DARPA Director Tony Tether addresses the large audience gathered to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary on Apr 10, 2008 at the Washington Hilton in Washington DC.
If you have seen Star Trek, you may have glimpsed the future. You know the scene—an away team steps into the transporter, someone operates the controls, and suddenly the center of each figure begins to sparkle. As the mysterious glows expand, the people fade away, to reappear, apparently unchanged, at their destination.
So it goes in Star Trek’s 23rd century. To get from place to place over short distances, people and objects are disassembled into their component particles, converted into information, and “beamed” elsewhere for reassembly.
This could happen sooner than television predicted. A storied and influential government agency is already exploring technology that might some day be used to build a real transporter.
That organization is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—probably the only branch of government ever created specifically to indulge in fantasy, or something remarkably close to it. DARPA explores the territory that lies beyond the cutting edge of science and technology, where revolutionary discoveries can sometimes be found. Then it turns those findings into practical hardware for the US military.
For such a productive agency, DARPA is almost tiny. It carries out no research of its own, instead contracting with university and corporate laboratories to get the work done. It gets by with only 240 employees, half of them program managers recruited from the academic and commercial worlds. They remain for only a few years, then return to private life, so fresh ideas and energy are always coming into the agency.
A proposal for the world’s first satellite navigation system was brought to DARPA in 1958. Agency support for the project led to the Transit 2A satellite.
And bright ideas are all these people need. “DARPA will take a chance on an idea with no data,” says Anthony Tether, the agency’s director. “We’ll put up the money to go get the data and see if the idea holds. That’s the highest-risk type of research you can have.”
This kind of high-stakes gamble often fails—but, when it pays off, it tends to do so in a big way. If today’s warfighters can hit harder, at longer distances, with better information about their targets, and often in greater safety than their peers a generation ago, much of the credit belongs to DARPA.
Often, DARPA’s work makes its way into civilian life as well. ARPA, as it was first known (“Defense” was added to its name later), was behind the early research on the very-large-scale integrated circuits that power today’s personal computers and video games. Later, scientists sponsored by the agency added microwave radios to integrated circuits, opening the way for GPS and cell phones.
In the mid-1960s, scientists at ARPA began planning a revolutionary new computer network that could send its messages over many different routes, so that scarce, geographically separated computer resources could be shared. The network, then called ARPANET, carried its first e-mail in 1971. Twenty years later, it had grown into the Internet and begun to change the world.
Yet far more of DARPA’s work has involved aviation. Its efforts led to the development of the Saturn rocket that carried men to the Moon, the Lockheed F117 “stealth” fighter, the Northrop Grumman B2 bomber, and the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now collecting intelligence videos over Iraq and other trouble spots. More than half of the X-planes built to date have been sponsored by DARPA.
Early mission
In Jan 1958, the USSR launched its Sputnik satellite—an act which convinced American leaders that the US was in danger of losing its technological lead. A month later, Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its job was to make sure that the US would never again be surprised by an adversary’s technology, and to prepare surprises of its own for use by the American military.
It would do this by working on the “far” side of technology. This is the area that, in the words of a DARPA publication called Bridging the Gap, “represents fundamental discoveries, where new science, new ideas and radical new concepts typically first surface.” There are always people with far-out ideas for novel technologies or new ways to use existing capabilities. But other programs are designed to support incremental developments, not revolutions, so those thinking on the far side find it difficult or impossible to get support for their work. ARPA would repair that problem and would fund the visionaries.
Because what became DARPA arose in response to the Soviet space triumph, the agency has always been a leader in aerospace. In fact, space research was almost its only activity in the early years. When NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office took over most space development work in 1960, the fledgling research group almost disappeared.
Yet DARPA soon proved its value. At the end of the 1950s, the military assumed that satellites would remain in relatively low Earth orbit, no more than 600 miles up. In their view, no one needed a booster capable of throwing heavy payloads further than that.
DARPA worked on one anyway. The project, completed by NASA, eventually grew into the Saturn V rocket. And when President Kennedy decided in 1961 to land men on the Moon, the vehicle that would get them there was well on its way to completion. It remains the largest space booster ever built.
