DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., for its Phoenix program, which aims to develop technologies to harvest still-useful components from retired satellites in geostationary orbit and create new systems with them on orbit. This project offers the potential to develop a “completely different methodology to build space systems” at a fraction of the cost of launching new satellites, said Javier de Luis, Aurora’s vice president for research and development, in the company’s release. Aurora is partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop prototypes of the attachment mechanisms that the program’s “satlets” would use to fix themselves on the retired satellites’ antennas. The satlets would then reposition the antennas so that they could relay radio signals to Earth, providing additional communications bandwidth to the US military, states the Aug. 13 release.
Due to the prolonged delay in deliveries of the Tech Refresh 3 version of the F-35 fighter, Denmark is pulling six of its TR-2-configured F-35 jets stationed in the U.S. back to home base in order to consolidate aircraft and get better training for its pilots and maintainers, the Danish…