Boeing Awarded $70M To Develop Prototype, Conduct Test Flights for Glide Breaker Hypersonic Interceptor

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided to partner with Boeing Co. for the next phase of the Glide Breaker program. Boeing will develop prototypes and technologies to help the U.S. military shoot down the enemy's hypersonic missiles.

DARPA Awards Boeing To Test Glide Breaker

A Pentagon contract announcement dated Sept. 8 revealed that DARPA awarded Boeing $70,554,525 for the Glide Breaker development program. It is expected to be a four-year contract.

Through its contract with DARPA, Boeing will pay for simulations assessing the Glide Breaker designs using data from wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamics, which are computerized models of how fluid air interacts with objects like missile interceptors.

Additionally, Boeing will assess Glide Breaker's overall aerodynamic performance while the jet thrusters it uses to maneuver into position to engage and defeat hypersonic weapons in flight are fired.

Boeing will need to use simulations that represent the interactions between the air and the interceptor at extremely high speeds and altitudes since Glide Breaker is designed to intercept fast-evolving technology instead of the weapons systems of the past.

According to Gil Griffin, executive director of Boeing Phantom Works Advanced Weapons, hypersonic vehicles are among the most hazardous and quickly developing threats to national security. They are concentrating on the technological knowledge required to strengthen the country's counter-hypersonic capabilities and protect it from impending dangers.

Griffin added that this phase of the Glide Breaker program will examine how hypersonic airflow and jet thrusters to guide the vehicle affect system performance at extremely high speeds and altitudes in a representative digital environment. We are operating at the leading edge of technology to intercept an extremely rapid object in a highly dynamic environment.

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About The Glide Breaker Program

The Glide Breaker program was launched in 2018 to develop and deploy technologies that enable protection against hypersonic systems. Its developments are meant to guide a later program of record as the US military searches for strategies to shoot down hypersonic aircraft in their glide phase of flight when they would be more amenable to intercepts.

The Pentagon is looking for an interceptor that can be launched from an Aegis MK-41 vertical launch system and destroy enemy missiles with a kill vehicle supported by a "divert and attitude control system," according to a broad agency statement for the initiative published last year.

The second phase of the Glide Breaker program "seeks to develop the knowledge required to enable a DACS-propelled [kill vehicle] to intercept threats during glide phase in the presence of [jet interaction] effects," according to the BAA. Phase one was important, but it did not address endoatmospheric phenomena like how to control the kill vehicle while the DACS jets and the hypersonic cross flow are interacting.

Other Pentagon agencies are also developing technology to defeat hypersonic weapons. The Missile Defense Agency's ongoing contracts with Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to separately develop respective Glide Phase Intercept designs were extended, the Department of Defense (DOD) stated in April.

Last month, the United States and Japan declared they would cooperate to create the Glide Phase Interceptor, a new weapon to counter emerging hypersonic threats in the Indo-Pacific region. Washington and Tokyo are particularly worried about China's breakthroughs in hypersonic missile technology.