Stay-at-home pilots
UAVs are another pivotal technology that might not exist if not for DARPA. Through most of the 20th century, military aviators scorned remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs), as they were then known. After all, how could pilots prove they had the “right stuff” if they flew their airplanes without ever leaving the ground?
Fortunately, DARPA has never needed outside encouragement to pursue its own vision. In 1971, the agency began the mini-RPV program. Six years later, it had produced 2 new models—Praeire and Calere—and handed them off to the military for battlefield use.
In 1981, DARPA conceived Teal Rain—a surveillance drone that could loiter at high altitudes for days or even weeks. It would have been a cheap substitute for surveillance satellites, but the armed services ignored the concept.
Condor was a high-altitude drone capable of carrying an 1800-lb payload for 9000 miles and remaining aloft for 60 hours.
DARPA moved on to Condor—a lightweight UAV that could carry 1800 lbs of instruments 9000 miles at altitudes up to 67,000 ft, remaining in the air for up to 60 hours. With a 200-ft wingspan, it was a breakthrough vehicle in many ways—built entirely from lightweight composites, capable of flying without an external pilot, optimized for high altitudes and sipping fuel rather than gulping it. By 1988, it was ready for acquisition. Then its mission was transferred to the US Air Force, which declined to buy a weapon that had been designed for the Navy. It was one of many DARPA programs that have fallen to inter-service rivalry.
Yet many of the ideas first developed by Teal Rain and Condor have made their way into Northrop Grumman’s RQ4 Global Hawk reconnaissance UAV, now operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
US Army A160 Hummingbird UAV can take off vertically and fly 2500 miles at 160 mph.
The Amber UAV program was even more successful. Begun in 1984, it took only 2 years to deliver a medium-range drone. It had a pusher prop, retractable tricycle gear for a conventional take-off and landing. It could carry a 140-lb payload 1200 nm and remain in the air for 38 hours. Budget problems killed Amber in 1990, but the highly successful General Atomics Gnat-series UAVs are essentially scaled-up versions of the DARPA model.
In 1994, General Atomics was commissioned to enlarge the Gnat-750 drone into a “medium-altitude endurance” UAV. The result was the famed RQ1 Predator, which flies reconnaissance and ground-attack missions (using Hellfire missiles) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Have Blue
Lockheed’s Have Blue demonstrator vehicle pioneered all the breakthrough technologies used later in the F117 “stealth” fighter.
During the Vietnam war, pilots found they had a problem. Their fancy electronic countermeasures didn’t work. Jammers notwithstanding, Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were shooting them down. Israel lost the same types of aircraft to the same types of Soviet missile in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The solution was obvious—build an airplane that was invisible to radar. But it was also pretty much impossible within conventional technologies. That made it a problem for DARPA.
In early 1977, Lockheed received a contract to build 2 small flyable test aircraft. The “Have Blue” airplanes flew before the end of the year. They were strange-looking craft, weirdly faceted, with narrow semi-delta wings and 2 vertical fins. They were coated with radar-absorbing materials and special coatings on the windshield. Their engine inlets and exhausts were hidden behind shields, and the exhaust was cooled to help avoid infrared detection. Electronic systems included active signature cancellation and radar designed not to be intercepted. In short, Have Blue demonstrated virtually all the features that made the F117 so hard for adversaries to knock down.
DARPA’s part in stealth technology development was completed in just 2 years. The F117 first flew in 1981 and entered production in 1983.
Work on Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Short Takeoff/Vertical Landing (ASTOVL) large-scale propulsion model (LSPM), developed by DARPA between 1986 and 1989, contributed propulsion concepts to the F35 Joint Strike Fighter.
