Testing Top of Mind as U.S. Lags China In Hypersonics Race

Purdue Applied Research Institute photo

“China now has the world’s leading hypersonic arsenal,” and “Russia currently has three deployed hypersonic weapon systems, including two that have been used in conflict against Ukraine.”

That was the message Jeffrey McCormick, senior intelligence analyst at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, delivered in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee in March.

Hypersonics — systems that can travel at speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are maneuverable — are seen as an important technology in the ongoing strategic competition with China and Russia. Several organizations in the United States are working to build up the testing infrastructure that can help accelerate the development of these high-speed systems.

So far, the United States has yet to deploy a single hypersonic weapon. The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon was supposed to be the first to the field in 2023, but due to testing delays likely won’t be ready until fiscal year 2025, according to the Government Accountability Office’s 2024 “Weapon Systems Annual Assessment” published in June.

The Air Force’s Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon hypersonic program concluded testing this year. The service did not request funding for it in the 2025 budget. However, it did request $517 million to advance its Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program.

A major reason for China surging to the lead in the hypersonics race is its “intense and focused investment” over the last 20 years in the necessary development and testing infrastructure for hypersonic weapons, McCormick said. “China has an extensive and robust research-and-development infrastructure, including many wind tunnels, devoted to the development of hypersonic systems.”

Steven Schneider, a professor at Purdue University focused on hypersonics, said Defense Department facilities and expertise relating to hypersonics “have degraded very badly since the end of the Cold War,” and today most of the testing capability and expertise resides in academia.

“So, I think it’s very important for academia to cooperate with the DoD to try to restore that expertise and restore the government’s science and engineering, technical advisory authority and expertise, which has … almost disappeared following the end of the Cold War,” Schneider said in an interview.

In April, a team at Purdue’s Hypersonics and Applied Research Facility successfully tested the university’s HYPULSE shock tunnel for the first time, generating a shockwave calculated at Mach 7.

HYPULSE director and associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue Joe Jewell said the system is “designed to study the real temperatures that happen in hypersonic aerodynamics.”

Many wind tunnels trade pressure and temperature for speed, expanding gas “as far as you can to get as high a Mach number as you can,” Jewell said in an interview. But to get a true understanding of hypersonic aerodynamics, it’s “really important to actually study the real temperatures” as well.

What makes HYPULSE unique is it is “one of the only dual-mode high enthalpy tunnels in the world,” which means it is able to conduct both reflected shock and shock expansion tests, he said. Reflected shock tests achieve high reservoir temperatures, relatively long test times — which is multiple milliseconds in systems like HYPULSE — and can reach speeds ranging from Mach 4 to Mach 12. Shock expansion tests last at the most a single millisecond long but are “very hot [and] very fast,” achieving speeds from Mach 10 to at least Mach 25.

“Typically, tunnels do one or the other. Ours does both, which is why I like to say that it’s … possibly the most versatile hypersonic high enthalpy facility in the world, because it can go from Mach 4 all the way to in excess of Mach 25, which is orbital velocity,” he said.

The successful test in April was conducted with reflected shock conditions, and Jewell said there is “customer interest” in using HYPULSE for both reflected shock and shock expansion tests.

Jewell said he couldn’t comment on specific customer plans for the facility but said the HYPULSE team has “had outreach from and visits with DoD officials, as well as representatives of, I think, all of the major airframers, and there is interest.”

“We’ve demonstrated that we can do Mach 7 tests right now if needed in support” of a customer, and the next step is “we have to build up our capability to measure everything that comes out of those test conditions in a rigorous way so that we can provide” useful data to a customer, he said.

Along with potential collaboration with universities like Purdue, the Defense Department through its LIFT advanced materials manufacturing innovation institute is working on building its own Hypersonic and Extreme Environment Test facility.

LIFT announced in May the organization had launched the planning phase for the new facility, exploring the possibility of placing it at or near Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan, close to the institute’s Detroit headquarters.

Joe Steele, LIFT’s vice president of communications and legislative affairs, said the organization has been working on hypersonics material development for the last several years, and “as we’ve grown and developed these materials … we looked around the country and tried to find places where we could physically test them” with the necessary “strain and stress and environment.”

There are other locations around the country, but many are booked up sometimes up to four years out, Steele said in an interview. “And our mission as a national manufacturing innovation institute is to accelerate technology, and if we’re waiting three, four years to test some of these things that we’re working on, that’s not really acceleration at all. … So, we raised our hands and [said], ‘Hey, we are developing these materials. Wouldn’t it be great if we could put such a facility here in Selfridge to test’” them?

LIFT received $1.5 million in the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2023 budget for the initial exploratory phase of building the facility, which was matched by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The project is now in “Phase 0,” in which LIFT is investigating whether the base has a building that could be repurposed for the facility or if it would need to be a new construction, as well as evaluating capability and equipment requirements and cost, Steele said.

Phase 0 will take about a year, and “at the end of it what we would like to have is essentially a packet that we can take to a contractor … and say, ‘This is what it looks like. This is what it costs. [These are] the specs of the machine, the facility, etc.,’ to understand what that would look like to begin putting something there on the base,” he said.

While Steele said it’s too early to say when the facility would actually open, if and when it is built it will be a “game changer … for the nation.”

“It’s all about acceleration and getting this technology into the hands of the warfighter as quickly as possible,” he said. If the facility can speed up the process and help the Defense Department “make that transformational leap faster, then we are making a difference.”

Along with new ground facilities, hypersonic tests are also taking to the skies.

In March, California-based Stratolaunch successfully completed the first powered flight of its unmanned Talon-A test vehicle, TA-1, which marked a “major milestone in the development of the country’s first privately funded, reusable hypersonic test capability,” according to a company press release.

Stratolaunch President and CEO Dr. Zachary Krevor said the TA-1 achieved all primary and customer objectives for the test, “reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers.”

Dr. Dan Gallton, director of space navigation and in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing in the space systems program office at Draper, which provided the guidance, navigation and control software for the test, said while the intense pressures and temperatures that result from traveling at hypersonic speeds have “been studied extensively … it’s still not well understood.”

“It’s a very complex and unforgiving environment,” and one that is difficult to model, Gallton said in an interview. “So, that really demands a much higher technical capability on the [guidance, navigation and control] pieces of the vehicle to be able to adapt quickly, to be able to overcome some of those forces that are being exerted.”

Brandon Jalbert, program manager in Draper’s space systems program office, said the company’s software “behaved as designed” during the TA-1 test. “We had good control over the vehicle through all phases of flight, so from that standpoint it certainly was a very successful test.”

Stratolaunch’s ultimate goal is to “provide that routine flight access to the hypersonic environment with a reusable air-launch testbed that allows their customers to test these realistic trajectories and dynamic flight profiles at these high-speed temperatures and pressures,” Jalbert said. Additionally, collecting data from these tests will help with product development and evaluating everything from materials to avionics, “any number of things that are applicable to the hypersonic environment.”

Gallton said “hypersonics are here to stay,” with a variety of applications not only for weapon systems but also potentially rapid transport of personnel and material.

Tests like the TA-1 show “that the capability’s continuing to grow, and we hope to continue to [partner] and bring our expertise to the table,” he said.

Steele said there is recognition that competitors like China will not slow down their hypersonics development, so it’s on the United States to catch up.

“China and our other adversaries around the globe are not sitting around waiting for us. They’re going to keep going ahead and [advancing] these technologies, and we really need to accelerate,” he said. ND

Topics: Global Defense Market, Defense Department