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What’s Next in US Hypersonic Efforts as Air Force Shelves ARRW

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What’s Next in US Hypersonic Efforts as Air Force Shelves ARRW
The service will focus on a potentially cheap scramjet as research continues in other services.
PATRICK TUCKER | MARCH 30, 2023 07:29 PM ET
 
   
The Air Force is shelving its effort to make a boost-glide missile after an unsuccessful test, but will press on with a scramjet-powered hypersonic weapon, the service’s acquisition chief said Thursday.

The service “does not currently intend to pursue follow-on procurement of the ARRW”—Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon—“once the prototyping program concludes,” Air Force acquisition head Andrew Hunter said in testimony on Thursday.

The cancellation did not surprise Mark Lewis, who used to run the Pentagon’s hypersonics efforts.

“People underestimated how hard it was to take a relatively larger long-range boost-glide system and shrink it down to a tactical system that's small enough” to fit “under the wing of an airplane,” said Lewis, now executive director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2023/03/whats-next-us-hypersonic-efforts-air-force-shelves-arrw/384655/

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