A joint U.S. Army and Navy program launched a missile from a Virginia facility Wednesday with experiments to help develop hypersonic weapons, CNN reported.
It was the second test launch for the program, which started in 2021, and carried 11 experiments to collect data and test the hypersonic technology for land and sea weapons research, according to the report.
"The launch today went extremely well," Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, who is the director of Strategic Systems Programs and oversaw the test, told CNN. "As a matter of fact, we've just gotten done looking through our key observables, and every piece of data that we wanted to collect — at least preliminarily — has shown that we collected all that data."
Another test launch is scheduled for tomorrow at Virginia's Wallops Flight Facility with 13 more experiments, the Navy told the news outlet.
The report said hypersonic missiles travel above Mach 5, going about 4,000 mph, and can maneuver and vary altitude to evade missile defense systems as well as rely on speed to avoid detection and interception.
Hypersonic research and testing have become a priority for the military since China and Russia conducted successful launches in the past year, with Russia now deploying them in its war with Ukraine, the report said.
The U.S. Air Force conducted a successful test of a hypersonic weapon dropped from a B-52 bomber in Southern California that flew at five times the speed of sound, 1,100 feet-per-second, Al Jazeera reported in May.
"Following separation from the aircraft, the ARRW's [Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon] booster ignited and burned for expected duration, achieving hypersonic speeds five times greater than the speed of sound," the Air Force said in a statement to the news outlet.
The Defense Post reported in July that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as DARPA, conducted a ground-launched hypersonic glide weapon at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, successfully meeting the test objectives of "missile canister egress, stable flight capture and use of U.S. Army inventory artillery fire control systems to initiate the test mission."
Reuters reported Oct. 21 that the weapons are being developed by companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
A Congressional Research Service Report to Congress on Oct. 14 said that there is currently $4.7 billion in the 2023 Fiscal Year budget for hypersonic technology research, up from $3.8 billion in the 2022 budget request, and an additional $225.5 million requested by the Missile Defense Agency to defend against a hypersonic weapon attack.
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