US Plans Space-Based Surveillance Network To Monitor Hypersonic Weapon Threats

A few days back, China test-fired a hypersonic weapon that could deliver ballistic missiles at speeds six times faster than that of sound and destroy targets anywhere around the globe.

The experimental weapon, named Starry Sky, detached from a rocket in the atmosphere and flew at a top speed of 4,500 mph, some 100,000 feet above the ground. It demonstrated a range of maneuvers, trajectory changes mid-air and landed just where the country wanted.

As such systems — which are not just being developed by China but Russia too — can blast right past modern-day anti-missile systems, rendering defenses of the United States’ ineffective, the Pentagon has started exploring options to thwart the threat of hypersonics.

At the Space & Missile Defense Symposium on Wednesday, Michael Griffin, the under secretary of defense for Research and Engineering, stated the country needs to establish a layer of sophisticated sensors in space to monitor and track the launch of hypersonic weapons anywhere across the globe.

“Our response has to be a proliferated space sensor layer, possibly based off commercial space developments,” Griffin told SpaceNews.

By space sensor, the under secretary, who also oversees the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), meant the establishment of a massive constellation of satellites for space-based surveillance around the globe.

The U.S. already has sophisticated satellites that serve as early warning systems for ballistic missile launches, but the trajectory and maneuvering capabilities of hypersonic weapons demand a bigger, more capable network of satellites.

“Hypersonic vehicles are hard to see from high orbit [where current satellites operate] because they are not as bright,” Griffin added. “They’re a factor of 10 or more dimmer than strategic missiles. So we have to get closer to see them and track them.”

There is also an option to establish radars in different parts of the world, but that comes at an extremely high cost and is not feasible enough to serve as a persistent, not to mention reliable, surveillance option.

“This is not a mission that can be done realistically from the ground or the oceans. You would need a lot of radars that are very expensive and themselves become targets,” he said. “That’s not an acceptable defensive posture. The only way to see these things coming is from space.”

Major defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, have already started working on their respective concepts for a layer of space sensors. They have been awarded millions of dollars’ worth of contracts by the MDA and will be presenting the designs later this month. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been maturing hypersonic technologies for years.

That said, it is worth noting the project is still at a nascent stage and will require approval from the White House and Congress before being implemented. Also, there is no word on the technical details of the surveillance system such as the number of satellites in the constellation or their targeted altitude of operation.

Once the detection and tracking network is up and running, the Pentagon could go into the next phase defense and develop systems to shoot down such weapons. This could be done by more sophisticated anti-missile systems, ground or air-based laser or kinetic weapons, or maybe space-based interceptors missiles.