Contracting Office Address

Other Defense Agencies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Contracts Management Office, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203-1714, UNITED STATES

Description

The Vulture air vehicle program is an exploratory development program to develop the capability to deliver and maintain a single airborne payload on station for an uninterrupted period of at least 5 years using a heavier-than-air platform system. It is envisioned that this program will, at a minimum, develop and demonstrate advanced reliability technologies for air vehicle systems. Other advanced technologies may also be developed and demonstrated depending upon the nature of the architectures proposed by offerors. The Government is not interested in approaches that use either radioactive energy sources or employ any form of buoyant flight for this application.

The Vulture program will research and develop technologies and systems which will enable the military to deliver and maintain a 1000 lb, 5 kW airborne payload for an uninterrupted period of at least 5 years with an on-station probability of 99% and with a high probability of mission success. The architectures selected and the specific approaches taken by the offerors will determine the range of technical areas that are developed, including, but not limited to, environmental energy collection, high specific energy storage, extremely efficient propulsion systems, precision robotic refueling, autonomous materiel transfer, extremely efficient vehicle structural design, and mitigation of environmentally-induced loads.

Point of Contact

Wade Pulliam, Program Manager, TTO, Phone 703-248-1524, Fax 703-248-8006, Email Wade.Pulliam@darpa.mil