“The demonstration of the reuse of fully repairable hypersonic test vehicles is an important milestone for Mach-TB,” said George Rumford, director of the Test Resource Management Center, in a statement. “The lessons learned from this test campaign will help us reduce the lead time of the vehicle from months to weeks.”
Krevor said that Talon-A was wearing multiple experiments with each mission, but did not provide details about the nature of the payloads, referring to its own reasons and customer agreements.
“We cannot reveal the nature of those loads, except to say typical materials, instrumentation, feelingORS, etc., “he said.” The customers were pleased with their ability to restore the payloads shortly after landing. “
Stratolaunch completed the first driven flight of a Talon-A vehicle last year, when the rocket plane was launched over the Pacific and his liquid driven Hadley engine fired– Produced by Ursa Major– About 200 seconds. The Talon-A1 vehicle accelerated just a embarrassment of hypersonic speed and then fell into the sea as planned and was not recovered.
That was the scene for the first flight of Talon-A2 in December.
Military officials previously stated that they have set up the MACH-TB program to make more frequent flight tests from hypersonic weapon technologies, including communication, navigation, guidance, sensors and seekers. Stratolaunch strives for monthly flights from the Talon-A Rocket plane towards the end of the year and eventually wants to increase to weekly flights.
“These flights are now the stage to increase the cadence of hypersonic flight tests in this country,” said Krevor. “The possibility of having a fully reusable hypersonic flight architecture makes a very high cadence of flights possible, along with a lot of responsiveness. The DOD can call Stratolaunch if there is a priority program, and we can have a hypersonic flight next week, which can have the willingness of all other technologies and payloads.”
Pentagon officials set a goal in 2022 to grow the American capacity for hypersonic tests from 12 to 50 flight tests per year. Krevor believes that Stratolaunch will play an important role in let it happen.
To overtake
So why is hypersonic flight tests important?
The Pentagon tries to close what it regards it as a technological gap with China, who acknowledging American officials that the world leader has become in hypersonic rocket development. Hypersonic weapons are more difficult than conventional missiles for air defense systems to detect, follow and destroy. In contrast to ballistic rockets, hypersonic weapons drive at the top of the atmosphere, which improves their maneuverability and the ability to avoid interceptors.
Hypersonic flight is a ruthless environment. Temperatures outside the Talon-A vehicle can reach up to 2,000 ° Fahrenheit (1,100 ° Celsius) while the aircraft plows through air molecules, Krevor said. He refused to announce the duration, top speed and maximum height of the test flights of December and March, but said that the rocket plane carried out a series of “high-g” maneuvers on the journey of the drop location to Vandenberg.
