WASHINGTON — Last spring, the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center received requests from two program offices to supply support for upcoming hypersonic flight tests — one over the Atlantic Ocean and one over the Pacific.
The flights can be 10 days apart.
Up to now, the testing community wouldn’t have been able meet that demand, based on George Rumford, TRMC’s director. It might take weeks — and sometimes months — to reposition the ships the Pentagon has traditionally relied on to trace hypersonic test vehicles in flight and make sure the programs had the correct instrumentation in place.
“One in every of those programs would have been told that they need to take a seat on their hands for weeks, if not months, waiting for us to rearrange the infrastructure to support their test,” Rumford told C4ISRNET in an interview.
But this time, Rumford’s team had a brand new capability available — a fleet of three uncrewed Range Hawk aircraft equipped with sensors and instrumentation to support hypersonic flight tests from the air. The drones, a part of a program called SkyRange, provide the Pentagon with a versatile, airborne testing infrastructure.
Rumford and his office declined to call the systems that were tested, but said that due to SkyRange, which became operational last yr, TRMC was capable of support the fast turnaround that the programs needed.
“With SkyRange, our nation was capable of do a hypersonic test within the Atlantic and in a matter of days do a hypersonic test within the Pacific,” he said. “That could be a significant accomplishment.”
The U.S. military is investing in hypersonic research and development efforts aimed toward fielding weapons and aircraft that may travel and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5. Access to flight test support and ground test infrastructure has been a big limiting factor in that development, and the Pentagon has been working lately to alter that.
Growing the SkyRange fleet
In 2022, the department set a goal to extend its hypersonic flight test cadence from about 12 events per yr to 50, or about one per week. Rumford said TRMC is prioritizing efforts like SkyRange that bring the speed and suppleness to hopefully help the department achieve that goal over time.
The aircraft that make up the SkyRange fleet are called Range Hawks — decommissioned RQ-4 Global Hawks, once utilized by the Air Force for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The primary three of those aircraft are older, Block 10 models which have been converted to trace overhead systems.
In fiscal 2023, SkyRange supported 10 hypersonic flight tests, and Rumford expects that to grow to greater than 15 in FY24.
The SkyRange fleet can be poised to grow in the approaching years as TRMC and Northrop Grumman, which built the Global Hawk, convert retired Block 20 and 30 Global Hawk models into the Range Hawk configuration. Those conversions will begin this yr and by FY25, SkyRange must have additional Range Hawks in its fleet to support hypersonic testing, Rumford said.
Flying testbed
The Pentagon is investing in other efforts beyond SkyRange to spice up hypersonic flight and ground testing. Through the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed program, or MACH-TB, TRMC and the Navy are working with industry to create a flying testbed that may validate subsystems, advanced materials and other technologies as a system is being developed.
Rumford noted that prior to MACH-TB, programs rarely had opportunities to validate that individual systems and components could function in a hypersonic flight environment before a full-up flight test.
“In a typical hypersonic flight test, there is perhaps greater than a dozen things flying for the primary time, all having risk related to them, all bundled into that big flight test,” he said. “MACH-TB can provide a flying testbed in a repeatable, inexpensive environment.”
TRMC can be working with the Defense Innovation Unit to funnel emerging technology into MACH-TB through the Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities program, dubbed HyCAT.
“The intent of that’s to try to find progressive approaches which are extremely inexpensive, reusable, that may possibly provide things that we currently don’t have today, make some tech maturity investments in them, after which once that after that technology matures, we’ll transition it from HyCAT to the MACH-TB program,” Rumford said.
On the bottom side, TRMC is investing in improvements to government-owned test facilities and is partnering with private sector organizations to deal with shortfalls in propulsion testing for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles and aeroshell materials for boost-glide systems.
Rumford highlighted a test and integration company called CUBRC, based in Recent York, that gives hypersonic testing services and is trying to make its wind tunnels more representative of a hypersonic flight environment.
“There are some facilities that we’re investigating, planning development strategies to refurbish and produce back online in order that they’ll give you the option to satisfy our hypersonic needs,” Rumford said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a deal with the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on among the Defense Department’s most vital acquisition, budget and policy challenges.