On Wednesday, during a gathering at Mar-a-Lago attended by some of Donald Trump's closest associates, a speaker demanded, "Where is the George Soros of the right?" In a scene that an attendee captured on video, Elon Musk, the fifty-three-year-old South African-born billionaire who reportedly spent about a hundred and thirty million dollars to aid Trump's campaign and support other Republicans in competitive races, raised his arm. Amid loud cheers, the speaker declared, "God bless you, Elon. We are so, so grateful." Musk has claimed publicly that he has never asked Trump for any favors, and that Trump has not offered him any. Despite spreading misinformation on X, his social-media platform, and heavily financing the campaign of someone who plotted an autogolpe, he has also denied being a political extremist.

The Pentagon is usually scant on any details about the X-37B, its top secret space plane that flies up to 500 miles above Earth. But the Department of Defense has now revealed that the unmanned craft is about to execute a'first-of-a-kind' manoeuvre to alter its orbit. It's thought the novel exercise will let it evade detection by hostile nations and perform secretive'low-passes' over Earth. The Boeing-built vehicle, roughly the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, has been launched seven times since 2010. Although the exact purpose of the ship is a guarded secret by the US Space Force, it's thought to carry spy equipment, satellites or even weaponry. X-37 is a reusable robotic spacecraft manufactured by Boeing for the US government.

Arthel Neville welcomes former U.S. Defense Intelligence Officer Rebekah Koffler to discuss the massive global cyberattack that had impacted several federal agencies. The next big war may be fought in space. As the Pentagon is gearing up for a future celestial conflict, so are our chief adversaries, China and Russia. Here's why "Star Wars" is no longer merely a topic of science fiction. The best way to avoid space warfare is to be ready for it. On Dec. 28, Elon Musk's Space X launched into space the Pentagon's highly secretive X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, an unmanned reusable robotic spacecraft operated by the Air Force, in collaboration with Space Force.

The US military's secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than ever before. The Falcon Heavy, composed of three liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast. The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday's flight. It came two weeks after China's own robot spaceplane, the Shenlong, or'Divine Dragon,' was launched on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing US-Sino rivalry in space. The Pentagon has disclosed scant details about the X-37B mission, conducted by the US Space Force under the military's National Security Space Launch program.

Japanese startup Astroscale Holdings has won a $25.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to develop a satellite capable of providing in-space refueling services to other satellites. Astroscale, a Tokyo-based company founded in 2013 that announced the deal Friday, aims to provide "on-orbit services," such as refueling, that would extend the service life of satellites, and the removal of space debris. A feature likely to have been among the capabilities considered of high value by U.S. Space Systems Command, the premier space capability delivery organization of the U.S. Space Force, is the company's satellite-grabbing technology, which involves a robotic arm.

'Robot dogs' are being tested by the US Space Force so they can carry out patrols of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The $150,000 (£123,000) four-legged bots can be equipped with a wide variety of optical and acoustic sensors, allowing them to serve as the'eyes and ears' around sensitive areas of the base. They are being used for patrols'to save significant man hours', according to a statement from the Department of Defense. Space Launch Delta 45 – the unit responsible for all space launch operations from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral – used at least two Vision 60 unmanned ground vehicles (Q-UGVs), or'robot dogs', during the two-day test last month. Built by Ghost Robotics, the robots can be operated either autonomously or by a human controller.

The Space Force's innovation arm, SpaceWERX, has tapped Wallaroo Labs to explore and demonstrate how machine learning models can be deployed to advance multiple efforts associated with on-orbit servicing, assembly, and manufacturing (OSAM) missions for the newest U.S. military branch. The company was selected for a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project to help the Space Force fully unleash machine learning within its OSAM-aligned production environments, according to an announcement published Tuesday. OSAM enables the building or repair of systems and components at the operational edge, on orbit. While predictive algorithms to support such processes can be built virtually anywhere on Earth, operationalizing those machine learning models in space is necessary to maximize their value. "The whole point of this for them is to get to outcomes faster across a whole range of use cases," Wallaroo CEO and founder Vid Jain told FedScoop in an interview on Monday prior to the announcement.

Members of the Reserve and National Guard are highly skilled across a variety of private-sector industries and have the potential to make substantial contributions to Defense Department missions, a DOD official said. The problem is, the department is not always aware of that talent, said Scott Sumner, technical project manager at Defense Innovation Unit's artificial intelligence/machine learning portfolio. For example, reservists in their civilian jobs might be working on cloud computing, software engineering, cybersecurity or any number of other in-demand skills. The department has no way to find them or to know that those skills even exist, he said. That could soon change, Sumner said.

Experts say artificial intelligence -- which has wide applications across the military, civil and private sectors -- will be critical to furthering space technology as the cosmos becomes more contested. "The space environment continues to rapidly evolve," said Melanie Stricklan, CEO of Slingshot Aerospace, a space simulation and analytics company based in Austin, Texas, and El Segundo, California. "We continue to proliferate with new users and capabilities, new sensors both on orbit looking down, and on the Earth looking back up at space." Artificial intelligence can improve space domain awareness, accelerate command-and-control decisions as well as inject resiliency into satellites and their corresponding networks, she said during an online panel discussion hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton. "There's a lot of limitations for space today, but I think AI solutions really offer a transformative opportunity for ... the protect-and-defend mission on the defense side [and] for improving operations on the commercial side," Stricklan said.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and former under Secretary of Defense for policy Michèle Flournoy discuss possible actions to take if Russia invades Ukraine. This is a rush transcript of "Fox News Sunday" on December 5, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. President Biden and Russia's Vladimir Putin will hold a superpower phone JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I don't accept anybody's red We'll discuss the standoff with Senate Armed Services Committee member Joni Just how much of a threat is China? We'll talk about how to keep law and order in space with the vice chief of So, we need to be ready. U.S. faces around the world.