The agency soon revisited stealth technology, in a program called Tacit Blue. This produced just one testbed, which made 135 flights beginning in 1982. Built by Northrop, the aircraft showed that it was possible to design a stealth airplane using curved surfaces rather than facets. The techniques developed by Tacit Blue have since been used in the B2, the Lockheed Martin F22 and the Lockheed Martin F35. The F35 itself emerged from DARPA’s Advanced Short Takeoff/Vertical Landing (ASTOVL) program, begun in the early 1990s. Additional spinoffs from this and an earlier program called Pave Mover include the “moving target indication” radar and the “low probability of intercept” radar that were critical to air operations in Operation Desert Storm and the early days of the current war in Iraq.
Current research
“We are extraordinarily broad,” remarks Tether. “If you can think of it, we’re doing it.” DARPA has projects going in space science, biomedicine, microelectronics, nanotechnology and just about any other field you can name, including aviation. Currently, at least 6 new aircraft are in the works.
Testing a new scramjet engine powered by conventional jet fuel, the Boeing/Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne X51A scramjet demonstrator is designed to operate above Mach 6. A ground test of the engine last year showed it had more than enough power for the job. Future applications could include a strike aircraft with global reach and a space launch vehicle far cheaper to run than current technologies. The X51A should fly in 2009.
Falcon will develop technologies for the first practical hypersonic aircraft, capable of delivering a 12,000-lb payload 9000 miles in just 2 hours.
Building on lessons learned in HyFly—DARPA’s hypersonic flight demonstration program—Falcon and its follow-on project Black Swift aim to develop and flight-test technologies for the first practical hypersonic aircraft. These will be capable of reaching Mach 10—and eventually Mach 25—and landing safely for reuse. The future hypersonic cruise vehicle would be capable of delivering a 12,000-lb payload 9000 miles from the continental US in just 2 hours. The first 2 models of the hypersonic technology vehicle will launch on a rocket booster. The third will be capable of taking off from a standard runway under turbojet power, accelerating to Mach 6 with turbojet and scramjet, and then returning to Earth and landing on a runway.
DARPA’s heliplane will take off and land vertically like a helicopter, yet deliver the speed and efficiency of a fixed-wing airplane. A demonstrator aircraft will be designed for combat search and rescue, carrying a 1000-lb payload 1000 miles at 400 mph.
Heliplane will combine fixed-wing speed and efficiency with vertical takeoff and landing for combat search-and-rescue operations.
One wing of an oblique flying wing (OFW) aircraft is swept forward, the other back, and the sweep angle changes with speed to optimize aerodynamic performance. The OFW program will build a proof-of-concept X-plane, whose unique combination of high and low-speed performance would enable rapid deployment and extended time over target in roles such as surveillance and combat air patrol. This could reduce the number of combat aircraft and tankers needed to accomplish military objectives. In the very long run, an OFW bizjet would have a high purchase price, but might offer enough operating efficiency to justify the initial cost.
An autonomous aircraft capable of staying in the air for up to 5 years at a time, Vulture will be the 21st-century heir of Condor. It can be thought of as the equivalent of a cheap satellite that can gather intelligence or relay communications for extended periods, then fly off to another target.
The nano air vehicle program really pushes the limits. It aims to produce an aircraft less than 3 inches long and weighing under 10 grams, or about 1/3 oz. The idea is to provide soldiers in cities with a flying insect capable of maneuvering, and even hovering, inside buildings where GPS navigation will not work, to position sensors or relay images. This is a classic DARPA effort, requiring fundamental breakthroughs in aerodynamic design, propulsion and power systems, avionics and manufacturing techniques.
Improving flight ops
No one is happy about the high cost of oil, and this includes the military, which probably worries more than most about the risk that unfriendly regimes in the Middle East could cut off the supply. So DARPA’s biofuels program is working to develop a cheap, highly efficient process to replace JP8 with fuel derived from crop oil. The conversion process should be compatible with oils from many different crops and capture at least 60% of the energy in the feedstock. Ideally, the program will identify opportunities to achieve 90% efficiency with further development work. If successful, this program could transform the world’s energy economy.
Biofuels program under way at DARPA will lead to production of JP8 jet fuel from farm crops with high efficiency and at relatively low cost.
