DARPA's Launch Challenge came to a close with many lessons learned, including the ability to achieve launch-readiness with minimal infrastructure and little knowledge of launch conditions, but there was no winner. Less than two years from its start, DARPA’s effort to develop new and more agile approaches and processes associated with space launch ended with the lone Launch Challenge participant – Astra – scrubbing its launch attempt with less than a minute left in the countdown before liftoff.

Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) Bug Bounty

After three months of reviewing more than 13,000 hours of hacking labor conducted by more than 580 cybersecurity researchers, DARPA announced on January 28, 2021, that its Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering (FETT) Bug Bounty validated the security-enhancing efficacy of newly designed hardware architectures developed under the agency’s System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program. The exercise also pinpointed critical areas to further harden defenses.

DARPA’s Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks to better equip warfighters and first responders to explore uncharted underground environments that are too dangerous, dark, or deep to risk human lives. Participating teams will deploy autonomous systems to map, navigate, and search underground tunnel, urban, and cave spaces.