“We’ve been very, very selective on getting not only the right talent, but the right personalities that understand how to go fast,” Guetlein said Tuesday at the Innovate Space Global Economic Summit in Arlington, Virginia. “Not everybody understands what it takes to move at that speed.”

Previously the Space Force’s second in command, Guetlein was confirmed last week for this role, officially assuming the position Monday. As a direct report to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, he has a slew of authorities designed to speed up decision-making and capability delivery, including the ability to bypass standard competitive hiring procedures that can slow down the process.

Guetlein said he has a long way to go in building his team but has a list of 30 names, identified from across industry and academia that he hopes will join the effort.

Along with filling out his program office, Guetlein is also pulling together a national-level consortium that includes companies, labs and universities to serve both as capability providers and technical advisers for the effort.

Since President Donald Trump announced plans to develop Golden Dome during his first week in office, the Pentagon has been working to identify a path forward – studying capability options, understanding the industry landscape and getting a sense of the feasibility of crafting a layered missile defense capability that brings together ground, air and space sensors and interceptors.

In May, Trump added another challenge to the project, announcing during a televised Oval Office meeting that he expects Golden Dome to be completed by 2028 at a price tag of $175 billion.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built,” Trump said at the time.

With Guetlein in place and starting to populate the newly established program office, one of his early tasks is to craft a vision for what the Golden Dome architecture will include and deliver it to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth within 60 days.

To further lay the groundwork and provide context for the 60-day study, Guetlein will travel to U.S. Northern Command on Thursday to discuss current gaps in the current homeland defense architecture with its commander Gen. Gregory Guillot and U.S. Space Command head, Gen. Stephen Whiting.

Guetlein said those gaps will help inform the size of the Golden Dome architecture, the scope of his organization and the capabilities needed to counter future threats.

The office is also planning several engagements with companies vying to support the effort, including a long-awaited Missile Defense Agency that was slated to happen in June but was delayed by Guetlein’s confirmation process.

Space Systems Command will also host an industry session focused on options for developing and fielding interceptors that can destroy missile threats from space. That part of the architecture, Guetlein said, presents the greatest technical challenge, noting that while the capabilities exist and have been proven, there are looming questions about the number of interceptors that will be required and at what cost.

“What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale?” he said. “Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc?”

While those questions will likely take some time to answer, Guetlein said a more near-term task will be integrating various systems from across the military services into a common command-and-control architecture. That includes sensors, weapons and communication channels that need to work together, he said.

To get after that challenge, Guetlein plans to schedule incremental demonstrations on a six-month cadence with a goal of delivering capability as soon as possible.

“We are on a short timeline,” he said. “The president gave us three years to deliver this capability and we’re going to deliver in three years. That means we need to move out with a sense of urgency and move out with incremental wins along the way.”

The aircraft, dubbed Mk 1, is the second iteration of the Quarterhorse high-speed test platform and the first to take flight. Its May 21 flight test brings Hermeus a step closer to its goal of flying the autonomous, reusable vehicle at near-Mach 5 speeds by 2026.

“We’ve proven the viability of our iterative development approach,” Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica said in a statement Tuesday. “But this is just the start. We have much more to do as the bar rises for the next iteration.”

Hermeus had planned to fly Quarterhorse in 2023 and then pushed that date to last summer before eventually hitting the milestone this month. Still, the company touted its ability to go from a clean-sheet design to a flight-ready system in just over a year.

The first flight test focused on validating Quarterhorse’s ability to take off and land, which is a particular challenge for high-speed systems. Hermeus is feeding data from the first flight into its second test vehicle, Mk 2, which is currently being built at the firm’s headquarters in Atlanta.

That aircraft is slated to fly by the end of the year and reach supersonic speeds. It will also enable “novel operational defense capabilities,” the company said.

This early work will push Hermeus toward its larger goal of supplying high-speed platforms to both defense and commercial customers. The company plans to build one aircraft per year — an approach it hopes will position it to address the challenges that come with operationalizing a hypersonic aircraft.

“The company’s approach emphasizes ‘hardware richness’ — building multiple prototypes in quick succession, allowing the team to take well-managed technical risk,” Hermeus said. “While driving technical progress towards high-speed flight, this approach simultaneously enables Hermeus to rapidly develop its team and talent.”

