Excellent Work Performed on System F6

摘要

Your recent article on the cancellation of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) System F6 demo mission ["DARPA Cancels System F6," May 20, page 4] gives a fairly accurate portrayal of the current state of the program and the reasons for its cancellation. However, it needed to delve deeper in order to avoid casting aspersions on some of the excellent F6 performers that are executing at a very high level on their contracts. Our company, Emergent Space Technologies Inc., is one such performer, but there are others. Emergent is the prime contractor for the Cluster Flight Application (CFA) software, which enables multiple spacecraft to perform the relative navigation and control needed for coordinated semi-autonomous cluster ingress/egress, efficient station-keeping, collision avoidance and scatter/re-gather. This software technology, which DARPA intends to make available as Open Source, is an important advancement in enabling future cluster and formation-flying missions. With today's small-satellite technology, they are more viable than a decade ago when such architectures first began to emerge in the thinking at NASA and the U.S. Air Force.