RAYTHEON MISSILES & DEFENSE IS DEVELOPING THE NEXT-GENERATION HYPERSONIC MISSILE

In 2015, Raytheon Missiles & Defense and Northrop Grumman began building a prototype hypersonic cruise missile. Since then, there has been a lot of progress. Specifically, the missile's codevelopers successfully tested the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, or HAWC, for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Air Force in 2021 and 2022.

Now the industry team is no longer in the prototype phase. Using those early lessons, they're on schedule to deliver a separate system, the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, or HACM, to the Air Force. It will be the first such weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

The system will serve as a major milestone for scramjet technology – a method of sustaining extremely high speeds that has been in development for decades and is about to make its real-world debut. Scramjets compress the fast-moving air around them for use as fuel.

Raytheon Missiles & Defense designed HACM, which leverages Northrop Grumman scramjet propulsion, to travel more than five times the speed of sound and cover vast distances in minutes. The Air Force has said it plans for the missile to be operational by the fiscal year 2027.

The HACM contract comes after years of collaboration between Raytheon Technologies and Northrop Grumman on the development of hypersonic systems. That partnership started in 2013 and resulted in a 2019 teaming agreement to develop, produce and integrate Northrop Grumman’s scramjet engines and boosters onto Raytheon Technologies' air-breathing hypersonic weapons. The collaboration led to the development of HAWC.

The system was initially developed in the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment, or SCIFiRE, a cooperative program with Australia to design and test hypersonic missile prototypes.