Hypersonic aircraft fly and maneuver at speeds of Mach 5 or higher. The Defense Department has several major programs to develop and field hypersonic weapons and vehicles — including the Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile and the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon — and is interested in potentially using Quarterhorse to help test hypersonic technology.

Along with funding from private investors, Hermeus received early backing from the Air Force Research Laboratory, which awarded the company a $1.5 million contract in 2020, followed by another $60 million deal the following year. The Defense Innovation Unit also chose the firm for its Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities program, which aims to increase flight test support for Pentagon programs.

Piplica previously told Defense News he expects Quarterhorse to start supporting DOD test events in 2026, around when its Mk 3 vehicle rolls off the line.

“I’m pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for this state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” Trump said. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they’re launched from space. And we will have the best system ever built.”

Trump also announced he has appointed Gen. Michael Guetlein, the Space Force’s second in command, to oversee the effort, which has become one of the president’s signature defense projects just months into his second term.

Guetlein, currently vice chief of space operations, previously led the Space Force’s primary acquisition organization, Space Systems Command. There, he oversaw major development efforts and helped streamline the space enterprise’s notoriously fragmented acquisition system. Earlier in his career, he served as deputy commander of the National Reconnaissance Office and program executive officer for programs and integration at the Missile Defense Agency — two of the organizations that will play a significant role in building out the Golden Dome architecture.

“I greatly appreciate your trust in me … and your trust in the team to deliver this,” Guetlein told Trump. “It is a great day for America.”

Trump first announced plans to develop an advanced, layered homeland missile shield in the early days of his second presidency, issuing an executive order that called for a 60-day study of architecture options. The capability is expected to include a mix of ground and space-based interceptors designed to defeat a spectrum of threats — from lower-end weapons to advanced hypersonic and cruise missiles.

While the current homeland missile defense system focuses on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia, Trump’s homeland missile defense shield would focus on addressing threats from peer adversaries, as well as those rogue threats.

Beyond his cost and schedule projections — and an assertion that Canada had signed on to be part of Golden Dome — Trump was light on details about the architecture and approach to fielding what many analysts and officials have called a bold and challenging endeavor. He alluded to fielding space-based and hypersonic interceptors but offered little more about the scope of the project.

Trump’s promise Tuesday to deliver the layered, integrated system in around “two-and-a-half to three years” would require the Defense Department to field the more advanced elements of the architecture years ahead of schedule. For example, the space-based missile interceptors that he said will be part of the effort have not yet been developed. Meanwhile, hypersonic interceptors are not expected to be developed and delivered until the mid-2030s.

While the more advanced elements of Golden Dome will take time to deliver, several pieces of the architecture are already in various stages of development.

That includes a space-based missile defense and tracking layer comprised of satellites and sensors that can identify and monitor high-end missile threats, which MDA and the Space Force are currently developing and fielding. Those capabilities are part of the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture and could potentially be scaled to support Golden Dome.

Republicans in Congress have largely been supportive of Golden Dome.

In February, Sens. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. — both of whom were in the Oval Office for Tuesday’s announcement — introduced a bill that proposes $19.5 billion for Golden Dome in fiscal 2026.

Their bill, the Golden Dome Act, proposes the addition of Aegis Ashore Systems for U.S. territory — which took years to install in Romania and Poland — and the use of blimps for detecting complex threats. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, at Fort Greely, Alaska, would be expanded and upgraded with next-generation interceptors along with a brand-new interceptor site on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, the House GOP included $25 billion for the project in its budget reconciliation package for fiscal 2025 — a number that Trump referenced and validated in his remarks Tuesday.

Asked how confident he is that Congress will fully fund Golden Dome given the administration’s $175 billion cost projection, Trump called the process “easy.”

“It’s amazing how easy this one is to fund,” he said. “Some funding is tough and some is easy. When we say we’re going to save everyone’s lives in a crazy world, it seems to be very easy to get.”

Trump noted that Golden Dome systems will be made in the U.S., but didn’t confirm whether contracts had been awarded. Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., highlighted the work that L3Harris, which is based in his home state, is doing to build out the current space-based sensor architecture.

Sullivan also referenced Lockheed and RTX, who have developed ground-based missile interceptors, while noting that the project will also likely involve more nontraditional defense contractors. Lockheed won the contract last year to build the interceptors that will replace the current ones.

“It’s all across the board in terms of companies. Sen. Cramer and I just met with a bunch of them last week that are interested in this,” he said. “Our technology sector is head and shoulders above any other place in the world, and they’re going to be a key part of this.”

