Kratos contracted to increase US hypersonic flight test capability

Kratos Defence has received a contract valued at up to $1.45 billion as part of the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 programme to help the US Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering increase the cadence of its hypersonic flight tests, according to a 6th January company press release. 

“MACH-TB 2.0 will provide an affordable bridge between hypersonic ground tests and system level flight tests. This will reduce overall hypersonic development risks and time,” Kratos states in its press release. Under the contract, which will return $1.45 billion if all options are exercises, Kratos has been selected as the prime for Task Area 1 of the programme, which is called Systems Engineering, Integration, and Testing. 

Under that task area, Kratos will lead a team of other companies to deliver systems engineering, launch services, mission planning, and assembly, integration and test services. There are two other task areas that are still under evaluation by the US Government and there is no readily available information on what they involve that could be found for this article. 

MACH-TB 2.0 is expected to deliver from 2025 and has a five year period of delivery. Kratos and its team will be taking the test-bed vehicle from MACH-TB 1.0 from a design and concept demonstration, to a full flight test capability within 2025. Kratos has developed its own rocket motor called Zeus, which are built for test launches of hypersonic and ballistic missiles as well as space payloads. The motors are built by L3 Harris to Kratos’s specifications. 

Defence explained: What is MACH-TB? 

The US Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, in collaboration with the US Navy Strategic Systems Programs, recently completed a conventional hypersonic missile test from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, Dec. 12, 2024. There are many different customers within the DoD that require hypersonic test capabilities. Credit: Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs

MACH-TB was the precursor programme to MACH-TB 2.0. It set out to provide a modular boost glide vehicle and test-bed that US Department of Defense customers could test their systems on. This includes things like sensors, new modes of navigation, warheads, in-flight communication, and technology miniaturisation. It was designed to be somewhat agnostic to the rocket booster used to propel the payload and replicate operational or modified hypersonic trajectories. The original MACH-TB consortium was led by Dynetics, a Leidos subsidiary, under a 2022 contract from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane through the Strategic and Spectrum Missions Advanced Resilient Trusted Systems (S2MARTS) Other Transaction Authority. The first testbed launch occurred in June 2023, demonstrating that a commercially available booster could be used to propel a vehicle into hypersonic flight. 

This development is important because hypersonic missiles are at the very early stages of their development and while they seek to provide new capabilities – flight speeds in excess of 1,700 metres per second – they are still subject to the laws of physics and militaries must learn how to make these weapons work within their systems. For example, a boost glide vehicle is likely to form a plasma shield around its exterior as it races towards its target; plasma shields are a problem for radio frequency communications which means that mid-flight course corrections based on GPS signals or target reallocations via datalink are deemed impossible. 

Furthermore, the shape of hypersonic missiles generally means that their internal space is confined when compared to a conventional cruise or ballistic missile. This means that designers must find space for a warhead and a new form of guidance mechanism that works inside a very small space if they are to produce a workable missile. This is a problem because hypersonic missiles are also fantastically expensive. They are expensive to design, expensive to build, and expensive to test. To date, this means that the US DoD has conducted relatively few tests and is deemed to be lagging behind China in its hypersonic tests. Which infers that it may be behind its main rival in developing a technology seen as key to a potential conflict between the two. 

So, MACH-TB 1.0 and 2.0 aim to develop a more affordable test-bed vehicle that can be loaded with different payloads per US DoD customer requirements and facilitate a much greater cadence of hypersonic boost glide vehicle tests from 2025. This will enable the US to gather more data and speed up its fielding of live hypersonic weapons. 

Calibre comment

Hypersonic weapons are seen as a critical component of the US military’s future long-range precision strike capability. However, there is a lot of work to be done before the US is able to field a sufficient number of operationally ready systems. A lot of hypersonic testing is done through computer simulations based upon the current understanding of how these vehicles interact with the environment at speeds exceeding Mach 5, and wind tunnels can provide further testing of missile shapes. However, eventually, it becomes essential to test a vehicle in real life flight conditions, at which point costs can rapidly escalate. The US is working hard to increase its flight test cadence by trying to focus only on those hypersonic efforts that are more likely to succeed. MACH-TB 2.0 will help drive those efforts further by providing more frequent test opportunities.