Peraton Awarded $44M US Army Hypersonic Testing & Evaluation Contract

Peraton has been awarded a U.S. Army contract for Hypersonic Test Engineering, Mission Planning and Systems (HyTEMPS), valued at up to $44 million over two years.

This award builds upon Peraton’s more than 10 years of experience supporting the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC) Technical Center and its mission to develop hypersonic vehicle technologies and provide hypersonic weapon and vehicle flight testing capabilities.

Under the contract, Peraton will be responsible for providing comprehensive mission support for interservice flight test missions, deploying whenever and wherever needed to ensure flight test events are successfully executed. To support these test events, Peraton will develop hardware and software solutions associated with the development, maintenance and sustainment, and operations of mission and test systems.

Peraton will also continue to support the advancement of the Army’s Portable Range Operations and Test Network (PROTN) and will begin work on new initiatives, including developing and deploying novel collection mechanisms that place a broad array of instrument sensors closer to a hypersonic vehicle’s flight path and point of impact to obtain more testing data. These novel collection mechanisms may include developing a single networked architecture to rapidly share telemetry and test data; developing and operating an open ocean range system that incorporates sensors based on ships, barges and unmanned maritime systems; and incorporating advanced data collection using aerial drones.

“Hypersonic vehicle testing is an extraordinarily complex process,” said Roger Mason, President, Space, Intelligence and Cyber sector. “In addition to the inherent challenges of studying an object traveling at speeds above Mach 5 across uninhabited ocean regions requiring the support of multiple test ranges and collection assets, we also must account for the unique maneuverability of the hypersonic test vehicle. The HyTEMPS contract allows us to bring together our extensive hypersonic testing and evaluation knowledge and experience to create more testing capacity and capability for the customer.”

Because the Department of Defense has prioritized developing and fielding hypersonic weapons, the hypersonics flight test rhythm is scheduled to triple from two events to up to six events per year. This places a major responsibility on contractors like Peraton to provide the capabilities, solutions, and services necessary to execute effective tests on an increasingly tight schedule.