Funded by AFRL, Varda’s W-3 capsule launched March 14 on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite, which provided power, communications and propulsion for the system. It landed May 13 at Koonibba Test Range in South Australia.

The Varda capsule carried an inertial measurement unit — built for the Air Force by Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated and designed to allow systems to navigate and maneuver without GPS.

According to Varda, the W-3 capsule reentered Earth’s atmosphere at speeds that exceeded Mach 25, considered an “extreme” environment that can provide the military with new information about how systems perform in hypersonic conditions.

“The W-3 mission will provide unprecedented data to advance next-generation space and defense capabilities and continue to provide hypersonic environments to the reentry test community,” Dave McFarland, Varda’s Vice President of Hypersonic and Reentry Test, said in a statement.

Varda was founded in 2021 with a plan to send “production facility” satellites to space and manufacture everything from pharmaceuticals to fiber-optic cables in a zero-gravity environment. Because the capsules it uses to return the objects to Earth travel through a hypersonic environment, AFRL and NASA have partnered with the firm to use those vehicles as high-speed, reusable testbeds.

That application helped Varda secure a $60 million strategic funding increase in 2023 from AFRL, NASA and several private investors. Last November, AFRL awarded the company a four-year, $48 million contract to continue testing military payload reentry through a program called Prometheus.

Varda recovered its first capsule in 2024 in Utah and its second in February, also at the Koonibba Test Range. Varda’s fourth spacecraft is in the midst of integration and testing in California at Rocket Lab’s Spacecraft Production Complex.

The company has indicated that its first two successful missions proved the versatility of its W-series vehicle to fly a range of payloads and have given it the confidence to shift its focus to increasing the system’s launch cadence.

“For our pharmaceutical customers, increased cadence means we are able to more closely match drug development timelines,” the company said in a May 8 press release. “For defense customers, it allows for faster iteration between tests. And for microgravity researchers, we can offer a faster turnaround time between the design of an experiment and receiving data to iterate on.”

The flights were part of the Pentagon’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Testbed program, or MACH-TB, and occurred three months apart — one last December and the second in March. Both met all of the Defense Department’s performance benchmarks within a 1% margin, according to Stratolaunch CEO Zachary Krevor.

“For the first one or two times going into the hypersonic regime, especially as we’re going faster, it’s a pretty incredible accomplishment,” Krevor told Defense News.

But perhaps the more critical milestone was the ability to recover the Talon-A vehicle, known as TA-2, after both flights. The U.S. hasn’t had a recoverable hypersonic aircraft since the X-15, which stopped flying in the late 1960s — and it’s never had one that’s fully autonomous.

Those attributes allowed Stratolaunch’s DOD customer, the Test Resource Management Center, to immediately recover and begin pulling data from the payloads it flew on TA-2. The ability to reuse the Talon-A will eventually make it a more affordable hypersonic testbed by “orders of magnitude,” Krevor said.

The lower the cost, the more accessible the vehicle is for DOD programs developing operational systems, whose demand for test opportunities far outpaces the Pentagon’s current infrastructure.

The Pentagon’s renewed push for hypersonic systems — which can travel and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5 — follows decades of waning investment following the unraveling of the X-15 program. As China and Russia make progress developing and even fielding hypersonic systems of their own, the Defense Department in recent years has shown a renewed interest in the capability, though it has still struggled to field an operational system.

To get after that testing challenge, DOD leaders have been on a path since 2022 to increase the department’s hypersonic flight cadence to around one test per week, and MACH-TB is a big part of that initiative. The program uses systems like Talon-A — which is powered by Ursa Major’s Hadley engine — as well as Rocket Lab’s HASTE rocket and Kratos’ Erinyes to test components and subsystems in a realistic flight environment that mimics the harsh conditions hypersonic vehicles face.

Stratolaunch is on contract for five MACH-TB flights and will support a Missile Defense Agency test campaign later this year. Krevor said the company has a full flight manifest through 2025 and has started booking the Talon-A for 2026, but declined to comment on who those customers are.

While increasing Talon-A’s flight cadence is an overarching goal for the company, Krevor noted that for the first few tests, the emphasis is on expanding its flight envelope.

That means flying the vehicle faster, performing more maneuvers and maintaining hypersonic speeds for longer durations in each successive test. Talon-A was able to do that for its first two flights and Stratolaunch hopes to build on those metrics in future tests.

