The US Navy and Army fired a missile from a coastal launch pad in Virginia to test nearly a dozen hypersonic weapons tests on Wednesday to help develop a new class of weapon, the Pentagon said. The test passed.
The test was conducted by Sandia National Laboratories from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which evaluated hypersonic weapon communications and navigation equipment as well as advanced materials that can withstand heat in a “realistic hypersonic environment,” according to a Navy statement.
Hypersonic glide vehicles are launched from a missile in the upper atmosphere before gliding onto a target at speeds more than five times the speed of sound, or about 3,853 miles (6,200 kilometers) per hour, Reuters reported.
The United States and its global adversaries have been accelerating the pace to build hypersonic weapons – the next generation of weapons that rob adversaries of reaction time and conventional defeat mechanisms.
To speed up the development process, the Pentagon launched these trials and prototypes with the SBR, a smaller and therefore more expensive test vehicle, to bridge a critical gap between ground testing and flight testing of the full system.
Wednesday’s test was intended to validate future aspects of the Navy’s conventional rapid strike (CPS) and the Army’s long-range hypersonic (LRHW) weapon.
Glide hulls differ from their hypersonic, air-breathing relatives, which use scramjet engine technology and the vehicle’s high speed to forcibly compress incoming air before combustion to enable continuous flight at supersonic speeds.
Companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp and Raytheon Technologies Corp are working to develop a hypersonic weapons capability in the United States.
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