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Defense Innovation Division of the Pentagon (DIU) bets on the development of a hypersonic test "aircraft", which can help speed up work on the creation of similar weapons systems and reduce their final cost. In doing so, it is planned to reduce reliance on the few currently available wind tunnels..
DIU hopes to overcome shortcomings of existing land and sea based flight test sites, which cannot provide fast cyclic testing, leading to long delays in the development of hypersonic weapons.
As part of the new Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testabilities initiative (HyCAT) DIU is looking for commercial partners to demonstrate a prototype test "aircraft" within 12-24 months, capable of flying at speeds over 5 M, and can also carry an experimental payload, performing sufficiently long flights with the ability to collect data on flight performance.
Interested contractors must 16 September to submit proposals.
The first flight of an experimental hypersonic aircraft may require, According to the American press, greater risk, than that, which engineers are now going to develop hypersonic weapons.
But this is completely in line with the spirit of DIU, and its advantage is, that you do not need to take up space in several wind tunnels, capable of conducting hypersonic tests. In other words, hypersonic aircraft will take to the air without testing in a wind tunnel. He himself will provide a test platform for testing hypersonic developments.. At least, that's what the Pentagon wants.
The lack of "hypersonic" wind tunnels is a problem, and those few objects, which we have, booked for other trials. If we can reduce the cost of flight testing in the air, we will be able to reduce the time and get the necessary data during real flight tests, a DIU representative told reporters.
At the same time, several universities are rushing to build new testing centers. One of them is Purdue in Indiana, where Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks visited the Center for Hypersonic and Applied Research in August, in which two new wind tunnels will soon be installed. Author:The same Mikhail
