The Pentagon is weighing options to establish new flight corridors to test hypersonic weapons over the U.S. and Australia — and it’s eyeing the Trump administration’s urgent call for a homeland missile shield as a mechanism to speed up the approval process.
The Defense Department already leverages several over-sea test ranges to validate that the hypersonic vehicles it’s developing — which are designed to travel and maneuver at speeds above Mach 5 — can hit their targets. But as programs transition to later test phases, overland ranges are better suited to evaluate how a system performs under more stressing conditions, like a faulty navigation system or an enemy decoy, which an adversary may use to distract from a real target.
For the last few years, the Pentagon has been considering locations for overland sites, in part a response to a requirement in the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that called for DOD officials to study options for at least two more corridors.
The initial study phase identified more than 1,600 possible locations around the world, according to George Rumford, director of DOD’s Test Resource Management Center, or TRMC. From that pool, TRMC has narrowed its list to three, Rumford told Defense News in an interview. One of those locations is in Australia and relies on a partnership with the country through the trilateral defense pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. known as AUKUS. The other two are in the United States: one over Alaska and the other at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
All three sites require lengthy approval and planning processes as well as funding to build new infrastructure and conduct the flight tests. The Pentagon in November announced it will partner with Australia and the U.K. through AUKUS to conduct up to six trilateral flight campaigns by 2028. Rumford said there are ongoing engineering and planning meetings that will determine a schedule for initial testing. The hope is that funding will be available later this year, according to Rumford.
For the domestic sites, TRMC is in the thick of the research and approval phases. If the regulatory approval process moves at a standard pace, the department could start flying in these corridors by 2029. The Pentagon is weighing options for shortening that process, using two of President Donald Trump’s executive orders as justification.
Rumford declined to predict how much time the department thinks it could shave off that timeline.
“It could be a significant acceleration,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”
Reducing ‘red tape’
Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order directing the Pentagon to create an “Iron Dome for America” has a direct link to the hypersonic test corridor expansion, Rumford said. The project, which the administration has since renamed “Golden Dome for America,” aims to build an advanced, multilayered missile defense architecture comprised of space-based interceptors and sensors that can track ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
Since the order’s release, the Pentagon has moved quickly to convene teams to evaluate existing contributions and lay out what new systems the department would need to meet the intent of the president’s direction. The Missile Defense Agency and the Space Development Agency have reached out to industry for input.
In order to piece together an advanced missile defense architecture, Rumford said, the department will need to update its ranges and supporting infrastructure to validate those capabilities. The overland corridors could support that effort — particularly at White Sands, where much of the Golden Dome testing will likely occur.
“We’re going to be making significant modernization upgrades at White Sands to realize an Iron Dome Capability at an accelerated pace, as directed by that executive order,” he said.
The other order he referenced calls for establishing a National Energy Dominance Council to improve permitting processes and “cut red tape.” This directive, which emphasizes national security needs, may help TRMC streamline its certification process for the corridors, Rumford said.
No ‘safety shortcuts’
Rumford said the regulatory workarounds do not involve “safety shortcuts,” but instead focus on reducing the number of consecutive public notifications the Pentagon is required to make before establishing the new flight corridors.
The department is in the midst of a National Environmental Policy Act application process that requires environmental impact reviews when the government proposes projects it considers to have a “major federal impact.”
The time it takes to conduct these reviews varies based on the complexity of a project, and Rumford noted that the corridor expansion is fairly complicated. Rather than applying to build a facility at a fixed site, the proposal involves multiple launch and landing sites.
As part of that process, the government is required to make public notifications of its plans. To streamline those notifications, the Pentagon is looking at options to issue them concurrently rather than one at a time.
Among the department’s safety precautions is a requirement that no system will fly on an overland range until it has been tested over water and has proven ready for the later phases of flight test. Rumford noted that most of the hypersonic testing at these new U.S. corridors will occur over federal land and above commercial airspace.
The Pentagon is also working closely with the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Transportation, Department of the Interior and other stakeholders to coordinate safety concerns and make sure they — and the broader public — understand the national security mission that’s driving the need for the flight corridors.
“We absolutely want to make sure that the American public understands that we’re executing this safely and that we’re doing this because there’s a national security reason for us to do this test,” Rumford said. “We are not exploring this out of curiosity. We’re exploring this because there’s a national need to be able to do this.”
Cost containment
Funding is another factor in how soon the Pentagon can expand its hypersonic testing footprint — and much of the financial discussion is tied up in behind-the-scenes budget planning processes.
TRMC declined to provide details on funding estimates for the corridors, but Rumford offered some insight into how his office is looking to contain the cost of the project, which he said is largely spread across three categories: flight testing, building support infrastructure and buying the instrumentation needed to conduct a test and collect data about a system’s performance.
The Pentagon has initiatives that Rumford thinks could bring down costs in each of these areas. For the last few years, DOD has been working to reduce the cost of flight tests by investing in reusable testbeds through programs like the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed and the Defense Innovation Unit’s Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing effort.
To limit its support infrastructure and instrumentation costs, the department is looking to make much of those capabilities mobile — think mobile launch pads, launchers and telemetry — which is cheaper and also gives TRMC more flexibility.
One program applying this approach, SkyRange, is converting Global Hawk drones into what’s essentially a flying test range. By equipping the uncrewed aircraft with sensors and instrumentation, TRMC can use them to support flight tests.
Another effort, dubbed Modular Open Systems Architecture Instrumentation Containers, is focused on making ground-based test support systems mobile, allowing TRMC to essentially roll of the instrumentation onto ships, rail cars and trucks and transport them to testing sites.
“So, because our instrumentation solution is intended to be mobile, we think that we can keep the corridor cost at a minimum,” Rumford said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
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