US Lockheed Martin’s Secret Hypersonic Missile Test, DARPA’s Hypersonic Air breathing Weapon Concept

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Please Support As and Give me a Feed Back to Improve. The United States conducted a secret test of Lockheed Martin’s Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, or HAWC, it has been revealed. The hypersonic missile was launched successfully from a B-52H bomber off the west coast of the U.S., but officials decided to keep the test under wraps, apparently in response to growing tensions with Russia.
Typically, hypersonic speeds are defined as anything of Mach 5 or above. In the past, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have said that the missile will use a rocket booster to accelerate to at least that speed, after which the scramjet will ensure it maintains a speed between Mach 5 to 10.
In this latest test, the Lockheed Martin missile was accelerated to high speed by its booster stage before successfully engaging the air-breathing scramjet which propelled it to a speed faster than Mach 5 “for an extended period of time.”
In this latest test, the Lockheed Martin HAWC reached an altitude greater than 65,000 feet and flew for more than 300 nautical miles.
U.S. Air Force, working together with the DARPA, awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth approximately $928 million for the development of its version of HAWC. While the missile is designed for land attack, the company has also pitched to the Navy an apparent maritime strike variant, to be carried by the F-35C stealth fighter, and perhaps other platforms.
At the same time, hypersonic missiles like HAWC can maneuver within the atmosphere, allowing them to fly a more unpredictable flight path compared to other traditional long-range weapons, such as ballistic missiles, and making it far harder for enemy defenses to defeat them. Neither of the HAWC designs uses a warhead, relying instead on kinetic energy to destroy the target.
The HAWC designs are considered by the Air Force and DARPA to be stepping-stones to more sophisticated air-launched, air-breathing hypersonic weapons that could be fielded in the future. These include the Air Force’s own Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) project, which is also an air-breathing weapon.