Every UASFeed story on NASA — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
High-Altitude Platform Stations operate in the stratosphere at 20 km — above weather, below orbital mechanics — using solar power and ultra-dense batteries to loiter for months. Here's how they work, which programs are viable, and why the sector is drawing serious capital.
Read the story →Every VTOL aircraft must reconcile two contradictory physics demands: hover requires high blade area and tip speed, while forward flight requires the opposite. Tilt-rotor, tailsitter, and ducted-fan architectures each place their bets differently — with lasting consequences for military range and noise compliance.
For 17 consecutive nights in December 2023, unidentified drone swarms penetrated restricted airspace over Joint Base Langley-Eustis, forcing the relocation of F-22 Raptors — while the military's C-UAS authorities and tools proved wholly inadequate to respond.
From a copper-wire-rigged DJI Mavic to a C-4-loaded platform aimed at a Nashville substation, drone attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure have moved from theoretical to documented — yet 93% of nuclear sites, 90% of oil refineries, and most major airports remain without active counter-UAS protection.
Drone noise sits in household-appliance decibel territory but is measurably 4–10 dB more annoying than jet aircraft at equal sound pressure. A patchwork of bespoke FAA rulings and an unfulfilled congressional mandate have left communities in Texas and Australia with no effective regulatory recourse.
The FAA provides no air traffic services below 400 feet, where drone density is set to explode. UAS Traffic Management replaces centralized control with a federated network of software intermediaries — and a decade of NASA research shows why that architecture is the only one that can scale.
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