An artist’s rendering of Kratos’s Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle. (Kratos image)
WASHINGTON — Defense technology firm Kratos has inked a deal worth up to $1.45 billion with the Pentagon to help develop a low-cost testbed for hypersonic technologies, the company announced today.
The award, issued as an other transaction authority agreement under the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program, has a performance period of five years if all options are exercised. The team led by Kratos includes several players such as Leidos, Rocket Lab and others.
“Kratos is honored to receive the largest contract award in our company’s history, a testament of the value Kratos’ employees and team bring both to our Company and United States National Security,” Kratos CEO Eric DeMarco said in the release.
“This programmatic milestone underscores our unwavering commitment to making upfront investments for rapidly developing, and being first to market with affordable, mission-critical solutions that meet the evolving needs of the warfighter,” he added.
The MACH-TB program, which began as a US Navy effort, includes multiple “Task Areas,” with Kratos’s award falling under Task Area 1. For its part, Kratos will be tasked with “systems engineering, integration, and testing (SEIT), to include integrated subscale, full-scale, and air launch services to address the need to affordably increase hypersonic flight test cadence,” according to the company’s release. Awards and missions for the other task areas were not immediately clear.
Kratos last year revealed that its Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle successfully flew for a Missile Defense Agency experiment. A company spokesperson told Breaking Defense today that the Erinyes “is one of the hypersonic frontends” planned to fly under the MACH-TB effort. However, the spokesperson added that “[t]here will be others as well.”
Officials have long raised concerns that hypersonic efforts are stymied by limited testing infrastructure. As the MACH-TB program’s name suggests, the effort aims to provide a wide array of DoD users increased hypersonic testing capacity. Flying testbeds like one envisioned for the MACH-TB effort typically allow users to evaluate the performance of key subsystems under relevant conditions — meaning speeds greater than Mach 5 in the case of hypersonics.
The Pentagon is racing to catch up with adversaries Russia and China that have already fielded hypersonic weapons. A recent successful test for a joint Army-Navy missile may mean that goal is closer at hand, as the Air Force moves forward with its own fast-flying projects.
