The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is in the news again.  Actually, it’s in the news most every day.  What we mean to say is, it’s back on Apogee Consulting’s radar screen with a couple of items we think are of interest to our clients and visitors.  (We last reported on DARPA’s budget request here.)

First, this Aviation Week “Ares” blog article discusses the role of complexity in the aerospace industry design process.  The article reports that DARPA believes that the industry’s antiquated MIL-STD-499A systems engineering approach—the famous “Vee”—is to blame for much of the recent spate of cost overruns and schedule slips.  DARPA produced the following chart to illustrate its point—

As the Ares blog noted, “Integrated-circuit makers have held development times steady even as chips have soared in complexity. Car manufacturers have actually reduced their development timespans. Only the aerospace industry, according to the chart, has seen development time (and cost) increase in lockstep with product complexity.”

Ares reported that—

The research agency sees a lot of problems with the process, arguing that because detailed design is done within functional stovepipes that are ‘based on arbitrary cleavage lines’ - like between power and thermal management - when components and subsystems come together during integration there are ‘unmodeled and undesired interactions’ that force redesigns, driving up delays and costs.

To address the issue, DARPA is reportedly launching “META” to try to change the old system engineering paradigm.  As Ares reported, “A key part of META is using complexity as the metric, rather than the traditional SWaP - size, weight and power. Apply that to the F-35 and you can begin to see why development is proving so difficult. A complexity metric would, DARPA says, allow ‘cyber-vs-physical’ trades - between implementing a function in software or hardware - and trade-offs between complexity, performance, cost, etc.”

Second, DARPA has reportedly “scrapped plans” to develop its “Rapid Eye” program, according to this article.  Rapid Eye envisioned encapsulating a folding ISR drone inside an inter-continental ballistic missile, which would put surveillance assets on scene—anywhere in the world—within an hour.  As the article noted—

--the rocket-launched drone had some serious conceptual flaws. For starters, lobbing an ICBM across the planet without warning could be mistaken for a surprise nuclear attack. That’s the same general issue that plagues other high-speed, hit-anywhere-in-the-world weapons concepts like Prompt Global Strike. If you want to put non-nuclear payloads like a drone or a conventional warhead on a ballistic missile, you need to make sure you don’t trigger Armageddon.

So Rapid Eye is closed for good.  But as META shows us, DARPA is still trying to create the future today.