October 31, 2023
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The era of hypersonic weapons has arrived and with it has come an urgent push to upgrade space-based missile warning/missile tracking (MW/MT) infrastructure to meet the new threat.
“If you’re not frightened about these hypersonic glide vehicles, you should be,” said Col. Heather Bogstie, head of U.S. Space Systems Command’s Resilient Missile Warning Tracking Defense Acquisition Delta at the MilSat symposium in Mountain View, Calif.
Bogstie is overseeing the development of a constellation of medium Earth orbit satellites that will form a critical piece of an upgraded multi-orbit, persistent MW/MT architecture.
The days of only having to track the relatively predictable ballistic trajectories are gone. Hypersonics, and hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) in particular, add an element of unpredictability. With speeds of Mach 5 and above, an HGV is dimmer and can travel within the hard-to-track upper reaches of the atmosphere. Its trajectory can be adjusted along the flight path to shorten or extend its range, creating significant uncertainty about its intended target.
“You’re not able to track HGVs utilizing what is currently on orbit,” Tim Ryan, Senior Resident Fellow for Space Studies at the Mitchell Institute’s Spacepower Advantage Center of Excellence told Constellations. “The speeds are too fast. The profile is not able to be tracked and it can maneuver as it descends.”
Today’s Cold War-era Defense Support Program (DSP) and Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) continue to be effective and critical pieces of MW/MT, but the GEO-based systems were simply not designed for the growing threat environment.
According to the most recent Pentagon report on Chinese military and security developments, China deployed its first HGV-armed medium-range ballistic missile in 2020 and conducted a fractional orbital launch in 2021. In 2022, the PLA Navy launched a hypersonic missile designed to defeat aircraft carriers. Russia reportedly put a nuclear-capable Avangard HGV into service in 2019 and reports have suggested it has used hypersonic weapons against Ukraine. Meanwhile, Iran’s rapidly evolving missile capabilities continue to be a strategic concern for the United States and its allies.
…
Read the full article: https://www.kratosspace.com/constellations/articles/countering-hypersonics-from-space-multi-orbit-missile-warning-missile-tracking
