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.
- Demonstrate the combination of land and ocean soaring techniques in a mission relevant environment. - Improve soaring prediction capabilities and algorithms to ensure operational relevance and enable extended range and endurance in operational applications. - Integrate capabilities and technologies to enable new broad, long-term, and perpetual flight techniques for s-UAS applications.
The FY 2027 decrease reflects the transition from software development to final integration and demonstration.
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.
- Conduct practice test events for incremental integration and development selection. - Demonstrate flight planning tool for soaring scenarios. - Conduct test events through mission-relevant scenarios. - Develop low-power flight path mission planning software to account for land and ocean soaring conditions. - Develop software/hardware algorithms for aircraft to respond to ocean soaring conditions and harness energy. - Conduct additional practice test events for final integration.
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 | 22.2 |
| FY2027 | Request | 11.1 |
This activity is 11% of project ACS-01's FY2027 request and 10% 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.