V2X, a U.S. defense technology company, will help integrate the Air Force’s next-generation Long Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile with B-52 bombers under a $46 million order.
Announced on September 15, the work involves producing carriage equipment that will support the deployment of the new weapon from the B-52 Stratofortress.
The LRSO will replace the Air-Launched Cruise Missile the service currently uses, helping maintain its long-range strike capability against evolving threats.
Based in Reston, Virginia, V2X provides integrated mission solutions across the air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Its work includes engineering, manufacturing, sustainment, and mission support for defense customers.
Preparing B-52s for the LRSO missile
V2X was awarded a position on the delivery order through the Enterprise-Wide Agile Acquisition Contract, an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract.
Under the order, the company will produce the carriage equipment needed to support the integration of the LRSO weapon system with the B-52.
The equipment will help prepare the bomber to carry the new cruise missile as the Air Force advances the wider modernization program.
The LRSO is designed for deployment from the B-52 and will replace the Air-Launched Cruise Missile currently in service. According to V2X, the transition will ensure that the Air Force retains an effective long-range strike capability for decades to come.
Strengthening the US strategic deterrent
The U.S. Air Force considers the LRSO program a critical modernization effort and an essential part of the country’s strategic deterrent.
V2X said its role in the program reinforces the company’s involvement in advancing next-generation defense capabilities. The carriage equipment will support mission readiness while enabling the Air Force to integrate its new weapon with the existing bomber platform.
“Supporting the modernization of the B-52 and our nation’s strategic deterrent is a responsibility we take seriously,” said Jeremy C. Wensinger, President and Chief Executive Officer of V2X.
“This award reflects the trust our customer places in V2X to deliver high-quality solutions that enable mission success and support one of the Air Force’s highest modernization priorities,” he added.
Supporting complex defense missions
V2X develops solutions that combine physical and digital environments by aligning people, actions, and technology. The company works across different stages of a critical mission’s lifecycle to improve readiness, strengthen security, and optimize resource management.
Its experience in engineering, manufacturing, sustainment, and mission support enables it to help customers address complex defense challenges and evolving operational requirements.
The LRSO assignment expands that work by placing V2X within a major Air Force modernization program. Its production responsibilities will directly support the equipment required to integrate the cruise missile with the B-52.
Through the effort, V2X will help prepare the bomber fleet for a new generation of long-range weapons as the Air Force moves to replace its currently fielded Air-Launched Cruise Missile.
Nitride Global, a US developer of advanced thermal-management, dielectric, and semiconductor materials, will study a centimeter-scale quantum sensor designed to support navigation when GPS signals are unavailable.
The Wichita-based company announced on September 14 that it had received an AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research Phase I contract supporting the Department of the Air Force.
The project will assess the feasibility of a microwave atom-chip quantum sensor for precision navigation and remote-sensing gravimetry.
Known as the Atom-Interferometer Microwave Atom Chip, or A-MAC, the proposed device will be evaluated using Nitride Global’s aluminum oxynitride platform.
Navigation without satellite signals
The project addresses a challenge faced by Airmen and Guardians operating in environments where GPS signals may be jammed, spoofed, or completely unavailable.
Conventional inertial navigation systems accumulate errors over time. Without periodic satellite updates, those errors cause positional uncertainty to increase, restricting how long and how far a platform can operate independently.
Atom interferometers offer a potential alternative because they measure acceleration and rotation against the wavelength of a matter wave. Nitride Global said these systems are among the most stable inertial sensors demonstrated so far.
However, most leading systems still occupy a meter or more of laboratory bench space. According to the company, the principal obstacle to miniaturization is the packaging surrounding the sensor rather than its underlying physics.
Compact microwave atom chips continue to rely on distributed radio-frequency hardware. The resulting heat and phase drift can degrade measurements, making the technology difficult to deploy outside controlled laboratory environments.
Bringing microwave hardware onto one board
Nitride Global’s A-MAC architecture is intended to consolidate the distributed microwave chain onto a single integrated board.
