DARPA
Technology research and development agency of the U.S. Department of Defense
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| May 19 2025 | Stephen Winchell becomes the incoming DARPA director, starting his term on May 19, 2025. |
| 2025 | Anticipated Polish Cup win in the Wrocław regionals with Barycz Sułów |
| February 2025 | DARPA shifted the final phase of NOM4D from laboratory experiments to small-scale orbital demonstrations, focusing on developing advanced in-space manufacturing capabilities. |
| January 20 2025 | Rob McHenry becomes acting DARPA director from January 20, 2025 to present. |
| 2024 | Northrop Grumman conducts initial tests of the Manta Ray UUV prototype in the Pacific Ocean, designed to be transported in 5 standard shipping containers. |
| 2024 | Won the Polish Cup in the Lower Silesia regionals with Barycz Sułów |
| October 2024 | DARPA Triage Challenge Event 1 held in Perry, Georgia, featuring disaster site replicas where teams competed to identify individuals most urgently in need of medical care. |
| August 2024 | AIxCC held the semifinal at DEF CON in Las Vegas, with DARPA and ARPA-H testing 42 submissions and seven teams winning $2 million each. |
| April 2024 | Program update occurred with industry participants providing insights on lunar economy operationalization, with many proposals focusing on in-situ resource utilization and reduced launch costs. |
| April 2024 | DARPA and U.S. Air Force announced the first-ever in-air dogfighting tests of AI algorithms autonomously flying an F-16 against a human-piloted F-16 under the ACE program. |
| March 2024 | Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) partnered with DARPA, contributing an additional $20 million to the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) prize pool. |
| 2023 | Won the Polish Cup in the Lower Silesia regionals with Barycz Sułów |
| 2023 | DARPA launched the Triage Challenge (DTC), a three-year competition to improve emergency medical response in military and civilian mass casualty incidents. |
| 2023 | DARPA expanded the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) with ERI 2.0, seeking to reinvent domestic microelectronics manufacturing. |
| 2023 | DARPA launched the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), a two-year competition to identify and fix software vulnerabilities using AI, in partnership with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. |
| December 2023 | DARPA funded 14 companies including Blue Origin, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and others to complete the LunA-10 study by June 2024, exploring infrastructure and capabilities for a moon-based economy. |
| October 2023 | Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU APL) was selected to administer the Lunar Guidelines for Infrastructure Consortium (LOGIC), establishing it as a permanent, self-sustaining, and independent forum for collaboration between industry, academia, and government to identify critical lunar infrastructure interoperability and interface needs. |
| August 2023 | DARPA announced the LunA-10 program, a seven-month capability study aimed at creating core technology concepts for adaptable, expandable lunar systems with commercial and economic potential. |
| June 2023 | DARPA awards a Phase 3 contract to General Atomics for manufacturing and flight demonstration of the LongShot air-launched missile carrier in 2025. |
| June 2023 | DARPA selected nine companies to produce initial operational and demonstration system conceptual designs for an uncrewed aerial system (UAS) under the ANCILLARY program. |
| June 12 2023 | DARPA launched four satellites for a technology demonstration in low Earth orbit on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare as part of the Blackjack program. |
| May 2023 | DARPA designated the experimental uncrewed aircraft X-65 for the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, which will use compressed air nozzles to execute maneuvers without traditional flight controls. |
| April 2023 | International Space Station announced the launch of the Rhodium-DARPA Biomanufacturing 01 investigation, examining gravity's effect on drug and nutrient production from bacteria and yeast under the B-SURE program. |
| 2022 | DARPA launches the ANCILLARY program to develop a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) plane with low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities. |
| 2022 | DARPA launched the Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program to explore using lightweight raw materials that can be transformed and assembled in orbit. |
| 2022 | DARPA launched the AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY X-Plane (ANCILLARY) program to develop a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) plane with low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities. |
| 2021 | DARPA initiates the LongShot program to demonstrate an unmanned air-launched vehicle (UAV) capable of employing air-to-air weapons. |
| 2021 | DARPA launched the Biomanufacturing: Survival, Utility, and Reliability beyond Earth (B-SURE) program to address scientific questions about industrial bio-manufacturing microorganisms in space conditions. |
| December 2021 | DARPA awards Phase 2 contracts to Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group for Manta Ray UUV subsystem testing and demonstrations. |
| September 2021 | PwC Australia published a 'Lunar market assessment' report identifying key sectors for lunar economic development, which influenced LunA-10's focus areas of transit/mobility, energy, and communications. |
| March 2021 | Stefanie Tompkins is appointed as the director of DARPA. |
| 2020 | DARPA launches the Manta Ray program to develop autonomous, large-size, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) with long-duration mission capabilities. |
| November 2020 | Victoria Coleman became the director of DARPA. |
| September 2020 | DARPA and the US Air Force announced the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) was ready for free-flight tests within the next year. |
| 2019 | DARPA launched the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program to demonstrate an experimental aircraft design based on active flow control. |
| October 2019 | Eight teams from academia and industry were selected for the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program aimed at automating air-to-air combat. |
| June 2018 | DARPA leaders demonstrated new technologies developed under the GXV-T program, aiming to create a lightly armored, maneuverable combat vehicle capable of resisting modern anti-tank weapon systems. |
| 2017 | DARPA initiated the Blackjack program to develop and test military satellite constellation technologies with commercial satellite buses. |
| 2016 | University of Florida team won the overall top prize of US$2 million in the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). |
| June 5 2016 | NASA and DARPA announced plans to build new X-planes, with NASA planning a series of X-planes over the next decade. |
| May 12 2015 | DARPA awarded $500,000 in prizes to 11 winners of the Chikungunya (CHIKV) Challenge during a scientific review. |
| 2014 | DARPA initiated the first machine-to-machine computer security competition, the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), bringing together top computer security experts to automatically find, exploit, and patch security vulnerabilities. |
| April 2014 | The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) was created by Director Arati Prabhakar, consolidating programs from the MTO and DSO offices. |
| April 2013 | DARPA awarded $1 million to a three-man team during the first DARPA Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) Challenge competition. |
| July 30 2012 | Arati Prabhakar becomes DARPA director, serving from July 30, 2012 to January 20, 2017. |
| 2011 | All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S team won the $50,000 prize in the DARPA Shredder Challenge by successfully reconstructing shredded documents. |
| 2011 | DARPA hosted the 100-Year Starship Symposium to encourage public engagement and serious consideration of interstellar travel. |
| 2010 | University of California at Santa Barbara team won $50,000 in the DARPA Digital Manufacturing Analysis, Correlation and Estimation Challenge for creating the most accurate predictive model of digitally manufactured titanium mesh spheres. |
| 2010 | DARPA merged the Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO) and the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) to form the Information Innovation Office (I2O). |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Jakub Smektała, DARPA Prize Competitions, DARPA & DARPA lunar programs, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.