Two key engineering challenges facing hypersonic engineers today are heat management and drag management, both of which are essential to ensuring a survivable airframe. Traveling through the atmosphere at speeds exceeding Mach 5 (3,836 mph), hypersonic airframes would have to adapt to an environment of extremes. Put simply, the ramifications of these potential advances on the global economy and foreign policy are significant. In a defense setting, it will dramatically compress response times for military commanders. The term hypersonic means “moving at a speed greatly in excess of the speed of sound, usually meaning greater than Mach 5.” 1 This roughly translates into traveling at 60 miles per minute (or the equivalent of a four-minute commute from Washington, D.C., to New York), which would significantly reduce flight duration for commercial passengers. The introduction of hypersonics will likely require a need for A&D firms to make changes in four key areas of their business: market strategy, design and engineering, manufacturing, and talent. While hypersonic travel, weapons, and defenses are just starting to be discussed more frequently, it is likely that some will be ready for use within the next year.īy understanding what hypersonics are, the market for it, major industry players, and the types of hypersonic products, A&D firms can better position themselves to capture their share of a sizable new market opportunity in the years to come.

Hypersonics could have the potential to transform the industry in a manner not seen since the introduction of supersonic flight in 1947 and supersonic transport in the late 1960s. Some examples are likely to include several classified programs to take advantage of new technologies in unmanned systems, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and finally, hypersonics.

As the aerospace & defense (A&D) industry enters the 2020s, it will likely see numerous major developmental programs become a reality.

Raytheon irad program