Its thin, conformal AlON dielectric material would allow microwave routing, coupling structures, and trap geometry to be positioned within the same stack. Heat would move outward through metal instead of passing through a bulk ceramic substrate.
The aim is to create a centimeter-scale architecture suitable for platforms with strict size, weight, and power requirements.
Nitride Global will work with Dr. Seth Aubin, associate professor of physics at William & Mary.
Aubin’s atomic physics group will participate as a subcontractor and research partner, bringing more than a decade of work on microwave atom-chip traps and related trapping physics.
During the initial phase, the partners will model the architecture’s thermal behavior, microwave insertion loss, coupling, and possible trap geometries. The work will conclude with a decision gate and technical roadmap for a potential second phase.
From laboratories to contested environments
The technology could eventually support satellite-independent positioning, navigation, and timing across hypersonic vehicles, unmanned aircraft, orbital systems, submerged platforms, autonomous ground vehicles, and UAV interceptors.
Commercial applications could include resource exploration, infrastructure monitoring, and subsurface mapping.
“Quantum inertial sensing has been constrained for the same reason power electronics were constrained a decade ago: the limit is set by the package, not by the physics. If microwave routing and thermal management can be carried on the same material system, the instrument becomes small enough to fly,” said Mahyar Khosravi, CEO of Nitride Global.
The company is now seeking input from aerospace and defense integrators to define the sensor’s form factor, environmental requirements, and performance thresholds.
BAE Systems has unveiled a new electronic warfare family aimed at giving small aircraft stronger protection in contested airspace. The Shadow EW family targets a growing need for compact systems that can fit space-constrained platforms.
The new products focus on electronic sensing and self-protection without demanding the size, weight, or power of traditional systems. BAE Systems also designed them for rapid production, making larger-scale deployment more practical.
The architecture uses commercially available microchips to support computing needs and simplify the supply chain. That approach could help BAE Systems produce systems faster as demand for affordable EW grows.
Compact EW
Small drones and other airborne systems increasingly operate near sophisticated electronic threats. Their limited payload capacity makes traditional EW equipment difficult to integrate.
Shadow EW addresses that constraint with small, lightweight hardware designed around open architecture principles. The systems can also receive software updates after deployment.
That software-defined approach gives operators another way to respond as adversaries change their electronic signatures and tactics. Hardware configurations can also adapt to different platforms and mission requirements.
BAE Systems says the family can support both manned and unmanned aircraft. Its platform-agnostic design aims to preserve valuable payload capacity while adding radio-frequency capabilities.
The systems can support several EW functions, including threat awareness, targeting, deception, and survivability. They can also participate in collaborative electronic effects across multiple platforms.
Commercial chips drive scale
BAE Systems is leaning on commercial components to make high-volume EW production more achievable. Commercial microchips can provide substantial computing performance without requiring specialized hardware for every configuration.
The strategy also reduces dependence on highly customized components. That can simplify procurement and help manufacturers respond more quickly to changing production requirements.
Production scalability sits at the center of Shadow EW’s design philosophy. BAE Systems plans to use established manufacturing methods to support larger orders and faster deliveries.
That matters as the U.S. military explores more affordable ways to equip increasingly numerous autonomous and expendable systems. Electronic warfare capability becomes harder to scale when every platform requires an expensive bespoke solution.
Software keeps EW adaptable
Shadow EW separates much of the system’s adaptability from its physical hardware. Operators can configure capabilities around specific threats and platform architectures.
Software updates provide another path for changing the system after deployment. That flexibility could prove important against adversaries that frequently modify their electronic warfare techniques.
Rebecca Cruz, director of Shadow EW products at BAE Systems, said battlefield conditions are changing rapidly. She said even smaller platforms need adaptable electronic warfare protection.
The family is designed around a configurable approach that lets customers select capabilities suited to individual missions. BAE Systems describes the result as an affordable Electronic Warfare option built for broader fielding.
