Navy Spends Millions On Sub-Launched Hypersonics As USAF Touts New Hypersonic X-Plane
The U.S. military as a whole has a voracious appetite for the fast-flying vehicles and there's no sign it will be satiated anytime soon.
By Joseph TrevithickOctober 4, 2018
The War Zone
The development of hypersonic weapons has become and continues to be one of the U.S. military’s top priorities. A recent contract award shows that the U.S. Navy is spending millions to keep developing a submarine-launched type that might eventually arm its future Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. Now, the U.S. Air Force has announced that an air-launched hypersonic test bed it is developing in cooperation with NASA to support various projects will become the latest of America’s research and development “X-planes.â€
On Oct. 1, 2018, the Pentagon announced that the Navy had awarded the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Massachusetts a contract worth more than $13 million for various services in support of actual hypersonic weapon flight tests. Then, on Oct. 4, 2018, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) revealed that space launch firm Generation Orbit’s GOLauncher 1 (GO-1) hypersonic vehicle would now be known as the X-60A.
http://thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24046/navy-spends-millions-on-sub-launched-hypersonics-as-usaf-touts-hypersonic-x-plane
