Western countries have trailed behind Russia and China in developing hypersonic weapons, expensive and difficult-to-produce systems able to travel upwards of five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5.<\/p>\n
The missiles, which can be launched from the ground, air or sea, are able to maneuver mid-flight, making them extremely hard to detect, track or intercept.<\/p>\n
The U.S. and U.K. do not yet have operational hypersonic weapons, although several U.S. programs have been working towards hypersonic boost-glide systems and cruise missiles.<\/p>\n
“The U.S., Russia, and China are in an arms race over hypersonics, and nobody wants to drop out,” journalist and technology expert David Hambling told\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>.<\/p>\n What To Know<\/strong><\/p>\n U.S. aerospace company, Rocket Lab,\u00a0said in a statement on Monday<\/a>\u00a0that its launch vehicle, the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron or HASTE, had been picked for hypersonic test launches in programs run by the U.S. and the U.K.<\/p>\n This announcement is more about the testing of new technology and support for hypersonic programs rather than the weapons development side, Hambling said.<\/p>\n It will “enable the U.S. to launch hypersonic glide vehicles and other payloads and see whether they fly as intended,” Hambling told\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>.<\/p>\n A hypersonic glide vehicle is a warhead or missile launched into space by a rocket and then gliding through the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.<\/p>\n “This is part of a much longer-term effort to build a hypersonics technology base, much less glamorous than a shiny new missile but more strategically important,” Hambling said.<\/p>\n The U.S. Air Force selected the California-headquartered company for what is known as an “indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity” (IDIQ) contract worth $46 billion, Rocket Lab said. This type of contract is used when the exact timing, delivery and costs aren’t clear upfront.<\/p>\n The company said the British Defense Ministry had picked Rocket Lab for its own Hypersonic Technologies & Capability Development Framework, worth roughly $1.3 billion, to quickly develop hypersonic capabilities for the U.K.<\/p>\n Rocket Lab will now be able to bid on providing services, testing and technology for London’s hypersonic programs, the company said.<\/p>\n The HASTE launch vehicle “can deploy technologies at speeds of more than 7.5km per second to test air-breathing, glide, and ballistic payloads, as well as technologies to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere from space,” the company added.<\/p>\n The British government said earlier this month that scientists had completed testing on an air-breathing engine for an in-development “cutting-edge” hypersonic cruise missile. The scientists carried out more than 200 tests at various hypersonic speeds at the\u00a0NASA<\/a>\u00a0Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, the defense ministry said.<\/p>\n The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, a scientific research arm of the military, was involved in the “extensive” tests over six weeks, London said.<\/p>\n Britain’s Defense Secretary John Healey said these tests were a “milestone moment on hypersonics research,” adding it was a “crucial area where we are working in lockstep with the United States.”<\/p>\n The U.K. had said in November that it was accelerating “crucial” hypersonic missile development as part of AUKUS, the trilateral security agreement between the U.S., U.K. and Australia.<\/p>\n The U.S. Air Force in 2023 scrapped its hypersonic Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), and earlier this month, the U.S. Navy stopped its plans for the Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (HALO) missile, an air-launched and air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/russian-hypersonic-missile.jpg\")