The company has not disclosed specific performance figures for individual Shadow EW variants. Details such as detection ranges, frequency coverage, power consumption, and platform integration options remain limited.
The engineering approach focuses on shrinking EW hardware while using software to keep the systems adaptable. Commercial-scale manufacturing also helps BAE Systems keep production costs under control.
Chinese researchers have outlined a future tank that could generate its own power and strike targets hundreds of miles away. The concept combines a compact nuclear reactor with a 50-megajoule electromagnetic railgun.
The proposed vehicle would weigh about 60 tonnes. A 10-megawatt-class small modular reactor would supply its electrical power.
Researchers estimate the railgun could accelerate projectiles to roughly 3.5km/s. That could give the weapon a theoretical range of about 280 miles.
Three steps to nuclear power
The development path starts with conventional propulsion. An initial tank would use a 1,500-horsepower diesel generator.
Its 10MJ electromagnetic gun could reach roughly 93 miles. Supercapacitors and flywheels would provide additional energy for high-demand systems.
The first design would also feature 2MJ electromagnetic armor. A second-generation vehicle would increase weapon energy to 20MJ.
Its projected range would rise to roughly 186 miles. That version would carry 10MJ electromagnetic armor and about five tonnes of advanced energy storage.
Researchers also envision solid-state batteries and superconducting storage. An onboard microgrid would coordinate the vehicle’s electrical systems.
The final stage would introduce nuclear propulsion after 2045. That would replace the diesel generator with a compact reactor.
Fitting the tiny reactor
The proposed reactor would use lead-bismuth cooling and produce 10MW of thermal power. Researchers want the reactor package to fit inside just two cubic meters.
Its radiation shielding would weigh no more than three tonnes. The reactor would also need a fuel replacement interval of at least five years.
Those targets create a difficult packaging problem. Engineers must fit the reactor, shielding and power-conversion equipment inside a combat vehicle.
Thermal management presents another hurdle. The reactor would produce substantial heat that engineers must remove from the vehicle.
The system would also need to survive punishing off-road conditions. The researchers say it should withstand shocks approaching 30g.
The railgun creates an even tougher electrical challenge. A 50MJ weapon must release enormous energy within an extremely short pulse.
The reactor could provide steady power, but it cannot instantly deliver the entire firing pulse. Energy storage would need to accumulate power between shots.
That makes the vehicle’s capacitors, batteries, and power electronics critical. Researchers say additional multiphysics simulations and vehicle-level testing remain necessary.
Feeding 50MJ railgun
A nuclear reactor could provide continuous electricity for energy-intensive weapons and sensors. Yet it would also consume space and weight needed for armor, ammunition and crew protection.
A military equipment expert told South China Morning Post that installing a fission reactor in a battle tank remains unrealistic. The expert also pointed to shielding and heat-dissipation requirements.
The expert questioned the practical value of effectively unlimited onboard electricity. Crews still need rest, while tanks still require ammunition and maintenance.
Survivability creates another concern. A destroyed crewed vehicle carrying a reactor could introduce risks beyond losing the platform.
The expert suggested an uncrewed alternative. Such a vehicle could use abundant electricity for lasers, microwave weapons, radar, and electronic warfare.
That approach could transform the concept from a conventional tank into an autonomous, high-power battlefield platform.
The nuclear tank remains a long-term research concept. Its central challenge may be delivering enormous electrical pulses inside a mobile combat vehicle.
The study is published in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Acta Armamentarii.
It’s common to find things among the sand while strolling along a beach: shells, seaglass, bits of and seaweed. But in Essex, England, a beachgoer found something quite different on the coast of Southend-On-Sea: a World War II explosive.
Southend-On-Sea’s HM Coastguard intervened over the weekend after someone reported a “shell-shaped object” less than half a mile south of a local monument called “The Crowstone.” The team first showed up early in the morning to locate the object and send pictures to the Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams.
The Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams decided that disposal officers should remain on the scene, but that everyone should go back at low tide to identify the object and execute a plan. When they returned that evening, Southend Coastguard Rescue Officers accompanied Explosive Ordnance Disposal officers to the suspected explosive.
