Innovations & technologies

Is autonomy the next frontier for hypersonic vehicles?

On April 25, Sandia National Laboratories announced a proposal to add autonomous navigation to hypersonic vehicles.

Hypersonics themselves are hardly new technology. At White Sands in 1949, the United States pushed a modified V-2 rocket to a speed of 5,150 miles per hour, making it likely the first human-produced object to reach hypersonic speed, though the rocket was destroyed in the testing. By 1981, Albuquerque’s Sandia Labs had conducted the “Sandia Winged Energetic Reentry Vehicle Experiment,” which yielded information about hypersonic vehicles if not useful prototypes. Sandia also worked on the Strategic Target System program from 1985 into the 1990s, which explored guidance systems at hypersonic speeds, and has worked on other hypersonic projects in the years since.

The latest initiative, then, is less about the physics of hypersonic flight, and more about the software guiding flight decisions at hypersonic speeds.

“At extreme speeds, the flight is incredibly challenging to plan for and program,” said Alex Roesler, a senior manager at Sandia who leads the coalition. Sandia Labs is looking to AI as a way around the difficulty of planning hypersonic flight in advance of launch.