Krevor declined to provide a precise timeline for Talon-A’s next flight, but said it is slated for later this quarter, so by June. Between the March test and this next flight, the team has been working in parallel to analyze flight data in order to understand how various components performed during hypersonic flight and whether those metrics matched its predictions.

“Because we are also expanding that performance envelope and going faster and faster on every flight, adding more maneuvers, there still is a healthy data analysis period, and so we’re allowing that to really be the focus as opposed to dialing in the cadence,” Krevor said.

Krevor said the company will shift its focus to “dialing in” Talon-A’s cadence by the second half of this year, though he wouldn’t specify how many flights the vehicle would conduct.

Those later tests will also help validate modifications the company has been making to one of its launch platforms, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner called the Spirit of Mojave. Stratolaunch’s other carrier aircraft, Roc — a much larger, two-fuselage aircraft with a 385-foot wingspan — has conducted all of its flights to date, but having a second platform will allow the company to bring on more customers.

The 747 modifications are progressing well, Krevor said, and he expects the aircraft to start flying by the summer or fall.

The Defense Department already leverages several over-sea test ranges to validate that the hypersonic vehicles it’s developing — which are designed to travel and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5 — can hit their targets. But as programs transition to later test phases, overland ranges are better suited to evaluate how a system performs under more stressing conditions, like a faulty navigation system or an enemy decoy, which an adversary may use to distract from a real target.

For the last few years, the Pentagon has been considering locations for overland sites, in part a response to a requirement in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that called for DOD officials to study options for at least two more corridors.

The initial study phase identified more than 1,600 possible locations around the world, according to George Rumford, director of DOD’s Test Resource Management Center, or TRMC. From that pool, TRMC has narrowed its list to three, Rumford told Defense News in an interview. One of those locations is in Australia and relies on a partnership with the country through the trilateral defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. known as AUKUS. The other two are in the United States: one over Alaska and the other at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

All three sites require lengthy approval and planning processes as well as funding to build new infrastructure and conduct the flight tests. The Pentagon in November announced it will partner with Australia and the U.K. through AUKUS to conduct up to six trilateral flight campaigns by 2028. Rumford said there are ongoing engineering and planning meetings that will determine a schedule for initial testing. The hope is that funding will be available later this year, according to Rumford.

For the domestic sites, TRMC is in the thick of the research and approval phases. If the regulatory approval process moves at a standard pace, the department could start flying in these corridors by 2029. The Pentagon is weighing options for shortening that process, using two of President Donald Trump’s executive orders as justification.

Rumford declined to predict how much time the department thinks it could shave off that timeline.

“It could be a significant acceleration,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”

Reducing ‘red tape’

Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order directing the Pentagon to create an “Iron Dome for America” has a direct link to the hypersonic test corridor expansion, Rumford said. The project, which the administration has since renamed “Golden Dome for America,” aims to build an advanced, multilayered missile defense architecture comprised of space-based interceptors and sensors that can track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

Since the order’s release, the Pentagon has moved quickly to convene teams to evaluate existing contributions and lay out what new systems the department would need to meet the intent of the president’s direction. The Missile Defense Agency and the Space Development Agency have reached out to industry for input.

In order to piece together an advanced missile defense architecture, Rumford said, the department will need to update its ranges and supporting infrastructure to validate those capabilities. The overland corridors could support that effort — particularly at White Sands, where much of the Golden Dome testing will likely occur.

“We’re going to be making significant modernization upgrades at White Sands to realize an Iron Dome Capability at an accelerated pace, as directed by that executive order,” he said.

The other order he referenced calls for establishing a National Energy Dominance Council to improve permitting processes and “cut red tape.” This directive, which emphasizes national security needs, may help TRMC streamline its certification process for the corridors, Rumford said.

No ‘safety shortcuts’

Rumford said the regulatory workarounds do not involve “safety shortcuts,” but instead focus on reducing the number of consecutive public notifications the Pentagon is required to make before establishing the new flight corridors.

The department is in the midst of a National Environmental Policy Act application process that requires environmental impact reviews when the government proposes projects it considers to have a “major federal impact.”

The time it takes to conduct these reviews varies based on the complexity of a project, and Rumford noted that the corridor expansion is fairly complicated. Rather than applying to build a facility at a fixed site, the proposal involves multiple launch and landing sites.