“It was confirmed to be an old WWII shell that was approximately six inches in diameter,” HM Coastguard Southend On Sea explained in the social media post. “The decision was made to detonate it in situ, where it posed no risk to passing members of [the] public.”
The video in the Facebook post showcases a significant explosion in the distance, shooting a cloud of debris into the air. It’s not the first time this year that the violence of World War II makes itself known again. In the spring, experts safely detonated a 250 kilogram German explosive in Plymouth, UK. But possibly another World War II find in Indonesia had a drastically less fortunate outcome. A suspected shell killed five people when it detonated in a fishing village.
“As these items can be so dangerous, if you ever see something suspicious or out of place on the beach or in the sea, do not touch it, move it or take it home,” the post continued. “Let the experts decide if it is safe.”
By the time naval architecture firm George G. Sharp tasked Jack Heaney with the design of the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, the Glasgow-born designer had already broken many styling norms. In the mid-1940s, Heaney transformed routine ocean transport into a festive occasion when he designed the interiors of the SS President Wilson and SS President Cleveland with Hawaiian murals, carved glass panels, and a smoking lounge dressed in playful, exotic wall art. His gift for making the mundane desirable wasn’t confined to ocean liners—New York’s Museum of Modern Art had already put one of his stackable aluminum chairs on display in 1947. But nothing in Heaney’s career had prepared him for the commission that reached his drawing board in 1957.
At the time, the shadow of 1945, when the world first witnessed the terrifying power of the atom, loomed large. Following World War II, the United States and Soviet Union were locked in a nuclear arms race, and the public associated splitting atoms with annihilation. Atoms meant war.
To shift that sentiment, President Eisenhower launched his Atoms for Peace initiative, aimed at demonstrating the civilian benefits of nuclear technology—and the NS Savannah, or Nuclear Ship Savannah, was to be its flagship. Heaney suddenly had a much more daunting task than usual; he would have to make the feared desirable.
More than half a century since theSavannah was decommissioned in 1971, there is no nuclear-powered merchant ship in active commercial service anywhere in the world. Four nations have tried. None succeeded, mostly because the economics were not compelling enough and no one trusted nuclear ships.
In the interim, nuclear reactors have only become smaller and safer. Now, as the true cost of burning oil at sea comes due—commercial shipping produces more than three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—the economics of nuclear-powered merchant ships may finally be compelling. But the problem Heaney was hired to solve in 1957 still stands in the way, persuading people to trust what they fear.
The making of a maritime designer
John “Jack” Heaney was born in Glasgow in 1904. He grew up during a time when the River Clyde, which runs through the heart of Glasgow, served as the world’s premiere shipbuilding hub, with nearly 40 shipyards situated on its banks. Heaney studied naval architecture at the University of Glasgow, while taking classes at the Glasgow School of Art and apprenticing at the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company.
When Heaney emigrated to New York in 1926, he worked a string of jobs, including a brief stint as a door-to-door refrigerator salesman, before joining the New York City-based naval architecture firm George G. Sharp, Inc. in 1937. At Sharp, Heaney quickly developed a reputation for having an engineer’s eye and artist’s hand, helping design the interiors of several prominent passenger-cargo ships—a specialized form of merchant ship that is part cruise liner, part cargo vessel—including the Robin Line, the Delta Line, and the American President Lines. In 1947, the same year MoMA put his chair on display, Heaney opened his own design firm on West 54th Street in Manhattan. A decade later, the Savannah project came across his bow.
Originally tasked with the ship’s exterior design, Heaney eventually assumed responsibility for the ship’s interior styling, too. From stem to stern, it was Heaney’s job to design a nuclear-powered ship that passengers would want to cruise on for pleasure, and that businesses would want to ship merchandise on for commerce.
