There’s clearly a pragmatic incentive to allow reused rockets. The Space Force expects to save $52.7 million for the GPS III missions alone. It might also be difficult to insist on brand new rockets. SpaceX is shifting its focus to Starship, and might not be eager to make more Falcon 9 rockets than necessary.

This also reflects added trust in SpaceX. Although the company has clearly played a crucial role in US government launches through projects like Crew Dragon, the contract represents another level of confidence.

Defense One reports that like many other artificial intelligence systems we’ve seen, progress in developing these pilots relied on deep reinforcement learning that trained by attempting their tasks over and over again in a virtual environment. Notably, the AI pilots weren’t allowed to use information gleaned from these battles to upgrade during the competition, which had a number of limitations separating it from real-life, like a lack of collision detection between the planes.

After their AI won the competition, Heron Systems developers gave a Q&A via YouTube (the entire event was conducted remotely via Zoom), explaining some of the behavior they saw and even some movements that were unexpected. According to Heron, their agent is capable of running (without real-time image recognition) on something as small as an NVIDIA Tegra chip.

Sphero has brought four million robots to market, including programmable tank robots, and it’s experience in mobility could come in handy. We’ve also seen it make wearables. Though so far, those have been used to create music, not keep users safe.

It’s not entirely surprising that Sphero would see an opportunity in the military and first responder space. Police in Massachusetts are reportedly testing Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot. The UK military has bomb disposal robots, and the US is testing robotic combat vehicles.

Plus, Sphero has hinted that making robotic toys isn’t as lucrative as you might think. In 2018, it cut jobs after a lousy holiday season, and it quit making licensed Disney bots like BB-8 and R2-D2. At the time, it explained that the toys didn’t sell well after their tie-in movies were released.

While it would be great to have robots that keep first responders safe, it’s still a bit disturbing to think that future robot armies might evolve from the adorable, educational toys you’ve been using for years.

This is otherwise a run-of-the-mill Galaxy S20 with a 6.2-inch, 1440p display, a Snapdragon 865 processor, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of expandable storage, a 4,000mAh battery and the usual arrays of front and rear cameras. Although Samsung shows the Tactical Edition in a rugged casing, there’s no mention of the phone itself being rugged.

The S20 variant will be available in the third quarter of the year from “select IT channel partners.” If you get one, there’s a good chance it will have been issued to you as part of a bulk order. Still, this might be good news if you’re either a soldier eager for a tactical communications upgrade or an official who regularly handles classified data.

As for these recent sightings, however, the Pentagon has decided to release the clips “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough told CNN. She added that “After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”

So in a nutshell, the Pentagon is saying there’s nothing to worry about — although they haven’t exactly clarified what these objects are. Sightings like this can often be chalked up to weather, test aircraft and other phenomena, or as one of the voices in the videos speculates, it could just be a drone.

The launch is an important milestone for Space Force — the sixth branch of the military formed as a Trump administration directive. Until now, the agency has mostly just laid out plans, asked for funding, released a Star Trek-esque logo and inspired a Netflix comedy series starring Steve Carell.

The AEHF-6 satellite will provide “vastly improved global, survivable, protected communications capabilities for strategic command and tactical warfighters operating on ground, sea and air platforms,” Lockheed Martin wrote on its website. It will circle about 22,000 miles above the Earth, and it will serve international partners including Canada, the Netherlands and the UK, Space.com reports.

The rocket and satellite will launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and live stream will begin today at 2:37PM ET.

The exemplar of postwar Southern California culture, of course, was Walt Disney, whose Disneyland opened in 1955. Disneyland repackaged small-town midwestern America for the sprawling postwar aerospace suburbs, presenting a sanitized, nostalgic Main Street. That backward-looking ethos hid a forward-looking embrace of technology. As the historian Eric Avila has noted, Disney represented an essential paradox, “using technical innovations to represent traditional values.” Disney captured the blue-sky technological sensibility in his trademark, “Imagineering.”

