T
he Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Falcon program has progressed from wind tunnel testing and is gearing up for flight testing, says Stephen Welby, director of the agency’s Tactical Technology Office. Speaking at the Precision Strike Association’s winter meeting on Jan. 23, he said the program, which is maturing hypersonic technologies, would conduct flight experiments with Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2. This design features an airframe with a modified air shell to assess guidance and control subsystems at speeds up to Mach 20. HTV-2 will be invaluable in enabling researchers to understand the ability of a high-speed vehicle to withstand the stresses placed on the airframe and its protective thermal shell when it flies for an extensive time in the atmosphere, Welby said.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.