SECURE TRANSPORTATIONNext-Level Test for Secure Transportation Vehicle
A semitrailer loaded with mock nuclear weapons slammed into a barrier. The tests are designed to demonstrate that, if a trailer were ever involved in an accident on a public road, the cargo inside would remain secure and pose no danger to nearby communities.
With rockets propelling it down the sled track at Sandia National Laboratories, a semitrailer loaded with mock nuclear weapons slammed into a barrier. It took mere moments to complete the second and final full-scale crash test of the Mobile Guardian Transporter, a next-generation system that will carry nuclear weapons and other sensitive materials for the Department of Energy’s Office of Secure Transportation.
The tests are designed to demonstrate that, if a trailer were ever involved in an accident on a public road, the cargo inside would remain secure and pose no danger to nearby communities, a key tenet of the Office of Secure Transportation’s mission and vision.
“This was our last opportunity to understand how the trailer performs in a crash,” said Jason Berger, the program’s crash test lead for the second test asset. “The results will help qualify the design, a critical step before production can begin.”
Sandia conducted a side-impact crash that evaluated the first Mobile Guardian Transporter test asset in 2020. The second test completes the full-scale crash series and gives engineers a more complete picture of how the trailer performs in severe accidents.
“The second prototype crash test is a critical step in showing that the trailer and its cargo do not pose a hazard to the public,” Berger said.
“We are extremely proud of the commitment and dedication of teams across Sandia and our external partners, who applied their knowledge to make this a successful test,” said Kelly Neely, the senior manager overseeing the Mobile Guardian Transporter program. “It’s taken focus, determination and technical expertise to get us to this point.”
Test Planning and Execution
While the test itself lasted only a few moments, planning and preparation took about a year and a half. For a test of this scope, that’s not very long.
“This was a very heavily instrumented test and the overall scope of it was very large,” said James Dykes, the test director. “These kinds of large-scale, high-consequence tests don’t come along very often because of the complexity. It was the largest data collection effort in the history of Sandia’s rocket sled track facility.”
A test with 100 channels of data collection and a few cameras would already be considered complex. In this test, the trailer was equipped with nearly 500 data channels for acceleration, strain, force and temperature, plus about three dozen cameras, when rockets propelled it down Sandia’s sled track in the fall of 2025.