The NS Savannah was the first nuclear-powered merchant ship. Image: Contributor / Getty Images / Mondadori Portfolio
Atoms for Peace
Eisenhower had announced the Atoms for Peace initiative four years earlier, in a December 1953 address to the United Nations. The atom, he argued, should be turned from a great destructive force “into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind.” Under Eisenhower, the U.S. began sharing reactor technology and medical isotopes with allied nations. Atoms for Peace sought to prove that the technology that had obliterated two cities could also light homes, treat cancer, build harbors, and move ships.
The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, saw the advantages of a vessel that could continuously plow the ocean without refueling for months, or even years. The USS Nautilus was the first atomic-powered vessel, a sub, launching in 1955. By the time Sharp signed Heaney to the Savannah project, two more atomic-powered subs were patrolling the world’s oceans (USS Skate and USS Seawolf). But military vessels primarily keep to military ports, so the public rarely saw them.
Eisenhower needed a civilian showcase that would disassociate atom-splitting from mushroom clouds. That showcase would be Heaney’s NS Savannah. As a passenger-cargo ship, the Savannah would routinely sail into commercial harbors like Rotterdam, Le Havre, and New York, normalizing nuclear reactors and demonstrating their safety. At least, that was the goal.
How safe is our A-ship?
In 1959, the same year the Savannah launched, Popular Science ran a short feature designed to quell readers’ fears: “How Safe Is Our A-Ship Savannah?” The staff-written story read more like a safety brief than an objective review. While boasting about its efficiency—“on a single loading of A-fuel, the Savannah will have a range of 350,000 nautical miles”—the article focused mainly on the “worst possible accidents that might befall the first atomic merchant vessel.” Such caution seemed justified. That same year, Denmark canceled a scheduled visit by the USSSkate to Copenhagen, and England agreed to receive visiting nuclear submarines only at the remote Isle of Portland, population 12,000, rather than major ports.
Popular Science’s initial coverage was not anomalous. “Passengers will receive no more radiation on the Savannah than they receive from normal background radiation of the earth in their day-to-day lives,” The New York Times reassured its readers.
By 1961, however, as the Savannah prepared to begin its cargo and passenger service, which commenced in 1962, Popular Science’s editors were fully onboard, launching a four-part series that spanned four consecutive issues and more than a dozen pages. The do-it-yourself mini-manual provided detailed instructions for readers to build and sail their own four-foot model of the ship. Four different writers and editors took part in the project: hull casting one month, superstructure the next, then a working steam turbine, and finally radio controls. Even as Popular Science promoted its features, the real Savannah was being fitted with Heaney’s final touches.
The January 1961 issue of Popular Science shows a model of the NS Savannah assembled with screws and dowels. Image: Popular Science, January 1961 issue
Domesticating the atom
On a conventional ship, fuel is stored low in the hull, in tanks that any port can refill with diesel by hose. But Savannah’s single, massive fuel core had to sit in the hull’s center, beneath an opening in the deck, so it could be accessible by overhead crane for refueling. Heaney’s answer to this exterior design problem became the ship’s signature: a streamlined, teardrop-shaped superstructure. Popular Science’s writers praised Savannah’s sleek, futuristic lines as “graceful as a racing yacht’s,” and called its reactor housing “a well-placed superstructure [that] blends airfoil curves with sharply angled planes for a dazzling effect.”
Below decks, Heaney took the fear problem head on, weaving Atomic Age motifs into the ship’s interior. In the veranda, the cocktail bar’s backlit wine rack depicted the trilinear chart of the nuclides in blue, red, and yellow glass; the tables ringing the dance floor glowed, their tops lit by “panelescent,” or electrically charged luminescent panels. Even the floor tiles in the main stairwell carried the atomic theme. A separate lounge nearby offered passengers a closed-circuit television view into the reactor containment vessel. Overhead light beamed down through light fixtures adorned with stylized atoms.
In the dining room, sculptor Pierre Bourdelle installed a wall mural titled “Fission.” Nearby, suspended in glass, hung a small gold model of the NSSavannah’s namesake, the 1819 steamship SSSavannah, the first ship to cross the Atlantic under sail and steam. Heaney hoped such Old World symbolism would make people feel comfortable dining, dancing, and sleeping no more than a dozen yards from a nuclear reactor.