Some of Disney’s technical innovations came from California’s defense industry. Disney hired Stanford Research Institute, a defense-oriented think tank, to choose the park’s site and plan its layout, and Disneyland’s robot animatronics, for instance in the Enchanted Tiki Room, were controlled by a magnetic tape system originally developed for the Polaris submarine missile, for which Disney licensed the patent. Another quintessential Californian, Ray Bradbury, in a 1965 article titled “The Machine-Tooled Happyland,” marveled at these animatronics and called Disney and his park the “prime movers of our age.” One of Disneyland’s main attractions, Tomorrowland, symbolized faith in aerospace, especially its centerpiece ride, the Rocket to the Moon. A later Tomorrowland exhibit, the Carousel of Progress, opened in 1967 under the sponsorship of General Electric, which would soon build the engines for both the F-117 and B-2.

There was, in fact, a more direct Disney connection to Stealth. It came in the person of Richard Scherrer, who combined Disneyland and aerospace with another typically California pursuit, hot rods. Scherrer was born and raised in Seattle; his father spent time in prison for his role as a driver and mechanic for rumrunners and apparently passed on his mechanical ability to his son. Scherrer, like many other future engineers, built model airplanes as a youth, and in junior high school he had a job running a punch press making parts of model planes. That job led eventually to shop-floor jobs at Boeing, in between stints at the University of Washington. He apparently also inherited his father’s love of fast cars; he dropped out of college at one point “due to some foolish expenses,” he recalled, “including a 1938 Lincoln-Zephyr V-12 Coupe.” He eventually graduated in 1942 with a degree in aeronautical engineering and went to work for the Ames Research Center, a lab run by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (the forerunner to NASA) in Mountain View, south of San Francisco.

In the early 1950s Scherrer was working at Ames and goofing around with hot rods — this was, after all, the hot-rod heyday later celebrated by the Beach Boys and “American Graffiti.” It is no accident that hot-rods became a particular symbol of California just at the time the aerospace industry took off. Many California hot-rodders were young aerospace engineers who spent their weekends tinkering in garages with custom camshafts and exhaust manifolds. One of them was Scherrer, who was building a sports car with some buddies and looking around for a place to do the welding. He found it at the Arrow Development Company, a machine shop near Ames in Mountain View, so he started hanging around the shop while working
on his car.

The Arrow shop was run by Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon, a couple of mechanical geniuses of a type common to midcentury America; they could seemingly fix or build anything. In the early 1950s they had gotten a job making some playground equipment, which led to work on a merry-go-round, then a miniature train ride, and eventually to a contract from Disneyland making the cars for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. That led to a long association with Disney, for whom they built some of the canonical early Disneyland rides.

Bacon and Morgan recognized a kindred spirit in the young Scherrer and recruited him to help with the engineering on the Disney jobs. Scherrer agreed, moonlighting at Arrow for several years while working his regular job at Ames, trying to keep his Ames bosses in the dark despite mysterious phone calls. His Disney projects at Arrow included the Tea Cups, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, the Matterhorn, and the Flying Saucers.

Scherrer continued consulting for Arrow even after he took a new job in 1959 with Lockheed. The engineer who helped build the Flying Saucers for Disney’s Tomorrowland would, less than twenty years later, help invent Stealth aircraft. In fact, Scherrer was the only major designer to work on Stealth at both Lockheed and Northrop, on both the F-117 and the B-2. Most engineers would say there is no connection. Engineering is purely about optimizing a machine for a particular function—whether that function is maximizing the fun on an amusement park ride or minimizing the radar signature of an airplane. But if engineers can help Dumbo take to the air, perhaps so, too, can they make some other far-out, blue-sky contraptions fly. And that was not the last connection between Disneyland and Stealth.

Disney provided an antidote to another vision of Los Angeles, one that was not clean, controlled, and conservative but rather disorderly, dirty, and dangerous. Southern California had long toggled between two opposing visions of the place. On the one hand, there was the sunshine state of palm trees and beaches, extraordinary technological creativity, and economic opportunity; on the other hand, a dark dystopia where the powerful exploited the underprivileged and plundered the environment, and violence lurked in the shadows.

The wonderful world of Disney against the cynicism of Chinatown. In short, sunshine versus noir. As much as Disney tried to banish this darker vision of California, it survived—and resurfaced just as Stealth was germinating. Southern California in the early 1970s no longer had the heady buzz of the space race. Even as astronauts were stepping onto the moon, delivered by rockets and spacecraft made in California, the
aerospace economy had stalled, like a rocket motor at apogee. It soon entered a tailspin, with a flaming trail of pink slips.

