Defense agency launches back into space research arena

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is using its growing budget to shift its focus back to long-term, high-risk projects, many of which are based in space, DARPA Director Anthony Tether said Friday.

Speaking to reporters at a breakfast sponsored by New Technology Week, Tether said the Bush administration has instructed him to transform DARPA, which played a central role in creating the Internet, "back to the way it was when it was a swashbuckling agency, constantly getting the director in trouble, and almost getting him fired."

"I almost got fired yesterday," Tether said with a chuckle. He declined to elaborate.

Noting that DARPA was established in 1958 after the Soviet Union's launch of the Sputnik spacecraft, Tether said the agency is returning to its space-based roots. "We're back into space in a major way," he said, adding that the agency has increased its space investments by more than 15 percent per year over the past decade.

While DARPA earmarked about $2 million for space-based projects in 1991, Tether predicted that the agency's annual investment in space technology would reach about $500 million within the next couple of years. DARPA's primary space priorities include improving the U.S. military's access to space, protecting its space-based assets, and preventing enemies of the United States from gaining access to space-based technologies.

DARPA also is funding long-term projects aimed at protecting U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. For example, the agency is seeking ways to detect explosives from a distance of up to 200 meters. "We're still working on that," Tether said. "We don't have any solutions yet."

And DARPA is working to develop radar "tags" designed to improve military tracking of U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. "Right now, I think we sometimes know the enemy forces better than we know where our own guys are," Tether said.

Helping the Defense Department buck its traditional approach to warfare is another top priority for DARPA, he said. For example, Tether said, the U.S. military typically uses separate weapons systems to find and attack targets.

"That was great in the days when targets were fixed," Tether said. "But in today's world, where the targets are all mobile and fleeting, that organization no longer holds. So what we are doing is developing a technology that allows a person to find a target and be able to immediately kill the target, using the same system."

Tether said DARPA's investment in such dual-purpose weapons represents about 10 percent to 15 percent of the agency's budget and is "growing very rapidly"-along with the budget itself.

President Bush's $2.7 billion budget request for DARPA in fiscal 2003 would be an increase of $400 million-roughly 15 percent-over fiscal 2002. The agency also saw a significant spending increase in fiscal 2002, when its budget was 20 percent larger than the previous year.