Boeing and Lockheed Martin are due to submit preliminary designs for a US-Australian hypersonic rocket with an air-jet engine in a year, according to a Pentagon report. The development of the munition is carried out within the framework of the SCIFiRE (Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment) project.
The US and Australian defense ministries signed an agreement on the joint development of a hypersonic rocket with an air-jet engine last year. As part of the SCIFiRE project, they are going to design a promising munition, assemble several of its full-size prototypes and conduct their flight tests.
The military wants the missile to be relatively cheap and have a long range. According to the Australian Air Force, its carriers will be F/A-18F and F-35A fighters, EA-18G electronic warfare aircraft, as well as P-8A Poseidon coastal patrol aircraft.
Demonstration tests within the framework of the SCIFiRE project are planned for the mid-2020s. They will probably take place in Australia, which has seven wind tunnels. In some of them, the speed of the gas flow reaches Mach 30. It is also advantageous for the Pentagon to cooperate with the Australians because of their Woomera training ground, one of the largest in the world. In June, the US Air Force selected Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to participate in the initial stage of the project.
The US Department of Defense announced on September 1 that the US Air Force has signed a contract for the next stage of the development of the SCIFiRE missile with Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He assumes that the companies will prepare preliminary designs of the ammunition by next August. Although Raytheon has not yet received such a contract, it does not believe that its participation in the project is over, and continues to work on it.
In the SCIFiRE project, companies will be able to use the developments obtained by Australian specialists within the framework of the HIFiRE program, which we wrote about earlier. Within its framework, several successful test launches of a hypersonic missile were carried out.
Vasilisa Chernyavtseva
