A proposal to blast weapons out of the sky is entering a new phase.
The program aims to counteract highly maneuverable weapons zooming through the upper atmosphere at speeds of at least Mach 5. Hypersonic is the speed of sound, and it refers to vehicles that travel at least five times that fast.
The DARPA is ready for Phase 2 of the program, which was first announced last year. The agency is seeking proposals to conduct wind tunnel and flight testing of jet interaction effects.
The primary deliverable for Phase 2 is a data set from the wind tunnel and flight tests that enables validation of models and informs future design activities, according to the broad agency announcement.
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A major goal of Phase 2 is to develop adivert and attitude control system that will allow an interceptor to kill a vehicle in flight. The first phase did not consider the effects of hypersonic air flows or the control system.
In the first phase of the program, participants included, at the least, Aerojet Rocketdyne, which received a contract valued at $12 million in February 2020.
Two prototypes capable of achieving the desired performance objectives were designed and fabricated in Phase 1 of the Glide Breaker program.
Testing in Phase 1 includes component tests and static hot-fire demonstrations of the integrated DACS prototypes.
There are a few DARPA programs targeting the hypersonic realm. The agency recently announced that a hypersonic missile prototype flew for an extended period.
This happened during a technology test for another program, the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), which also supported another test in September 2021.
The U.S. military has been looking at hypersonic capabilities for a long time. The 1950s-era X-20 Dyna-Soar was designed to launch on a rocket and was part of the FALCON hypersonic program.
Hypersonic weapon delivery systems, which are harder to track and intercept than traditional missiles, are being developed by Russia and China. It is not surprising that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on ways to counter hypersonic vehicles.
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