Air Force engineers tested a novel hypersonic cruise vehicle design in a wing tunnel in White Oak, Md., according to an Aug. 25 release. They put a scaled twin scramjet-powered vehicle model through the paces in a series of integrated aerodynamic and aerothermal tests in the Arnold Engineering Development Complex’s Hypervelocity Wind Tunnel 9, states the release. This type of vehicle design “had never been explored before,” said Douglas Dolvin, the Air Force Research Lab’s manager for the Hypersonic International Flight Experimentation, or HIFEX, program. It’s a joint US-German effort to mature technologies that could be part of a future hypersonic space-access vehicle or an ultra-fast cruise missile. “The high-quality optical instruments and the measurements technologies employed, including extensive use of temperature sensitive paints, proved to be instrumental in capturing unsteady aerodynamic phenomena that have never been characterized before and formulating an understanding of complex interactions,” said Dolvin.
Watchdog Says Military Can Make Cyber Ops More Efficient
Sept. 17, 2025
The Government Accountability Office called for paring down the military's sprawling cyber enterprise in a recent report, amid renewed discussion about standing up a separate cyber force.