As a design achievement, Savannah was a triumph. Her passenger cabins were mostly full from 1962 to 1965, and more than 1.4 million people toured the ship across 46 ports in 13 countries.
Even the plates and silverware used on the NS Savannah had an atomic motif. Image: Baltimore Sun / Contributor / Getty Images / Kim Hairston
Sunk by economics—and fear
But novelty was never going to be enough to move public sentiment or make Savannah pay for itself. The combined ship-and-reactor construction cost ran to roughly $46 million, three to four times what a comparable conventional freighter cost at the time, and the ship’s specialized nuclear crew commanded specialized wages. No private insurer would touch a nuclear-powered merchant ship; the U.S. government had to indemnify it instead, extending $500 million in federal liability coverage just to get foreign ports to receive the ship. Every port call required a small diplomatic mission of its own, negotiated weeks in advance, with tugs standing by in case of an accident. Some countries, like Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, never accepted Savannah.
By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. Defense Department, one of merchant shipping’s largest customers, had concluded that conventional freighters remained the better bet. With no federal appetite left to continue funding a revenue-losing program, Savannah was withdrawn from service in late 1971 with no plans to build another.
The timing proved fateful. Two years after Savannah was decommissioned, the 1973 oil embargo sent fuel prices soaring; had it still been sailing, the ship’s independence from oil might have tipped the scales for commercial customers, even if the public remained fearful.
Fear kills future “A-ships”
In 1979, the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island—eight years after Savannah’s own retirement—hardened American public fear of nuclear power for more than a generation. The Soviet Union’s Chernobyl accident in 1986 and Japan’s Fukushima accident in 2011 reinforced that fear.
Three other nations tried what the U.S. attempted with Savannah, and each ran into the same wall. West Germany’s nuclear-powered merchant ship Otto Hahn logged 650,000 nautical miles over a decade before port restrictions and rising costs forced her conversion to diesel in 1979—the same year as Three Mile Island.
Japan’s nuclear-powered Mutsu fared worse. Local fishermen blockaded it in harbor for two years before the ship could even sail, and when its reactor went online in 1974, it leaked. The crew had to improvise radiation shielding using boiled rice and old socks.
The Soviet Union’s nuclear-powered Sevmorput, the last of the four and the only one to operate into the 21st century, has sat idle at a dock in Murmansk since 2024. As of today, not a single nuclear-powered merchant ship plows the seas anywhere on Earth.
And yet, military fleets have proven the technology works. The U.S. Navy alone has logged more than 6,200 accident-free reactor-years since 1955. What’s more, reactor designs have advanced significantly since Heaney’s day. Small modular reactors, or SMRs, have been engineered to be smaller, safer, and simpler to certify than anything available in 1959. SMRs are now in active development for maritime use, including a Norwegian consortium’s NuProShip program, and a molten-chloride test reactor that Core Power and TerraPower are building at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The pressure to act has intensified, too. Commercial shipping produces more than three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—a share that could climb to 10 percent by 2050 if the industry does nothing while the rest of the world decarbonizes. In 2023, the International Maritime Organization, which governs commercial shipping, committed its member states to a net-zero target by 2050, a goal serious enough that the IMO is now weighing previously unthinkable measures like SMRs.
But none of it matters if nuclear-powered merchant ships remain taboo.
Sixty-five years after Jack Heaney tried to make the atom desirable, the real problem with nuclear reactors was less about the technology and more about public perception. Unfortunately, that perception has kept a viable climate solution off the table for more than half a century, at a cost now measurable in our planet’s atmosphere. As the shipping industry searches for a way to shed its considerable share of global carbon emissions, it is not physics but persuasion that remains unsolved.
In A Century in Motion, Popular Science revisits fascinating transportation stories from our archives, from hybrid cars to moving sidewalks, and explores how these inventions are re-emerging today in surprising ways.
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