March 11, 2022 | International, Aerospace
August 6, 2019 | International, Land
For defense industry giants, there’s plenty of room in the hypersonic arena
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — Defense industry giants see the hypersonic missile market as large enough to be fruitful for all the major players.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman are engaged at all levels of offensive and defensive hypersonic missile capabilities as prime contractors on a variety of programs within the military services, but they are also partnering with each other.
The U.S. military has dramatically ramped up efforts to build its hypersonic missile capability in a race with Russia and China.
During Northrop Grumman's second quarter earnings call for fiscal 2019, President and CEO Kathy Warden described the hypersonic arena as having “plenty of market opportunity for all three of us.” The company recently acquired Orbital ATK, which has expanded Northrop's portfolio in hypersonics and other missile types, from propulsion and guidance systems to complete weapons.
Warden said Northrop would continue to be a key supplier to Raytheon and Lockheed, for which it has done in the “more traditional” cruise missile area. And Northrop will continue to partner on hypersonic weapons, she added.
Defense firms see dollar signs in hypersonics development, well in advance of potentially lucrative production contracts. Lockheed Martin's Marillyn Hewson reported during the company's second quarter earnings call for FY19 that recent contract awards from the U.S. military amounted to more than $3.5 billion.
Hewson highlighted some of Lockheed's contract wins — specifically $928 million for the Air Force's Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon program and $800 million for the Navy's conventional prompt strike hypersonic effort. The Air Force program was awarded in 2018.
In April, Lockheed reported that previous awards in hypersonic weapons — including a tactical boost-glide contract and the Air Force's Air-Launched Rapid Response program — had a cumulative value of $2.5 billion. The ARRW program experienced a successful captive-carry flight test on a B-52 Stratofortress bomber, Hewson said.
Fast forward to July: Lockheed is now looking at a cumulative value in contract awards of $3.5 billion.
The new contracts include selection as prime contractor for the long-range hypersonic weapon system integration effort in support of the Army Hypersonics Project Office. And Lockheed won another contract as part of a team led by Dynetics to build a common hypersonic glide body prototype for the Army.
“We anticipate that both of these opportunities will be negotiated in the next few months,” Hewson noted.
Most of the hypersonic awards Lockheed received “were not in our plan,” Ken Possenriede, the firm's chief financial officer, said during the earnings call.
“Just to give you a little color, we're going to probably book about $600 million of sales in hypersonics this year. And then the rest of that $3.5 billion would go into the next two years,” he added.
Raytheon continues to invest in hypersonics as well as counter-hypersonic efforts, the company's chairman and CEO, Thomas Kennedy, said during its second quarter earnings call for FY19.
“We're actively working multiple hypersonics and counter-hypersonics programs. For example, we have the [Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept] HAWC system; the tactical boost glide; and we're also participating in the Navy's conventional prompt strike and also the Army's long-range hypersonic weapons program, and also some other classified hypersonic and also counter-hypersonic programs,” Kennedy said. “So it is becoming a big part of our portfolio moving forward.”
Kennedy noted the HAWC program successfully completed some testing in a NASA high-temperature tunnel.
Raytheon has also signed an agreement with Northrop to develop and produce next-generation scramjet combustors to help power its air-breathing hypersonic weapons.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Raytheon a contract in February to work on ground-launched hypersonic boost glide weapons.
According to Kennedy, Raytheon believes the market for counter-hypersonic technology is bigger than that of offensive hypersonic weapons.
There are also more opportunities to develop hypersonic capabilities within the company should the proposed merger with United Technologies Corp. move forward; Kennedy specifically cited efforts related to high-temperature engine materials and high-end sensors.
Raytheon expected revenue to amount to about $300 million this year in hypersonic-related work as well as a growing backlog over the next 12-18 months.
Northrop's Warden reaffirmed the company's commitment to uphold the partnerships with Lockheed and Raytheon established through Orbital ATK's business. “We got into agreements to support them on certain programs, and we are very committed to uphold those agreements and continue to support them with our best and brightest people and technology,” she said.
Looking forward, Warden said Northrop will consider whether to go after opportunities as the prime or continue partnerships “through the prime of Raytheon, Lockheed and perhaps others that might emerge in this space as well, or both, and offer capability to everyone who is choosing to pursue the marketplace.”
Northrop is “certainly not looking to take an aggressive stance in that marketplace, because ... it's a growing market and it's one that we feel is big enough for three parties to adequately play, and we want to make sure that our technology is getting into the hands of the war fighter and that we're giving them the best capabilities in a timely fashion,” she said, “and sometimes it makes sense for us to work with our competitors to do that.”
While the hypersonics marketplace is in its nascent stage, companies are projecting weapons will move out of development and into production relatively soon. Prototype launches are expected to begin next year on many of the Defense Department's programs. “Some of these programs actually have scope that is to prepare for production,” Lockheed's Possenriede said. But “that doesn't mean they're going to go into production.”
Still, if some of the hypersonic prototypes are deemed successful after first launch, “I think it will be the time for that customer set to sit with us, to see if it makes sense to go into production. And that's probably, say, two years out would be our best guess,” he added.
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June 21, 2018 | International, Security
Synthetic biology raises risk of new bioweapons, US report warns
Ian Sample Report warns that swift progress in our ability to manufacture viruses is making us vulnerable to biological attacks The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art. Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The three scenarios are picked out as threats of highest concern in a review of the field published on Tuesday by the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense. The report was commissioned to flag up ways in which the powerful technology might be abused, and to focus minds on how best to prepare. Michael Imperiale, chair of the report committee, and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, said the review used only unclassified information and so has no assessment of which groups, if any, might be pursuing novel biological weapons. “We can't say how likely any of these scenarios are,” he said. “But we can talk about how feasible they are.” In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, “enhances and expands” opportunities to create bioweapons. “As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinise where harms could come from,” said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More than 20 years ago, Eckard Wimmer, a geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York, highlighted the potential dangers of synthetic biology in dramatic style when he recreated poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horsepox virus. The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century. Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesised. “The technology to do this is available now,” said Imperiale. “It requires some expertise, but it's something that's relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.” Other fairly simple procedures can be used to tweak the genes of dangerous bacteria and make them resistant to antibiotics, so that people infected with them would be untreatable. A more exotic bioweapon might come in the form of a genetically-altered microbe that colonises the gut and churns out poisons. “While that is technically more difficult, it is a concern because it may not look like anything you normally watch out for in public health,” Imperiale said. The report calls on the US government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defences, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. One bioweapon that is not considered an immediate threat is a so-called gene drive that spreads through a population, rewriting human DNA as it goes. “It's important to recognise that it's easy to come up with a scary-sounding idea, but it's far more difficult to do something practical with it,” said Carr. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/19/urgent-need-to-prepare-for-manmade-virus-attacks-says-us-government-report
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January 17, 2023 | International, C4ISR
US military services exchanging cloud-computing wisdom amid JADC2 push
The Army is expected to spend some $290 million on cloud uptake in the coming months, amid a push service officials dubbed the âyear of action.â