HYPERSONIC WEAPONSHelping the U.S. Fast-track Hypersonic Conventional Weapons
Hypersonic weapons have been a top priority for modernizing the armed forces, with ultrafast, long-range and maneuverable munitions being touted as a revolutionary advance in modern warfare. The U.S. has fast-tracked their development and announced plans to field the first conventional hypersonic missile battery this year. Sandia National Lab is helping the U.S. achieve this goal.
Hypersonic weapons have been a top priority for modernizing the armed forces, with ultrafast, long-range and maneuverable munitions being touted as a revolutionary advance in modern warfare. The U.S. has fast-tracked their development and announced plans to field the first conventional hypersonic missile battery this year. To meet this deadline, some contributing organizations have partnered in unprecedented ways.
Scott Nance, a manager at Sandia National Laboratories, is at the forefront of one such collaboration. He and his team piloted a new way to transfer Sandia’s technical designs to defense contractors for the common hypersonic glide body, which detaches from a rocket and soars at speeds above Mach 5.
The program is now earning recognition and could change how Sandia partners with industry in the future.
“Sandia National Labs’ successful teaming with the Army, Navy and industry has been crucial to keeping the services on the path to our nation’s first operational hypersonic capability,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch Jr., Director, Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.
This year, the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer awarded Sandia a national Interagency Partnership Award for its successful transition of hypersonic technology to industry partners.
The plan, Nance said, initially alarmed some people when he proposed it.
“We got a lot of wide eyes to: ‘Can we do this?’” Nance said.
New Program Answers Call of a Tight Timeline
Nance manages a team of experts in transferring technical designs from Sandia to industry. He said that for similar projects, moving plans out of the lab and into manufacturing is a slow and meticulous process of documentation, training and testing, especially for projects where the designs are very complicated and margins for error are slim.
“We were given three years to take our design, redesign it to meet the Department of Defense’s weapon system requirements, make it more producible, get it into production and get it fielded,” Nance said. “It’s a time scale that was very hard to meet.”
The only way to get the job done, Nance thought, was to bring in outsiders, lots of them, which seemed to break every rule of a national security lab.
