WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The end of American dominance in the class of hypersonic weaponry can be traced back to a steady decline in research and experimentation that began more than a decade ago, scholars and military insiders say, and the U.S. is only now beginning to fully reinvest in the cutting-edge work necessary to keep pace with its highly motivated, well-financed adversaries.
As Pentagon[1] officials warn that Russia[2] and China[3] are outpacing the U.S. in the race to build the world’s fastest planes and radar-defying missiles, American universities and laboratories say there has been a major challenge to the often tedious research work crucial to national security.
Purdue University hypersonics researchers said it was clear years ago that the U.S. was about to face a major global challenge and that their work would play a pivotal role in turning the tide.
“I think a lot of us saw that coming, I would say even five, 10 years ago,” said Joseph S. Jewell, an assistant professor at Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Mr. Jewell is one member of a team working on hypersonic technology, including experiments at the Indiana school’s Boeing/AFOSR Mach-6 Quiet Tunnel, a project financed 20 years ago by Boeing and the Air Force[4]’s office of scientific research.
The wind tunnel, housed in a nondescript warehouse adjacent to Purdue’s small airport, helps researchers study how turbulence affects vehicles traveling at Mach 6 or higher — the kinds of speeds now viewed as top military priorities in Washington, Moscow and Beijing[5]. The tunnel is just one piece of a broad slate of research projects at universities, government laboratories and private defense firms across the country.
That research, analysts say, eventually will benefit all corners of the military and the broader defense industrial base. Hypersonic technology will yield missiles that are faster and more maneuverable than ever before, planes that can travel at previously unimaginable speeds, weapons that threaten to render current defense systems obsolete, and a host of other remarkable advances.
“It’ll affect every part of what we do,” said retired Air Force[6] Gen. Herbert J. “Hawk” Carlisle, now president and CEO of the National Defense Industrial Association.
The trade association sponsored an inaugural conference July 30-Aug. 1 at Purdue focused entirely on hypersonics, attracting weapons specialists and academics from across the country full of fascination — and concern.
Mr. Jewell said lawmakers, the media and others have grown interested as it becomes more evident that the U.S. military has a great deal of work to do just to catch up with its adversaries.
“The best way to describe it in my personal view … is that we should be concerned,” said Mr. Jewell, a former scientist at the hypersonics branch of the U.S. Air Force Research...