Pentagon says it has completed successful hypersonic missile test

The Pentagon said this week that it successfully completed a third flight test of an air-breathing hypersonic weapon.

In a press release, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said that the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) — a joint project between DARPA and the Air Force that uses captured air from the atmosphere to achieve sustained propulsion — achieved a successful test in early July.

The speed and maneuverability of the missile concept allows it to evade defenses and carry out quick strikes.

The July test was the second successful test flight of Raytheon’s version of the missile design, which uses a scramjet engine made by Northrop Grumman. DARPA previously successfully tested the Raytheon design in September.

DARPA also successfully tested a version of the weapon made by Lockheed Martin in March, but news of the test wasn’t reported until April. The announcement was delayed to avoid tensions with Russia, which a week prior claimed to strike a Ukrainian weapons storage facility with a hypersonic missile.

The test also comes a week after the Air Force disclosed that it successfully tested another hypersonic weapon — the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon Booster — off the coast of Southern California.

In its release, DARPA said the scramjet engine propelled the weapon to speeds greater than five times the speed of sound for 300 nautical miles and reached altitudes higher than 60,000 feet.

In a separate press release, Raytheon said that after releasing the HAWC from an aircraft and accelerating to hypersonic speeds, the vehicle flew “a trajectory that engineers designed to intentionally stress the weapon concept to explore its limits and further validate digital performance models.”