As part of that process, the government is required to make public notifications of its plans. To streamline those notifications, the Pentagon is looking at options to issue them concurrently rather than one at a time.

Among the department’s safety precautions is a requirement that no system will fly on an overland range until it has been tested over water and has proven ready for the later phases of flight test. Rumford noted that most of the hypersonic testing at these new U.S. corridors will occur over federal land and above commercial airspace.

The Pentagon is also working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Transportation, Department of the Interior and other stakeholders to coordinate safety concerns and make sure they — and the broader public — understand the national security mission that’s driving the need for the flight corridors.

“We absolutely want to make sure that the American public understands that we’re executing this safely and that we’re doing this because there’s a national security reason for us to do this test,” Rumford said. “We are not exploring this out of curiosity. We’re exploring this because there’s a national need to be able to do this.”

Cost containment

Funding is another factor in how soon the Pentagon can expand its hypersonic testing footprint — and much of the financial discussion is tied up in behind-the-scenes budget planning processes.

TRMC declined to provide details on funding estimates for the corridors, but Rumford offered some insight into how his office is looking to contain the cost of the project, which he said is largely spread across three categories: flight testing, building support infrastructure and buying the instrumentation needed to conduct a test and collect data about a system’s performance.

The Pentagon has initiatives that Rumford thinks could bring down costs in each of these areas. For the last few years, DOD has been working to reduce the cost of flight tests by investing in reusable testbeds through programs like the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed and the Defense Innovation Unit’s Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing effort.

To limit its support infrastructure and instrumentation costs, the department is looking to make much of those capabilities mobile — think mobile launch pads, launchers and telemetry — which is cheaper and also gives TRMC more flexibility.

One program applying this approach, SkyRange, is converting Global Hawk drones into what’s essentially a flying test range. By equipping the uncrewed aircraft with sensors and instrumentation, TRMC can use them to support flight tests.

Another effort, dubbed Modular Open Systems Architecture Instrumentation Containers, is focused on making ground-based test support systems mobile, allowing TRMC to essentially roll of the instrumentation onto ships, rail cars and trucks and transport them to testing sites.

“So, because our instrumentation solution is intended to be mobile, we think that we can keep the corridor cost at a minimum,” Rumford said.

Through a nearly $25 million contract from the Missile Defense Agency the company will modify one of its launch platforms, dubbed the Spirit of Mojave, to fly from any airport that can support an aircraft the size of a 747 jetliner.

Stratolaunch, which announced the award Jan. 9, hopes to have the modifications complete to support testing by the fourth quarter of this year. CEO Zachary Krevor told Defense News the timing of the award comes as the firm is seeing growing demand for its hypersonic test vehicle, Talon-A.

“Our company’s goal is to get to one flight test a month this calendar year and then next year start to beat that and really address that Pentagon demand,” he said.

DoD is working to increase its testing rigor, setting a goal in 2022 to eventually conduct one hypersonic test flight each week. Talon-A could provide the department with a reusable, more affordable platform to test and validate high-speed components, subsystems and other technologies.

Stratolaunch has two carrier aircraft for taking Talon-A to its intended launch altitude: Spirit of Mojave, a Boeing-made 747-400 aircraft; and Roc, a much larger, two-fuselage aircraft with a 385-foot wingspan. The firm’s vision is to use both aircraft for tests, but for now Roc is the only one equipped with the requisite release system for Talon-A.

The MDA contract will allow Stratolaunch to install its release mechanism on Spirit of Mojave and will also support initial flight testing. Along with adding the release system, the company will upgrade the aircraft’s electrical interfaces and ensure onboard displays are configured for Talon-A.

Having two test platforms equipped to fly Talon-A gives Stratolaunch flexibility to support multiple DOD customers whose testing needs extend beyond the West Coast, which is where Roc has conducted Talon-A testing to date. For MDA — which is developing satellites that can track advanced missile threats through programs like the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor experimentation effort — that flexibility means it can test and calibrate the performance of its sensors to detect missiles launched from different locations around the world.

Stratolaunch is also on contract to support the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed, a program led by the Pentagon’s Test Research Management Center and the Naval Surface Warfare Center. As part of the deal, the company will conduct five MACH-TB flight tests.

Talon-A launched for the first time in March 2024, reaching near-hypersonic speeds. The vehicle was slated for a second test flight last year — with a goal of meeting or surpassing Mach 5 — but Krevor did not confirm whether that test had occurred.

