Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins told CSIS that he is “absolutely” trying to speed development of the Glide Phase Interceptor, but that any changes must keep the program “viable.”
The Missile Defense Agency is gearing up for its first major test of new space-based sensors designed to track hypersonic missiles — while also studying how to beef up capacity to shoot them down in the gap between now and 2035 when the new Glide Phase Interceptor is expected to be fully functional, according to the agency’s director.
In addition, MDA is eagerly awaiting a new charter to bolster the agency’s decision-making powers expected sometime this summer, Lt. Gen. Heath Collins told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a wide-ranging interview today.
MDA is the Defense Department’s executive agent for hypersonic defense, and is racing to get ahead of the threats posed by Russian and Chinese development efforts.
Tracking hypersonic missiles from space is required to give more time for interceptors to lock on — with current ground- and ship-based radar only able to see them just as they swoop in for kill, Collins said.
“On the hypersonic side, the big challenge is as we’re looking up to the sky for [a] ballistic missile, that hypersonic missile has turned over and come back into the atmosphere, and we see it so late in the fight, going so fast, it’s a really really small shot window. And so instead of being down looking up to find a hypersonic, you really want to be high looking down to track hypersonics,” he said.
Further, Collins said that coupling space-sensors will not just make it easier to detect and track hypersonic missiles but also “to be able to discriminate them well so that when we go to intercept we increase our likelihood of hitting the lethal object, not some some type of decoy or whatnot.”
The agency launched two satellites carrying Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) medium-field-of-view cameras on Feb. 14, alongside Space Development Agency wide field-of-view infrared sensors carried by four Tranche 0 test satellites for that agency’s planned Tracking Layer constellation.
“We’re getting ready for our first hypersonic testbed calibration flight within a week, where we are going to take a hypersonic testbed target and launch that and for the first time, have both of those sensors tracking and looking to see how they’re doing and how they could potentially close the fire control loop,” Collins said.
“That’ll be the first, there’ll be another testbed launch later this year,” he added.
The tests “are key steps in our ability to prove out that we can close a hypersonic fire control loop from space,” Collins said. “And we are in lockstep working this with the Space Development Agency, and they are already planning HBTSS-like sensors in their future tranches of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture to start fill out that truly global hypersonic kill chain.”
