While pri­vate com­pa­nies are touch­ing the edge of space, and NASA is fig­ur­ing out how to get to the Moon and Mars, key parts of the Pentagon’s already-troubled space pro­gram are crash­ing, fast.
The U.S. mil­i­tary relies on satel­lites to guide its bombs, relay its orders, and spy on its ene­mies. But the next wave of orbit­ing eyes and ears is cost­ing tens of bil­lions of dol­lars more than expected. It’s an open ques­tion whether they’ll ever make it into space.
The trou­bles start with Space-Based Infrared System-High (“SBIRS-High”), a series of satel­lites designed to spot mis­sile attacks, both on dis­tant bat­tle­fields and against the con­ti­nen­tal U.S. The Air Force just had to add another $1.5 bil­lion to the project. That means the cost for SBIRS-High has tripled since it was first intro­duced, Aviation Week reports.
But those hiked prices seem down­right petite, com­pared to the boon­doogle that is the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (“EELV”) pro­gram. The Pentagon rocket mod­ern­iza­tion project was sup­posed to “reduce the gov­ern­ments total [space] launch costs by up to 50 per­cent,” notes Defense News.
Not any more. Originally billed at $18.8 bil­lion, the EELV’s is now pro­jected to rise to $31.8 bil­lion, accord­ing to a new Congressional report.
The gov­ern­ment blamed the weak com­mer­cial space launch mar­ket and “incor­rect assump­tions about infla­tion” for most of the added costs. But, given the Pentagon’s dis­mal recent his­tory in space, that’s a lit­tle bit like say­ing, “the dog ate my satel­lite.”
THERE’S MORE: “People don’t real­ize that in many ways the DoD space pro­gram is even more of a dis­as­ter than NASA’s (partly because they sweep so much dirt under the black pro­gram car­pet),” notes space blog­ger Rand Simberg.

“If We Run Out of Batteries, This War is Screwed.”
That was the head­line to one of my favorite embed­ded accounts of the Iraq inva­sion. And it cap­tured a fun­da­men­tal truth about today’s mil­i­tary: with so much warfight­ing gear going elec­tronic, bat­tles are increas­ingly won or lost by the side with the best power sup­ply.
To break the bat­tery addic­tion, the Army has been pour­ing more and more resources into alter­na­tive and renew­able ways to gen­er­ate power. The lat­est exam­ple, reports John Gartner in today’s Wired News: “flex­i­ble solar pan­els that can be lay­ered on top of a tent, or rolled up into a back­pack to pro­vide a portable power source.”
Long-term, the idea is to have solar pan­els that can be cam­ou­flaged into tents or even uni­forms. So the Army is work­ing with con­trac­tors “to develop nanotechnology-based solar pan­els that can be woven directly into fab­ric. [The] tech­nol­ogy replaces sil­i­con with dye poly­mer plas­tics that trans­form any kind of light into elec­tri­cal energy,” Gartner writes.
“We want to cut back on the things that sol­diers have to bring with them,” includ­ing gen­er­a­tors and per­sonal bat­tery packs, Jean Hampel, with the Army’s Natick Soldier Systems Center, tells Gartner. “In mod­ern war­fare, portable power for com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy is every bit as impor­tant as fire­power and manpower.”