What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project ACS-01 of PE 0602023E. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Conduct iterative risk reduction through challenge cycles supporting prototype digital twin design validation. - Evaluate prototype AI test agents using a faster than real time evaluation environment and real-world test data from an active experimental flight test program. - Initiate design development of complete CyPhER prototype (digital twin + AI test agent) for an experimental air vehicle.
The FY 2027 increase reflects iterative increase of digital twin challenge cycle complexity, initiation of complete CyPhER prototype design work, and progression into Phase 2 of the program including preparation for flight test.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
- Establish the Government Integration, Validation, and Verification (IV&V) team and begin executing core tasks including developing government-owned Application Programming Interfaces and Graphical User Interfaces, conducting standards governance, and establishing the initial challenge-cycle evaluation framework. - Design and implement Government High Performance Computing (HPC) backbone and data storage infrastructure.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 13.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 30.4 |
This activity is 30% of project ACS-01's FY2027 request and 28% of PE 0602023E's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
8 activities in project ACS-01
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.