Lockheed Martin secured a second multi-million-dollar contract to design a hypersonic weapon prototype for the U.S. Air Force.
The $480 million U.S. Air Force contract to design the weapon was announced and unveiled on Monday 13/8/2018.
The Pentagon’s second hypersonic contract comes as Us attempts to match China and Russia in hypersonic development.
The weapon development take place in Orlando, Florida, under Lockheed’s missiles and fire control unit and is anticipated to be completed by November 2021.
A hypersonic weapon is a missile that travels at Mach 5 or higher. This speed is at least five times faster than the speed of sound. This means a hypersonic weapon can travel about one mile per second.
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a state of the nation address earlier this year, boasted about nuclear and hypersonic weapons into the military arsenal which he taunted as invincible. U.S. intelligence reports indicate that out of the six-weapons president Putin debuted in March, two of them will be ready for war by 2020.
Presently, the Pentagon has close to a dozen programs tasked with developing and defending against the new breed of weapons. In April 2018, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $928 million contract to produce an undefined number of hypersonic conventional strike weapons for the U.S. military.