The downsizing actually started in the late 1960s, as NASA began ramping down from Apollo and the cost of the Vietnam War ate into new weapons development. Aviation Week, the industry’s barometer, declared 1970 “the gloomiest year in decades,” and the decline only steepened, finally bottoming out in 1972. From 1967 to 1972 LA aerospace firms shed over fifty thousand jobs, a third of the aerospace workforce.

Layoffs and cutbacks caused resentment to percolate through Southern California, amplifying the effects of a national recession and providing a rude awakening to the region after two decades of affluence. To economic woes one could add traffic on the freeways, smog in the air, racial tension, drug abuse, and a general hangover of anxiety. Anti-military attitudes prompted by the Vietnam War further stressed the region’s defense industry. The turmoil reached even the suburban sanctuary of Disneyland, where in summer 1970 a group of three hundred antiwar protesters overran security and raised a Viet Cong flag on Tom Sawyer’s Island.

Far from the utopian visions of just a few years earlier, Los Angeles was becoming synonymous with dystopia, soon represented in movies such as Blade Runner and The Terminator. A 1972 book entitled California: The Vanishing Dream identified a “crisis” in the Golden State. In 1977 Time magazine, retreating from its previous sunny outlook, asked in a headline, “Whatever happened to California?” The article answered, “Everyone agrees that the California of the ’60s, a mystical land of abundance and affluence, vanished some time in the ’70s…. California has clearly lost the magic it once had.”

California had only misplaced the magic, not lost it altogether. Southern California had long gotten used to the boom-and-bust cycles of aerospace: the golden age of Lindbergh and Earhart gave way to the Great Depression, and World War II’s vast mobilization evaporated after the war’s end. The early 1970s were indeed dark days for Southern California, but sunny days soon returned—in part because, amid the desperation, a handful of engineers thought they knew how to build an airplane with a radar signature ten thousand times smaller than that of existing planes. And those enterprising engineers worked in two firms based about twenty miles apart across the LA basin. In a land of make-believe, if you believe it, you can make it.

From Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft by Peter Westwick. Copyright © 2020 by Peter Westwick and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

There are no restrictions on use with personal devices, but officials have encouraged personnel and their kids to uninstall the app.

The Air Force and Coast Guard didn’t provide specific reasoning for the ban, but it’s likely to be consistent with earlier bans. There’s been concerns that TikTok’s ownership might leave it susceptible to pressure from the Chinese government to hand over sensitive data, although the company recently said that China didn’t request any info in the first half of 2019.

And like spokeswoman Maj. Malinda Singleton told the WSJ, some of the issues are “not unique” to any one social media platform. Hostile governments could theoretically recruit people through social networks, and there’s a chance that personnel could inadvertently reveal military secrets or expose themselves to attack. Warnings like this are rare (the Defense Department cautioned against using Pokémon Go in 2016), but they’re not shocking given the potential for oversharing.

As with the Navy ban, the Army is likely concerned that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance could pose problems. While there’s no evidence of suspicious activity taking place, ByteDance could theoretically be compelled to forward soldiers’ sensitive info to the Chinese government or to recruit soldiers as spies.The company has been eager to fend off such claims, to the point where reports have speculated that it might sell control of TikTok to reassure nervous US officials.

It’s not known if the Air Force or Marine Corps have implemented similar policies, although it’s likely given coordination between the forces.

None of the services can ban TikTok from personal phones, so this might not wreck soldiers’ attempts to document their adventures. However, that still leaves some concerns about security. The Army still asks soldiers to be wary of strange texts, according to Ochoa, but it’s ultimately up to the troops to avoid sharing valuable data.

There’s little doubt as to why TikTok might face restrictions, though. US politicians remain concerned about TikTok’s Chinese ownership and the potential for the app to serve as a conduit for Chinese government plans. There’s no evidence that TikTok is siphoning personal info, but that might not matter to jittery officials. As it stands, there are also worries that China may be shaping TikTok’s message, even for American users. Critics are concerned that TikTok could be a recruiting tool, or else sanitize the atrocities and other forms of oppression in China.

The US Army recently told cadets not to use TikTok.

ByteDance hasn’t commented on the ban. It previously said that TikTok’s US operations are separate from China and has denied serving on the government’s behalf. That stance won’t assuage the Navy, though, and it looks like the Navy’s rank and file will have to use personal phones if they’re going to use TikTok at all.