Heaviside's $60M raise 💣, AEVEX buys BlackSea 🌊, Golden Dome Gate One 🛡️

Heaviside raises $60M Series B and taps Nammo for warheads

Los Angeles-based Heaviside Industries raised a $60 million Series B at a $600 million valuation led by Felicis with Hedosophia, just three months after leaving stealth. The autonomous precision-munitions startup also signed Norwegian defense manufacturer Nammo to supply warheads, pairing its software-defined weapons with an established, allied production and supply chain. A $600M mark on a three-month-old munitions maker shows how fast "affordable mass" is repricing; the Nammo deal signals warhead supply, not design, is the real bottleneck.

AEVEX to buy BlackSea Technologies for up to $650M

AEVEX agreed to acquire maritime-autonomy maker BlackSea Technologies for up to $650 million — roughly $250 million cash, $350 million in stock, and a $50 million performance earnout. The deal unites AEVEX's high-volume drone production with BlackSea's deepwater shipyard, which can build about 40 uncrewed surface vessels a month across air, surface, and subsea domains. Consolidation is arriving in attritable maritime autonomy as buyers race to add USV capacity; expect more roll-ups tying software-first drone makers to physical shipbuilding.

Space Force orders two more Impulse Space vehicles for maneuver demos

The Space Force awarded Impulse Space a $28 million SBIR Phase III extension for two Mira orbital-transfer vehicles supporting the VICTUS SALO 2 and 3 responsive-space demonstrations. The Mira tug uses eight Saiph thrusters to host, deploy, and maneuver government payloads across low, medium, and geostationary orbits, extending a tactically responsive line Impulse already flies. Repeat orders show the Space Force standardizing on commercial orbital mobility for responsive operations; on-demand maneuver is becoming a procured service, not a one-off experiment.

Firefly's SciTec wins $93.7M Space Force radar-digitization deal

SciTec, the software arm of newly public Firefly Aerospace, won a $93.7 million other-transaction agreement from Space Systems Command to modernize and digitize the military's ground-based radars. The award is part of a roughly $423 million common-architecture effort shared with Raytheon and WildStar, running through April 2028 across sites in Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Missile-warning radar upgrades are quiet but foundational to Golden Dome's sensing layer, and a software specialist winning alongside a prime shows the modernization budget opening to challengers.

Golden Dome's space-based interceptor teams clear their first gate

Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein said the 12 companies competing for up to $3.2 billion in Golden Dome space-based-interceptor work have cleared "Gate One," finishing design and component-level testing. The four-gate structure now advances survivors — SpaceX and Northrop Grumman among them — toward prototypes, an on-orbit demonstration, and integration into the wider homeland missile-defense architecture. Passing the first gate turns space-based intercept from PowerPoint into hardware milestones, but the on-orbit demo ahead is where the hardest physics, and the real winners, get sorted.

Northrop opens a 300,000-sq-ft sixth-generation aircraft engineering site

Northrop Grumman opened a 300,000-square-foot engineering building at its Melbourne, Florida campus, adding room for more than 1,200 engineers and 17 secure laboratories for sixth-generation aircraft work. The company called Melbourne "the epicenter of sixth-generation aircraft," as it competes for the Navy's F/A-XX carrier fighter after Boeing won the Air Force's F-47 in 2025. Pouring fixed capital into classified design signals Northrop is positioning for the Navy award, and keeping a sixth-gen airframe team intact even if it loses.

BAE Systems advances to Phase 2 of DARPA's THREADS chip program

BAE Systems' FAST Labs cleared Phase 1 of DARPA's THREADS program and won a $16 million Phase 2 award to pull heat off high-power gallium-nitride radio-frequency electronics. Better device-scale cooling can nearly triple the range of RF systems like radar and jammers, work BAE runs from its Nashua, New Hampshire microelectronics center with several universities. Thermal limits quietly cap electronic-warfare and sensing reach, so a chip-cooling breakthrough is the kind of unglamorous enabler that resets what every downstream sensor can do.

House Democrats demand records on Vulcan Elements' $620M Pentagon loan

House ranking members Robert Garcia and Jared Huffman demanded documents from magnet startup Vulcan Elements over its $620 million Office of Strategic Capital loan, the largest in OSC history. Citing ProPublica reporting, they say the White House pushed the Pentagon to fast-track the loan weeks after Trump-Jr.-linked 1789 Capital took a minority stake in the then-30-person firm. The largest OSC loan to date is now a political target, a reminder that as government-capital tools scale, so does scrutiny over who receives it.

Feinberg calls defense firms' board members into the Pentagon

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg asked large contractors to send corporate board members, not just executives, to the Pentagon for briefings from department leaders, an unusual escalation. It follows his order giving firms until late August to propose "significantly faster" delivery on wide-area surveillance, air-defense sensors, interceptors, and missile tracking amid Iran-war stockpile draws. Going over CEOs to boards is a pressure tactic aimed at capital-allocation decisions, signaling the Pentagon wants production surges written into corporate strategy, not just program offices.

Spacecom's Whiting: the joint force needs kinetic and non-kinetic space weapons

At the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, US Space Command leaders said the joint force needs both kinetic and non-kinetic weapons to fight and win a war in space. The call reflects a shift from a purely defensive space posture toward offensive counter-space options as China and Russia field jammers, maneuvering satellites, and anti-satellite systems. An open embrace of space weapons widens the aperture for startups building electronic-warfare, sensing, and maneuver payloads that a defensive-only doctrine would never have funded.

BlackSky won a multi-year, seven-figure international contract combining Gen-2 and Gen-3 satellite imagery for an undisclosed military customer.

UK-US startup Mindgard raised a $30M Series A led by Album VC to red-team and secure enterprise AI systems.

The Army will open four US test ranges, plus one allied site, to private industry within 30 days of a request.

Divergent unveiled Monolith One, a 12-laser metal 3D printer, and a second Long Beach factory to lift output eightfold.

A former NORAD chief said the Langley AFB drone swarms didn't surprise him, citing long-known homeland-defense gaps.