Here is Mark Lewis giving an NDIA talk on Hypersonics 101, mentioning his expectations on unit cost. Watch the whole thing because it is interesting throughout, but I’ll just pick up on some acquisition pieces.
There is a school of thought that says hypersonics will always be more complicated and more expensive than their lower speed counterparts. I don’t believe that’s true. Think about a scramjet engine. It is a very simple configuration. It is an open duct channel, it’s a hole in the front, it’s a tube, it’s got injectors for fuel, and it’s got a nozzle. Manufacturing can be a little bit complicated, the materials that it’s made out of can be complicated. They have to be high temperature. But intrinsically, there isn’t something that should be an order of magnitude more difficult about a hypersonic weapon as compared to a lower speed system.
There is a typical mantra that hypersonic weapons are going to be $50 million, $100 million. I like to point out that somehow the Russians and Chinese have figured out how to do this at a moderate cost. One of the reasons that I’m a big fan of the everything solutions is I think that you can get those costs way down they’re probably going to be more expensive than their lower speed counterpart but maybe a factor of two not an order of magnitude.
In FY 2022, DoD procured 550 JASSMs (joint air to surface standoff missile, AGM-158) for $748 million, or $1.359 million per unit. DoD also bought 48 AGM-158C LRASMs (long range anti-ship missile) for $3.358 million per unit.
So we’re talking about $2 million to $5 million for the future cost of a hypersonic scram-jet missile in production, based on Mark Lewis’ expectations of the achievable.
One aspect of getting the design right and production costs down seems to be vertical integration. Here is Lewis answering a question from the audience:
If I’m an aircraft subcontractor, what kinds of subsystems go into these hypersonic systems? All right, phenomenal question. Lots of subsystems like any vehicle. It’s got propulsion, it’s got structures, it’s got control, you need fuel management, all the classic systems of any aircraft. What’s especially complicated, the point that I made earlier, is how incredibly integrated all these components are. Anything I do to the engine is going to affect the aerodynamics. The structure is going to be driven by the heating requirements. The requirements to survive the heat in a way that’s really far more challenging than any other aerospace system.
Prime defense contractors, of course, have been outsourcing more and more of their effort to subcontractors. Whereas subcontracting was 30 to 50 percent in the 1950s and 60s, now it is closer to 70 percent or more. The primes often act as integrators. This may not be the ideal business model for successful hypersonic development and production.
By contrast, SpaceX has a vertically integrated business model where they bring many tasks in-house. For the turbine based combined cycle engine being built by Hermeus for their reuseable hypersonic aircraft, one of their top principles is vertical integration. On such a vehicle, its hard to say where the airframe stops and engine begins.
OK, last quote from Mark Lewis on deficiencies in United States hypersonic wind tunnel infrastructure and dedication to testing:
By any metric that I can come up with, China has exceeded our capabilities… They’ve invested in their universities, they’ve invested into infrastructure, they have built wind tunnels, they have invested into their government-industry partnerships, they have been flying vehicles test vehicles at a phenomenal rate — at almost 10 times the rate at which we’ve been flying — and as a result their success rate has been much higher than ours.
If I look at our flight test rates, if I’m generous, I’d say we have about a 50 percent success rate of our experimental vehicles. The Chinese are in excess of about 80 percent. So really quite remarkable. More importantly, they’ve act actually gone to deployed systems in 2019.
… As the Chinese were building new wind tunnels, we were shutting wind tunnels down. We need more wind tunnels. We are climbing all over each other right now in the United States trying to get wind tunnel time. You saw that list of 70 [DoD hypersonic] programs, many of them depend on wind tunnels.
… So our facilities are oversubscribed. I’ll also say we have a problem with flight test. We’ve made it too difficult to do flight testing. I showed you a picture of the X-15 rocket plane from the 1960s, that thing flew 199 times, it’s three different vehicles, but they flew 199 times throughout the 1960s. That was once every 18 days. We don’t operate that way, and we really need to be moving into that direction.
The United States needs to move in that direction not just in hypersonics, but in all areas of systems development. There is a systematic problem with the acquisition process that has stifled austere prototyping, rapid testing, and incremental decision-making based on individual responsibility rather than consensus-based staff planning.
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