This week’s Space & The Huntsville Missile Defense Conference is in its 25th annual conference, and regulars say it sometimes feels like a high school reunion to see friends and colleagues from past conferences on the large exhibit floor.
They are especially glad to see each other this year because the pandemic has subsided enough to make the event seem more like normal. But this is no reunion. Each year it is filled with briefings from the nation’s top military leaders on future needs and plans and booth after booth of systems, devices and simulators to demonstrate new defense technology.
Here are a few companies working with Alabama military commands to bring that technology to this year’s conference and support the Huntsville defense industry and Army commands at Redstone Arsenal.
Virtual training was a big topic at Space & Project Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., this week. Here, a symposium attendee tries his hand at using a shoulder-mounted missile to take out virtual opposition at the Blue Halo booth.
Blue Halo is a private defense and intelligence company headquartered near Washington in Arlington, Va., but has teams working in Huntsville on space defense, air missile defense, cyber security and “counterintelligence.”
One of its products is a fully autonomous “swarm of drones” that communicate with each other to detect and defeat enemy drones on the battlefield. It’s called the “Hive Program” and all of the company’s drone design and manufacturing is done in Huntsville. At the show, Blue Halo’s popular “training room” allowed customers to enter a virtual room and fire a shoulder-mounted missile at various threats in the simulation.
This MOOG dome shown at 2022 Space & The Missile Symposium could go on a military vehicle if the company gets the contract it is seeking. To demonstrate its versatility, the turret is equipped with cannons, missiles and lasers.
MOOG is a 63-year-old company active in “space, missile and military ground systems” and its main selling point is “precision motion control”. The founder of the company invented the “precision servo valve” which is a key part of multiple systems in multiple vehicles. When a pilot lowers the flaps to land a Boeing 737, for example, he or she pushes down on a servo valve invented by MOOG.
The company is currently competing in Huntsville to build a turret to top future military vehicles. For the symposium, he put everything on the big dome: cannons, missiles and lasers. The military can choose the combination it needs and hire or train personnel accordingly.
Technology company Parsons just said “thank you” and brought a life-size “Space Invaders game” to its booth at this week’s Space & Missile Symposium in Huntsville, Ala.
Parsons is a global technology company with several thousand employees in Huntsville in cooperation with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
Huntsville manager James Lackey said the company is active in designing weapons systems for MDA at Redstone Arsenal and ground-to-space satellite communications equipment. Satellites for communications, surveillance and other missions are increasingly numerous and critical to future defense, and face “confidential threats” that Parsons is also working to address.
Parsons also brought what may have been the most popular booth attraction: a life-size Space Invaders game with side-by-side seats where players could fight wave after wave of nefarious aliens. Just like the late 1970s version before some of them were born.
Enercon Corp. is an example of vendors showing off their wares to the military in Huntsville at the annual Space & Missile Symposium. Here, chief engineer Evan Roach and Enercon president Nick Keever are at their booth next to a model of the company’s mobile main power unit for its radar system.
ENERCON is working on the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system designed to shoot down ballistic missiles fired at America or its military installations.
ENERCON in Huntsville is an example of a well-known local structure. Headquartered in Maine, it has 100 people in Alabama working directly on THAAD. The missile is assembled in Troy, Ala. Lockheed Martin. Its radar is supplied by Ratheon and its cooling equipment is supplied by Teledyne.
At the symposium, the company showed off its large mobile generator for a system the military will rely on in future field operations.
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