The heavy-fuel engine/low-friction engine program will develop a powerplant light enough for aircraft, yet capable of running on diesel or JP8. For maximum efficiency, the low-friction engine will do away with conventional piston rings, which cause most of the friction that robs an engine of power. Tomorrow’s propeller airplanes should be more efficient and cheaper to run, thanks to this research.
Intended to make it easier for military helicopters to fly through hostile airspace without being recognized and shot at from the ground, the agency’s helicopter quieting program will develop new rotor technologies to reduce the characteristic sound of an ordinary helicopter. It could also make commercial helicopters more welcome in noise-sensitive populated areas.
Today’s inertial navigation systems (INS) lose accuracy, or drift, at a rate of several miles per hour. Current military navigation systems get around this problem by updating positions with GPS readings. But what happens if the GPS system is jammed or you are in a city or natural canyon—or even under water—where the signal can be hard or impossible to read? Atomic physics now uses interferometers based on ultracold atoms to measure forces acting on matter. DARPA’s precision inertial navigation systems program seeks to adopt those methods to inertial guidance, reducing drift rates to less than 5 meters per hour. For civilian air operations, this may be overkill, yet spin-off applications might eventually be possible.
Pursuing material advantage
DARPA has always been interested in new materials that could make it possible to build stronger, lighter airframes and powerplants. This remains an important part of the agency’s work.
Among such projects are DARPA’s initiative in titanium, which aims to produce high-quality titanium at costs of less than $4 per pound, and the next-generation super carbon fiber program, which will use nanotechnology to manufacture continuous fiber from carbon nanotubes, resulting in a material at least 50% stronger and stiffer than current carbon fiber.
Structural amorphous metals are a new class of bulk metallic alloy, with unique combinations of mechanical properties. They are noncrystalline (or glassy) in the solid state, and target applications include space structures made from ultrastrong composite materials, and turbine parts made from alloys stronger than titanium and more resistant to fatigue and corrosion.
A program covering materials systems for autonomous structural tailoring will investigate materials that use an internal circulatory system to make dramatic changes in their mechanical or electromagnetic properties. Applications could be as mundane as novel surfaces to keep barnacles from growing on ship hulls or as dramatic as structural elements and surfaces that repair themselves.
Still other DARPA programs aim not to produce new military hardware but to improve the actual soldier. And at least some of these techniques could make their way into future pilot training and flight operations.
In the agency’s accelerated learning program, scientists are hoping to improve learning by adopting modern neuroscience. The idea is to measure brain activity during instruction and design training programs that will impart both knowledge and physical skills at least twice as fast as traditional teaching methods and improve retention. For pilots trying to master new aircraft, the potential benefits are obvious.
People under extreme stress tend to miss important information. It happens in war and it happens to pilots. DARPA’s AugCog program, for improving warfighter information intake under stress, is working on computer systems that can break through cognitive overload to provide better information flow. Real-world demonstrations have already shown that such techniques can improve performance.
Matter transmitter
This brings us back to the beginning—DARPA’s newest bright idea. Early in 2008, the agency issued a request for proposals to learn more about quantum entanglement, among the strangest phenomena known to science. The project, called quantum entanglement science and technology (QuEST), could produce unbreakable codes, unbelievably fast computers, and even Star Trek’s transporter. This may be the most ambitious research effort DARPA has ever taken on.
Star Trek-style matter transmitter could emerge from DARPA research into quantum physics, replacing air travel for some individuals in the distant future.
In quantum mechanics, a particle, such as an electron circling the nucleus of an atom, does not have an actual location or physical state. All that can be said of it is a set of equations that describe its probability of being in a given place, with a given energy, vibrating in certain ways. In effect, it occupies all of its possible states at once, “collapsing” into a single one only when observed. Two particles whose vibrations are the same in all dimensions are said to occupy the same quantum state.
In theory, it should be possible to prepare 2 particles, such as electrons, so that their quantum properties are “entangled” or linked together. And if you observed the properties of one electron, the other would instantly fall into the same state, no matter how far apart they were. Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” and set about finding a better theory to explain the effect without invoking faster-than-light communication. He never succeeded, and physicists have since demonstrated that quantum entanglement really exists. This brings up some interesting possibilities.
