(Original image by GAO. Adjustments by Lee Ferran / Code and Dagger)
The U.S. government is spending at least $15 billion on dozens of different hypersonic programs, sometimes betting on immature tech to get to a usable weapon faster, according to a new government report.
The report by the Government Accountability Office tracks some 70 programs spread across the military branches, the Department of Energy and NASA, that include hypersonic missiles, so-called hypersonic glide vehicles and the related technology that hopes to get them screaming through the air. For its report, GAO defined “hypersonic” as moving at five times the speed of sound, or more than approximately 3,800 miles per hour.
A vast majority of the programs are in their technological development stage, but at least five have reached product development, including prototypes from the Air Force, Army and Navy. (In 2011 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, tested an unmanned aircraft designed to go 20 times the speed of sound but lost control of it during the test.)
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Hypersonic weapons have technically been in development since the 1950s, but interest in the technology for American military planners spiked more recently as America’s foreign adversaries appeared to progress in their own efforts — sparking a very specific arms race. The main fear is that hypersonic weapons will be capable of penetrating current missile defense systems. In October 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the successful test of a purported hypersonic cruise missile there was a “big event” for the country.
“In light of the potential threats posed by these developments, DOD has led multiple efforts to further develop its own hypersonic weapons and technologies to provide an offensive capability and improve its ability to track and defend against adversaries,” a GAO letter to U.S. lawmakers said.
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So focused is the military on the problem that in 2018 it established the Principle Director for Hypersonics “to develop the overarching hypersonic strategy and roadmaps” and two years later created a dedicated “hypersonic war room.” Still, the GAO said one major problem with the dozens of programs was clear coordination between the developers, especially between the military and civilian agencies, and understanding who was in charge of what.
Collaboration, however, was made easier by the simple fact that relatively few people work in the hypersonic field at all, and the GAO said they observed “robust collaboration across the hypersonic enterprise.”
Beyond that, the programs have seen their share of other “challenges,” as the GAO put it, from immature technology to the extreme conditions the aircraft would face at those speeds.
“DOD officials we spoke to described their development approach as acknowledging and accepting technology risk early in the program in order to achieve an operational hypersonic capability sooner […]” the report says.
Investigators also discovered a surprising stumbling block: a lack of wind tunnel time. Apparently in recent years the demand for wind tunnels — in which aircraft test aerodynamics or temperature stresses, among other factors — has increased to the point where it’s difficult to book enough time at the right place.
Nearly every wind tunnel the military needs, officials said, “is booked a year or more in advance.”
(NASA wind tunnel, via GAO)
PRIMARY SOURCE: GAO Report on Hypersonic Weapons Programs (GAO.gov, PDF)
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