Dr. Owen Brown
"DARPA's Innovative F6 Mission,
and Lessons Learned from Fortune Cookies"

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) original mission, inspired by the Soviet Union beating the United States into Space with Sputnik, was to prevent technological surprise. DARPA's mission implies one imperative for the Agency: radical innovation for national security. This seminar will focus first on some lessons learned in innovation from the now 50 year old DARPA (and others). Second, a new DARPA space program, System F6 will be described. The F6 program has been started recently and hopes to demonstrate a radical idea: a large monolithic spacecraft can be decomposed into a clustered network of wirelessly connected smaller spacecraft modules that perform mission functions and/or system support functions. Technical challenges will be described, as well as an innovative approach using econometric tools that should allow system value, cost, and risk to be characterized in real dollar terms for a variety of possible architectures.

Funding provided in part by Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration: WIRED Initiative