By Marina Malenic
The Air Force has awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] a $16 million contract for all design elements through the preliminary design review of a new flight- test vehicle demonstrator for a conventional prompt global strike capability, one of three major efforts under way in the Defense Department.
The contract, announced last month, is for the second of a two-phase Air Force effort to design a Prompt Global Strike (PGS) Payload Delivery Vehicle. The program is derived from a U.S. Strategic Command initiative to build a continental United States-based conventional prompt global strike weapon.
PGS is envisioned as a system to precisely hit difficult-to-access targets anywhere on the globe from great distances in less than an hour. The Defense Department is developing means of delivery that are unconstrained by basing and overflight rights and that do not place aircrew or other personnel in undue risk. The Air Force has said that it plans to field a PGS capability around 2020.
In 2008, the Pentagon consolidated its disparate long-range hypersonic flight activities, according to Greg Halcher, the deputy director of portfolio systems for strategic warfare. Halcher’s division within the DoD office of acquisition, technology and logistics now heads up the effort.
“Congress decided at the time that there was enough merit in consolidation of these activities into a defense-wide account,” Halcher told Defense Daily last week.
Halcher explained that an Air Force-led formal analysis of alternatives for the mission category was completed last year. As a result, three Defense Department organizations are now working on technology demonstration efforts.
First, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) continues to head up the FALCON program. Its goal is to develop a vehicle capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload across a distance of 9,000 nautical in less than two hours, according to a fact sheet on DARPA’s Web site. FALCON stands for Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States. Halcher said two major FALCON tests are planned for this year.
“Those will provide just a huge amount of data,” he said. “Short of weaponization, everything will be demonstrated, and it will be the basis for future acquisition decisions.”
Leveraging technology from the FALCON effort, the Air Force’s PGS project is being run out of the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Developmental Planning Directorate at Los Angeles AFB. In the first phase, engineers developed requirements for the delivery vehicle. Phase II will now include the actual design work, construction and flight testing of the vehicle. Lockheed Martin began work in August 2008.
SMC wants to conduct an “operationally relevant” launch of the test vehicle using a Minotaur-4 rocket by early 2012, according to an Air Force source. The test flight will originate at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., and will last 35 minutes.
According to the Air Force source, the payload delivery vehicle will share the aerodynamics, thermal protection, avionics and structural design developed by the FALCON program.
A third effort under way in the Army is being conducted at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., according to Halcher. That program is expected to demonstrate a hypersonic glide vehicle next year, he said.
Halcher said consolidation of these efforts was driven by both financial and development imperatives.
“The fact is, we don’t have enough resources in either the military or industry to be stovepiped and non-communicative,” he explained. “Also, we have to know that we’re complying with operator needs–primarily Strategic Command–and making certain that our representation of progress to Congress and all other interested parties be presented properly. That is particularly difficult to do in so complex and technically challenging an area as this.”
Halcher said there is also a great deal of “cross talk” between the PGS efforts and the Air Force’s Boeing [BA]-developed X-51 air-breathing scramjet program.
“Both efforts involve the same physics–high-temperature fluid physics,” said Halcher.
Hypersonic speed describes velocities upward of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. The PGS efforts are examining flight at up to Mach 20, according to Halcher.