Free Republic

First use of high-speed missiles by Russia in Ukraine sparks renewed urgency for U.S. development. With the first claimed use of a hypersonic weapon by Russia in the invasion of Ukraine, attention is again focusing on defense contractors in the U.S. that are trying to develop their own. Among U.S. defense contractors notable for their efforts are Lockheed Martin (LMT) , Northrop Grumman (NOC) and Raytheon (RTX). The three were picked by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency last November to develop an "accelerated concept design of the Glide Phase Interceptor," to stop incoming vehicles. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are also...

News AnalysisTalk of a new arms race between the United States and China has rapidly increased since a recent report by the Financial Times asserted that China had tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon.But what are hypersonic weapons? How do they work? Who has them? And why does it matter?What are Hypersonic Weapons?Technically, hypersonic weapons are missiles that travel faster than five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5. This speed is roughly 3,800 miles per hour, but fluctuates with the object, altitude, and temperature, as these interact with the physics of sound.But speed is not the key defining feature...

The U.S. Defense Department has awarded a multimillion-dollar contract for a system that would knock threatening missiles out of the sky. A company called Aerojet Rocketdyne was awarded $19.6 million to develop “enabling technologies” for the system, which will be known as Glide Breaker, it said earlier this month. “Advancing hypersonic technology is a national security imperative,” Eileen Drake, Aerojet Rocketdyne CEO and president, said in a statement. “Our team is proud to apply our decades of experience developing hypersonic and missile propulsion technologies to the Glide Breaker program.” The Glide Breaker program is part of America’s efforts to counteract...

High-tech weapons may be screaming through the skies at five times the speed of sound by the middle of the next decade, U.S. military officials say. That's the most optimistic timeline for the battlefied debut of a superfast new strike capability, officials said, and it depends on continued research into hypersonic vehicles like the Air Force's X-51A Waverider, which completed its final test flight earlier this month. The Air Force is "trying to get the technologies mature enough that in the 2020 timeframe we would like to be able to show the warfighter that we would be ready to start...