The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory launched a hypersonic research rocket Monday evening from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The move comes as the U.S. continues to play catch up with Russia in the development of hypersonic weapons.
Earlier Monday, President Joe Biden confirmed that Russia had used hypersonic weapons in its invasion and assault on Ukraine. “It’s almost impossible to stop it,” Biden told a business roundtable gathering.
The U.S. has yet to deploy any such weapons. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin (LMT) – Get Lockheed Martin Corporation Report, Northtrop Grumman (NOC) – Get Northrop Grumman Corporation Report and Raytheon (RTX) – Get Raytheon Technologies Corporation Report are working to develop both offensive and defensive hypersonic weapons.
What May The Mission Find?
The research mission, dubbed the BOLT II flight experiment, was carried aboard a sub-orbital sounding rocket.
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It was designed to “collect scientific data to better understand boundary Layer Transition (BOLT) and Turbulence (BOLT II) during hypersonic flight,’ according to a statement from the research laboratory ahead of the flight.
“Heat is the mother of all problems for hypersonics,” said Dr. Sarah Popkin, AFOSR’s program officer for high-speed aerodynamics in the statement.
“There’s a lot of heat that happens right at the very leading edge, but that’s all in a very focused area. Turbulence can cause heat to evolve over almost the entire vehicle surface, and so now you’re having to worry about protecting internal electronics and things like that, from that heat.”
In the end, “being able to understand and predict the turbulence associated with the heating will help us design better hypersonic vehicles,” Popkin added.
The roughly 10 minute flight was expected to reach speeds of up to Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound). The rocket’s ascent was visible from several east coast states including Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina.
A previous BOLT experiment flight in June of 2021 failed to reach the necessary speeds to conduct the tests.
