WASHINGTON — Boeing has won a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract to perform crucial testing for the research agency’s Glide Breaker hypersonic interceptor concept, the company announced today.
Glide Breaker looks to develop key enabling technologies and a prototype kinetic kill vehicle that would slam into incoming hypersonic vehicles during their glide phase, before they begin rapid maneuvers and become more difficult to target. DARPA’s program manager, Maj. Nathan Greiner, told Breaking Defense last November that such interceptors are aimed at providing regional missile defenses in areas where the US troops and assets are forward deployed — such as the Indo-Pacific theater, the focus of most of America’s hypersonic development.