Hypersonics

DARPA bets big on hypersonic missile interceptors

At its simplest, missile defense is the art of shooting a bullet with another bullet.

There is no part of this that is easy, and with the modern advent of hypersonic missiles, both the speeds and the trajectories at which missile interception has to take place to be successful, the already hard problem of missile defense is more daunting than ever. DARPA, the Pentagon’s home of blue-sky projects to turn hard problems into solved problems, is working on creating an interceptor of hypersonic vehicles.

The program is called “Glide Breaker.”

DARPA’s public-facing summary of the Glide Breaker program consists of a single sentence: “The Glide Breaker program began in 2018 to develop and demonstrate technologies to enable defense against hypersonic systems.”

Getting an interceptor to speed to hit a hypersonic weapon will take powerful engines, and on Feb. 10, Aerojet Rocketdyne announced that it had been selected by DARPA to develop the propulsion system for a Glide Breaker interceptor. The contractor is worth up to $19.6 million.