Following a successful test flight wherein its Talon-A vehicle reached near-hypersonic speeds, Stratolaunch is preparing for its next mission to succeed in or surpass the milestone of 5 times the speed of sound.
The March 9 test hit all of its primary objectives, in accordance with Stratolaunch CEO Zachary Krevor. Taking off from Stratolaunch’s manufacturing and test facility at Mojave Air and Space Port in California, the uncrewed vehicle separated from its carrier craft and reached high supersonic speeds before dropping into the Pacific Ocean.
“This was really focused on risk reduction for our platform,” Krevor told C4ISRNET in a March 11 interview. “We got through acceleration, through the transonic phase into the supersonic phase — that was our primary objective.”
An aircraft achieves hypersonic speeds when it reaches Mach 5, and Krevor said the primary powered Talon-A got near that rate. The corporate wouldn’t disclose the altitude or exact speed of the test flight.
For Stratolaunch’s second powered Talon-A mission, scheduled for the second half of this yr, it desires to push the uncrewed aircraft’s envelope further. The goal is to succeed in hypersonic speeds and to show reusability, landing the system on a runway.
The vehicle, dubbed TA-2, won’t undergo any structural changes before the flight, Krevor said, noting that the primary mission validated the aircraft’s design and construction. The corporate is, nevertheless, considering operational lessons from the TA-1 vehicle.
“There’s definitely some operational lessons that we’ve learned regarding our propellant management and the way can we proceed to enhance,” he said. “We’re an organization that believes strongly in continuous improvement.”
A successful Talon-A test campaign has significant implications for the Defense Department’s hypersonic efforts, that are focused on fielding the advanced weapons and defending against similar systems that China and Russia are constructing.
DoD is working to extend its testing rigor, setting a goal in 2022 to eventually conduct one flight each week. Talon-A could provide the department with a reusable, cheaper platform to test and validate high-speed components, subsystems and other technologies.
Talon-A’s first powered flight provided some data to U.S. Defense Department customers, including the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center, which is developing an airborne hypersonic test capability called SkyRange.
The following flight will take that partnership a step further, with SkyRange’s advanced sensors tracking the mission. It can even be the primary flight to support the Pentagon’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed program, or MACH-TB. The flying testbed effort is designed to validate hypersonic subsystems, advanced materials and other technologies.
The following mission is one among five Talon-A test flights that can carry MACH-TB payloads as a part of a contract inked in November.
The corporate can also be working to make sure its behemoth Talon-A carrier vehicle, dubbed Roc, is ready for its next mission. The aircraft, which has a wingspan of 385 feet and might fly 500,000 kilos of payload, will perform a series of flights geared toward increasing its altitude for the following Talon-A mission.
The flights are a part of mandatory Federal Aviation Administration inspections to validate Roc’s airworthiness.
Krevor noted that for the TA-1 mission, Roc’s 14th flight, the aircraft demonstrated a two-week turnaround time and brought its total flight time to around 60 hours.
“Roc really is popping right into a dependable aircraft that’s going to be a national asset for the USA to perform missions that, frankly, were unable to be completed previously,” he said.
Stratolaunch can also be preparing its second carrier aircraft — a Boeing 747 owned by Virgin Orbit before the corporate declared bankruptcy last spring — to support Talon A missions next yr. The corporate is performing modifications on the platform to make sure it’s compatible with its data systems and interfaces.
The aircraft will support some classified DoD testing before it starts flying Talon A missions.
“I can’t talk in great detail about it, however the 747 will support additional customer flight testing within the fourth quarter of this yr,” Krevor said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a give attention to the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on a number of the Defense Department’s most vital acquisition, budget and policy challenges.