WASHINGTON — Greg Kuperman, program manager on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Strategic Technology Office, worries that innovations emerging from the business space industry won’t ever reach potential customers within the U.S. military.
A key reason for that, Kuperman told , is that discussions about next-generation technologies, particularly within the space sector, quickly veer into classified territory, and lots of business businesses developing these technologies don’t have security clearances.
An example is the sector of the industry developing compact satellite antennas, he said. Much of the leading-edge technology is coming from business businesses and startups that DoD never hears about.
“The innovators who’re good at seeing the issues and coming up with clever solutions are form of left on the skin looking in,” he said.
Kuperman, who has worked on classified defense programs for greater than 15 years, is seeking to attract more room businesses to work with DARPA. He currently oversees a program attempting to develop low-cost optical satellite terminals, and a separate project in search of innovation in space sensors for low Earth orbit.
Satellite antennas — including design, materials and manufacturing techniques — that may increase performance at less weight and value are a key area of interest for DARPA, he said. “But with a view to actually appropriately say what the issue is, I would like to have a conversation on the classified level.”
In conversations with people within the industry, Kuperman found that lots of the innovators developing technologies of interest to DARPA don’t have clearances. “This happened so repeatedly that I used to be identical to, ‘That is ridiculous.’”
‘Bridges’ initiative
In an effort to repair this problem, Kuperman’s office launched an initiative called Bridges to assist corporations get security clearances to work on defense contracts. “We wish to bring innovators right into a space where we will actually begin talking with them,” he said.
Bridges is brief for “Bringing Classified Innovation to Defense and Government Systems.”
Across national security agencies, he said, “there’s an enormous recognition that we’d like to work with small businesses. However the piece that nobody’s really gone after is the clearance piece,”
Bridges is attempting to “solve that valley of death with respect to clearances and getting the parents from the business side into the cleared conversations.”
White papers on next-generation satellites antennas are due June 9. Kuperman said DARPA will select essentially the most promising concepts and can help chosen bidders apply for clearances in order that they can work with the agency and with potential military customers.
DARPA will arrange a consortium that may help corporations eligible to bid for U.S. defense contracts to use for clearances needed to work on classified programs, referred to as DD Form 254. The agency is partnering with MITRE Corp, a federally funded nonprofit that may provide consortium members access to classified office space, computers and telephones at locations in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
“We’re going to ask proposals from corporations by topic area,” said Kuperman.
Future topic areas beyond space
Satellite antenna designs was chosen as the primary topic since it’s an area “where we’re seeing form of a generational leap in technology that has not yet penetrated the defense market.”
Of particular interest are next-generation antennas to speak with low Earth orbit satellites. “For those who think that you simply are moving well past the present cutting-edge, we would like to listen to from you,” said Kuperman.
DARPA, for instance, desires to attract corporations working on ultra-slim metamaterial antenna arrays, said Kuperman. The business industry has invested on this technology, which has broad applications for satellite communications but has not been exploited for military systems.
“I’ve been very impressed with business developments in metamaterial antenna arrays,” Kuperman said.
Metamaterials are materials engineered to have properties not present in naturally occurring materials. They promise smaller, lighter, higher performing miniature antennas with increased performance, said Kuperman. “They provide the potential for being 10 to 100 times cheaper and 10 to 100 times lower power.” For the military, this implies “I can proliferate these and do things that I’ve never thought I could do before.”
Firms like SpaceX and Kymeta produce widely used flat satcom antennas “but nobody has demonstrated that at the scale and scale that DoD needs for air and space applications,” said Kuperman. “There’s still a variety of work that should be done there.”
For the next-generation antenna project, he said, “we’re also bringing in our partners across the DoD from the Air Force, the Army, from Special Operations Forces, the Navy in order that they can are available in and discuss their problems at the suitable classified levels.”