“It has that much energy and that much residual maneuver capacity. An object traveling at hypervelocity speeds over the Hudson Bay, he said, can be aimed at anywhere in the continental United States. “When you depress the trajectory of the booster you actually take it out of the view of many of the conventional sensors we have deployed today,” Selva said. ‘END GAME REALLY HARD’ The MDA review will have to address this problem. “If you have developed a maneuvering object, it can maneuver at your pleasure,” he said. “How you achieve that? With extra energy, which means the object goes faster for a very long time.” A ballistic missile would fly on a predictable trajectory hypersonic missiles don’t.
“What you have to do is depress the trajectory of the booster enough that you can make the object on its nose cone go faster than Mach 7,” Selva said. “If you think ballistic missile defense is easy …” A frightening prospect: a hypersonic weapon made by repurposing a ballistic missile booster. SCARY SCENARIO How do you stop a bullet flying at least seven times the speed of sound and that can also maneuver? Selva asked. If the solution is in space, Selva suggested, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if a commercial constellation of satellites actually had some capacity? If that’s true why would we build our own?” What’s needed: “persistent, timely global, low-latency surveillance to track and provide fire control for hypersonic threats.” The new layer of sensors will be aimed at low-flying hypersonic glide vehicles.
The Pentagon already has a network of early warning heat-detecting satellites in geostationary earth orbit that can see missile launches. “We asked for a systems engineering assessment for how they will link all that together.” The JROC expects to see a more concrete plan this fall.ĭuring a roundtable with reporters last week, Griffin cautioned that the traditional approach to developing “exquisite” military satellites is not going to work. “Those are big hard requirements,” Selva told SpaceNews last week at a Mitchell Institute breakfast. Paul Selva, who chairs the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, has asked MDA to come back with an “assessment of the sensor requirements.” What will the sensors have to be able to see? How large should the constellation of sensors be? How would sensors in space connect to command and control systems? Industry sources said the studies will include options such as constellations in low and medium orbits. Missile Defense Agency is reviewing proposed concepts for a space-based sensor layer from nine companies: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, Maxar, Draper Labs, Leidos, Millennium Space and Boeing. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin “Our response has to be a proliferated space sensor layer, possibly based off commercial space developments.” A defensive shield would require global coverage and the cost of doing that with ground radars would be prohibitive so this has to be done in space, Griffin said. The hypersonic threat brings a “new urgency” that the United States has not seen since the Cold War. SENSE OF URGENCY China has been testing hypersonic glide vehicles successfully, and is advancing the technology at an alarming pace, warned Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin. Current sensors could track some portions of the flight but more coverage is needed for the midcourse. The Pentagon’s panel of four-star generals known as the Joint Oversight Requirements Council will be briefed this fall on potential solutions to a major national security vulnerability: hypersonic weapons that fly into space at supersonic speeds and descend back down to Earth directly on top of targets. The next big thing in missile defense: sensors on satellites in lower orbits
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