ve rolled that out to the warfighter,” he said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in May.

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As part of the initiative, AFRL plans to conduct a set of demonstrations that will aim to provide military aircraft with ubiquitous connectivity using commercial spacecraft and networks.

The Pentagon announced the $9 million deal with Intelsat on Wednesday.

“This contract provides for efforts to develop and experimentally test satellite communications (SATCOM) systems capable of operating with multiple commercial space internet constellations operating in low, medium, and geostationary earth orbits offering a new low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) terminal that easily integrates onto aircraft platforms to provide resilient, high throughput, globally available, and highly reliable SATCOM,” per the announcement.

It was a competitive acquisition and 11 offers were received, according to the department.

The company’s work on the DEUCSI resilient multi-orbit airborne module (ROAM) effort is expected to be completed by Nov. 26, 2024.

Earlier this year, the Air Force awarded an $80 million contract to Northrop Grumman and an $81 million deal to L3Harris for DEUCSI.

The Defense Department previously inked agreements with Raytheon ($13 million), Lockheed Martin ($17 million), Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. ($10 million) and L3 Technologies ($18 million) to work on the program.

A key goal of DEUCSI is to establish “path agnostic communications,” or the ability to “reliably communicate to any location on the globe without explicitly specifying which nodes of a communication network to use,” according to a call for proposals.

The program could aid the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiative, which seeks to connect the various platforms and data streams of the U.S. military services, allies and international partners under a more unified network to enable more effective decision-making.

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The Hyperspace Challenge, which first kicked off in 2018, is a business accelerator funded by the Space Force and Air Force Research Lab in partnership with CNM Ingenuity — a nonprofit connected to Central New Mexico Community College. This year’s iteration is being sponsored by the Space Rapid Capabilities Office, an acquisition arm of the Space Force that’s headquartered at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

The 2023 Hyperspace Challenge program was unveiled in July and interested parties were invited to apply to participate. According to an Oct. 5 press release from New Mexico Community College, the companies chosen include Phase Four of Hawthorne, California: Dawn AeroSpace of Delft, Netherlands; Lexset.ai of Brooklyn, New York; Magdrive, Harwell Innovation Campus of Harwell Oxford, England: TRL11 of Irvine, California; and High Earth Orbit Robotics of Haymarket, Australia.

The six organizations will work with Space Rapid Capabilities Office officials, who are looking to expedite the development of capabilities with the aim of deploying them within the next few years.

A series of virtual meetings is slated for this month and there will be an on-site confab at Albuquerque New Mexico’s Q-Station Nov. 1-2, per the release.

Technologies of interest to the Space RCO include using hazard awareness capabilities that can rapidly and accurately detect and prioritize threats either from the ground or space; AI, machine learning and autonomy that reduce ground-based vehicle operator workload, inform vehicle response decisions and decrease vehicle response time; and advanced propulsion, refueling and fuel conservation capabilities that enable space assets to maneuver more freely.

“The future of a sustainability space ecosystem requires more collaborative thinking and innovation. We are committed to finding ways for government and enterprise to break down silos and work together,” Gabe Mounce, director of the Air Force Research Lab Tech Engagement Office in New Mexico, said in a statement. “Cohorts like this year’s [Hyperspace] program, foster a creative mindset and model a united approach that is more adept at delivering a rapid response to the real-world needs of the growing space economy.”

The pursuit of new tech comes as the U.S. government and its allies are concerned about potential attacks on spacecraft from jammers, high-powered lasers, anti-satellite missiles, cyber tools and other weapons, as well as space debris.

“As the number of countries participating in the global space industry has skyrocketed, so has the proliferation of, and dependence on, services provided by their space assets. Since disruption of these services — from communications to national defense, to data collection — threatens public safety and economic stability for all, their protection is paramount,” per the release.

According to a previously issued problem statement about the 2023 Hyperspace Challenge, a greater ability to maneuver systems combined with timely awareness and decision support tools “opens options for proactively avoiding threats or reactively responding to minimize threat effects. Taken together these capabilities may also open more orbit options, allow for more readiness and training activities, and even create opportunities for new operating concepts.”

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The flight was conducted by the 40th Flight Test Squadron on Aug. 22 at the Eglin Gulf Test and Training Range. Building upon a previous demonstration in July that trained the algorithms controlling the vehicle’s flight, the latest test pit the Valkyrie drone against “simulated opponents using simulated mission systems and simulated weapons,” according to an AFRL release. 

“The opportunity to fly alongside this trained AI-piloted air vehicle really set into stone this technology is very real and here to stay,” Capt. Tyler Brown, autonomy flight test lead at the Air Force, said in a statement.  “I feel we are at an inflection point of an exponential curve for the application of AI. It is imperative we understand the power of AI, its strengths and weaknesses, and that it is implemented in the right way.”

The event helped the Air Force train a “tactical autonomy algorithm,” according to AFRL. This demonstrates a shift from algorithms tested at the previous flight, which focused on performing common aviation, navigation and safety-related tasks while the Valkyrie drone flew alongside an F-15E Strike Eagle jet.

The ongoing demonstrations with the Valkyrie, which is manufactured by defense-tech company Kratos, are building upon previous work done by AFRL for the Skyborg Vanguard program.

The efforts are closely linked to the Air Force’s collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program, which aims to develop autonomous systems that will serve as robotic wingmen for the service’s current and future aircraft. The Air Force is planning for a fleet of 1,000 CCAs, hoping to begin fielding before the end of this decade.

The AI algorithms tested during the August demonstration used neural networks — a type of machine learning process that teaches computers to process data in a manner inspired by the human brain — to fly a real-world Valkyrie drone against the simulations, the AFRL release said. 

“AI testing requires combining new and traditional test and evaluation techniques. The team has a lot of lessons learned that will be used to inform future programs,” Ryan Bowers, lead test engineer for the effort, said in a statement.

The Air Force did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s questions about the specifics of the types weapons and opponents that were simulated during the flight test.

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