The five-year contract is part of the second phase of the Pentagon’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed program, or MACH-TB. The first phase of the program, led by Leidos, focused on designing and demonstrating a testbed. Through MACH-TB 2.0, the Pentagon wants to significantly increase the number of hypersonic test flights.

“MACH-TB 2.0 will provide an affordable bridge between hypersonic ground tests and system level flight tests. This will reduce overall hypersonic development risks and time and provide rapid transition of innovative hypersonic technologies to the warfighter,” Kratos said in a Jan. 6 statement.

The award, which is largest-ever for the company, follows major flight successes for two Kratos hypersonic systems. Its Erinyes vehicle flew in June as part of a Missile Defense Agency test, reaching hypersonic speeds on its first flight. The firm developed the vehicle in three years for under $15 million and is pitching the system as an affordable option for DOD’s hypersonic testing needs.

In October, the company’s Zeus solid rocket motors flew for the first time, paving the way for a potential production program in the first quarter of this year.

Kratos was a subcontractor for MACH-TB 1.0, which supported more than 25 test flights. For the program’s next phase, the firm will play a prime integration role, leading a team of contractors that includes Leidos, Rocket Lab and Purdue University.

Hypersonic systems can fly and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5. In recent years, the U.S. has made a push toward testing and fielding hypersonic weapons as China and Russia demonstrate progress on the technology. In November, Russia fired a hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile in Ukraine.

MACH-TB was created in 2022 as part of that push, with a goal of helping improve the Defense Department’s lagging hypersonic test infrastructure, which has slowed U.S. hypersonic weapons development. The effort is led by the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center and the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Crane Division.

The program’s flying testbed is designed to validate hypersonic subsystems, advanced materials and other technologies as a system is being developed. Prior to the effort, programs rarely had opportunities to test individual systems and components in a hypersonic flight environment before a full-up flight test.

The glide body was developed jointly between the two services. The Army plans to integrate its version of the system, the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, into a mobile ground platform. The Navy will integrate its version, dubbed Conventional Prompt Strike, into a ship-launched capability.

“This test builds on several flight tests in which the Common Hypersonic Glide Body achieved hypersonic speed at target distances and demonstrates that we can put this capability in the hands of the warfighter,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in a Pentagon statement.

The launch took place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Defense Department did not offer further details about the event, which represents the glide body’s second successful all-up round test this year.

Hypersonic systems can fly and maneuver at five times the speed of sound — and the Pentagon has been trying to field them for decades. The Army had planned to make a LRHW fielding decision by the end of fiscal 2023, but delayed that milestone after several aborted tests last year. The service now plans to make a fielding decision next year.

Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition executive, told reporters this earlier this year that the all-up round test is critical to making sure the system is “safe and effective” and ready to field.

The Navy, meanwhile, plans to start fielding Conventional Prompt Strike on its Zumwalt-class destroyer in FY25 and its Virginia-class submarine in FY29.

Leidos is the prime contractor for the Common Hypersonic Glide Body, and Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor for both LRHW and the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike program.

The partnership — dubbed the Hypersonic Flight Test and Experimentation project, or HyFliTE — will include up to six trilateral flight test campaigns set to occur by 2028. The intent is to increase the hypersonic testing cadence and leverage the three nations’ combined funding, facilities and experience.

“We are increasing our collective ability to develop and deliver offensive and defensive hypersonic technologies through a robust series of trilateral tests and experiments that will accelerate the development of hypersonic concepts and critical enabling technologies,” Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said in a statement.

The agreement falls within the second pillar of the trilateral defense pact known as AUKUS, which is focused on technology sharing and advanced capability development. Last year, the Pentagon announced a slew of joint exercises and prize challenges to boost collaboration in areas like autonomy and electronic warfare.

The announcement doesn’t offer details on the upcoming test campaigns, but notes that those efforts will draw from a funding pool of $252 million.

HyFliTE will build on past test efforts between the U.S. and Australia, who have been conducting hypersonic research together for more than 15 years. In 2017, they culminated a secretive decade-long effort known as the Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation, or HiFiRE. Through the program, they explored future high-speed weapons and subsystem designs and conducted a series of flight tests.

In 2020, the two nations launched a follow-on effort called the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment, or SCIFiRE. The program aimed to develop a Mach 5 precision strike missile powered by an air-breathing scramjet engine that would be carried by a tactical fighter aircraft. That work has fed into the U.S. Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program.