Vanessa Wyche

Southwest Research Institute has secured a $250M indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract from the United States Air Force to study how operational use impacts aircraft systems and materials. Read full story: https://lnkd.in/e2qRxshC --- #GovConNews #ContractWins #USAirForce

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On Tuesday I will be presenting “A Modeling and Simulation Framework for Evaluating Aircraft Survivability” authored by myself, Dr. Dimitri Mavris and Dr. Evan Harrison at the 2026 AIAA SciTech conference in Orlando. TL;DR I built a 6DOF missile engagement simulation of a low-SWAPc missile against a Shahed drone. The major effort was focused on a full FMCW missile seeker model and implementing the hooks to exercise the TIES systems engineering methodology. Details: Ukraine has shown us that modern warfare relies heavily on low cost, massively proliferated drones. The modern inventory of air interception systems relies on exquisitely designed systems that drives the cost-exchange ratio heavily in favor of the attacker. In missile systems, the seeker is typically the most expensive piece of this puzzle. TIES is a systems engineering methodology that aims to use physics based models and statistical methods to reduce the trade space of a design against mission effectiveness and cost. This helps to drastically reduce cost of a program by increasing design knowledge early in the development process. This framework intends to exercise the effectiveness of an FMCW radar design against a low cost drone. The RCS of the drone was modeled using Dr. David C Jenn’s POFacets software. The architecture of the simulation was pulled from Dr. Peter H. Zipfel’s CADAC++ suite. The FMCW radar hardware model and detection chain was programmed up in C++ with the help of several texts in the field, including Dr. DaVila’s “Radar and EW Modeling in Matlab and Simulink” (a wonderful modern text for anyone in the field- highly recommended!). With a physics based c++ simulation (read: fast execution) and the hooks in place to exercise a morphological matrix of an engagement and radar system, we now have a way to run the TIES methodology on a non-traditional application. Special thanks to Dr. Mavris for his immense support through my education at Georgia Tech (both undergrad and graduate school) as it comes to a close, and Dr. Harrison for his invaluable guidance on this project as I explored a novel application of the TIES method. If you’re interested to learn more feel free to reach out to me! If you’re at SciTech next week, I hope to see you at the presentation!

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Eric Berger of Ars Technica reports “TransAstra , said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.” THATS BIG! “We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel , chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”” THAT’S EXCITING…building the future industrial base. “Sercel said there are as many as 250 potential target asteroids, with a diameter of up to about 20 meters, that could be reached with reusable, robotic spacecraft over the next decade. He envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the “New Moon” processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth.” THAT’S SCALE! https://lnkd.in/et689znr Space Systems Command United States Space Force White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Office of Space Commerce

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A test readiness review (TRR) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Ouija program very low Earth orbit (VLEO) mission has been completed by Orion Space Solutions, an Arcfield Company...https://lnkd.in/gcJFphAK

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