Quantum cryptography is easy, as these things go. Just make some entangled pairs of particles, and send half of each pair to the destination. Observe the particles at the transmitting end, and the particles at the receiving end will fall into the same states. Those states can then be used as a unique key to encode and decode the message. There is no way to intercept and copy the key. It either reaches its destination intact or doesn’t get there at all.
This isn’t just theory—it works. BBN Technologies in Cambridge MA, under contract to DARPA, has already built a network in which quantum keys can be sent among 10 transmitting and receiving nodes over fiber optic cable.
Quantum computing is harder to understand, but the basic notion is that a quantum bit (qubit) is not limited to representing a 0 or a 1—it can represent both at once. That means the number of calculations possible for a computer grows exponentially with the number of qubits. A quantum computer with just 14 qubits could perform 16,384 simultaneous equations—more than the fastest supercomputer in the US just 3 years ago.
Today’s most advanced codes rely on the practical impossibility of factoring certain large numbers, so quantum computers would instantly make them obsolete. Researchers estimate that it will take a 100,000-qubit computer to reach that goal. Today’s machines have fewer than 10, and it could be 2020 before anyone builds a practical quantum computer.
At Harvard University, scientists are working on another technology that could be used in quantum information systems. Lene Hau and her colleagues have managed to stop a pulse of light, convert it to matter that travels to another location, revive the light pulse, and recover all the information it contained. Future computers based on this technology could be superfast, superpowerful and highly secure.
The process depends on something called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Get something cold enough—extremely close to absolute zero, which is around minus 460° F—and its atoms all drop into their lowest energy state and vibrate in lockstep, acting almost like a single object. This is the BEC.
Instantaneous travel
Quantum teleportation works just like the Star Trek transporter, by reading an object’s quantum state and sending that information to the destination so that the object can be recreated there. In research not funded by DARPA but pointing the way for the agency’s efforts, Ashton Bradley and his colleagues at the Australian Research Council quantum-atom optics lab in Brisbane have done it—at least on the atomic scale.
For teleportation, the Australian researchers make a BEC of rubidium atoms and aim a beam of rubidium atoms at the condensate. Instantly chilled, the atoms in the beam also drop to their lowest state, getting rid of the extra energy by giving off a burst of light. Astonishingly, that light contains all the quantum information needed to reconstitute the atom. Aim it at another BEC, and whatever atom it strikes takes on the quantum state of the original atom. In effect, an atom at the transmitting end has disappeared and been reconstituted at the receiving end. There is still an atom at each end, but the quantum “identity” has moved from one to the other.
It is a long way from teleporting a few individual atoms to sending people from the Enterprise to a planet’s surface. While it may take decades to transmit something as complicated as a virus or a single molecule of DNA, it should be possible eventually—theoretically—to send a human being from one place to another through a matter transmitter.
DARPA’s research may not ground future corporate pilots by giving executives a way to get there instantaneously. Atoms do not just “tell” other atoms how to be like them. They lose their information—their identity—completely.
Scale that up to human size, and the person who steps into the matter transmitter is reduced to a pile of atoms. The person who steps out of the transmitter at the other end may look and feel like the original, and carry all his thoughts and memories, but he is still a copy. The original has disappeared. In the act of traveling, he dies. It may be that after taking such a trip a dozen times, the current copy will no longer give it a thought—but the first people who step into the transmitter will have to be very brave, or very thoughtless. I don’t think professional pilots have much to fear.
Of course, there could be other ways to arrive early. DARPA’s website mentions one program by name, but gives no details. I am still wondering what the agency means by “mathematical time reversal,” but after half a century of exploring beyond the cutting edge of technology, DARPA may be moving even further into the unknown.
Marvin Cetron is a well-known forecaster/futurist and president of Forecasting Intl. His study for the Pentagon, Terror 2000, written in 1994, was an accurate prediction of the subsequent course of terrorism.
