The military’s hypersonic test program proves once again the superiority of freedom and private enterprise
For years the idea of a hypersonic missile, moving five times the speed of sound, has been proposed as a major and necessary advancement for providing a deterrence against attack by hostile foreign powers. At those speeds they would be difficult to track and destroy.
So, beginning in the early 2000s the Pentagon began a program to test hypersonic flight, using Boeing’s X-51 Waverider proposal as the test bed. Unfortunately, it took years before the first flight in 2010, only to have the flights routinely fail, in April 10, 2010, in August 2011, and in August 2012.
Only by the fifth flight, in May 2013, did the Air Force succeed in completing a test flight, only to fail again on its sixth flight in August 2014. After four years and billions of dollars, little had been learned.
Worse, it soon appeared that Russia and China were making far better progress. In 2016 Russia claimed it had successfully flown a hypersonic missile. China followed with its own claim in 2021.
In response, the Pentagon decided to shift gears drastically in its hypersonic program. Rather than designing and building its own hypersonic test vehicles (using old established companies like Boeing, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, and Lockheed Martin), it would instead ask the new commercial space industry for ideas. It was going to switch to capitalism, as outlined by my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space.
Stratolaunch’s test engineering vehicle attached to Roc during
a flight in October 2022
Stratolaunch became the first company to take on that challenge. It had built its giant Roc plane with the original intention of using it as the first stage for an air-launched orbital rocket system. When it could not find any rocket or satellite companies willing to use it, it found itself without customers. It recognized however that Roc could be used as a launch testbed for hypersonic test vehicles, and offered to develop its own, which eventually become its Talon-A reusable vehicle.
It quickly won a Pentagon hypersonic test contract in 2021, and then another in 2022, and by this year Talon-A had completed ten hypersonic test flights.
Seeing the potential for military contracts in this hypersonic test market, Rocket Lab followed in 2023, creating a suborbital version of its Electron rocket, dubbed HASTE.
Early HASTE launch
Only two months later it completed the first test flight, demonstrating to the military it was ideal for hypersonic testing. By November 2023 it had won its first Pentagon contract, and by April 2025 had won two more, a second Pentagon deal and a contract with United Kingdom’s military.
By March 2026, after completing seven HASTE launches, the War Department issued Rocket Lab a bigger contract, for 20 further hypersonic test flights, and then followed this up in June with another deal adding as many as 18 more test flights.
Meanwhile, in 2024 the Air Force hired the recoverable capsule company Varda to test hypersonic technology during the re-entry of its capsules, as they are then moving at hypersonic speeds and provide a perfect testbed. Since then every Varda capsule, totaling now five missions, has carried and tested military hypersonic technology.
Other companies have gotten involved. In March 2026. Ursa Major flew a hypersonic test flight of a new rocket engine, expressly designed for the military. Lockheed Martin and and the startup Venus Aerospace meanwhile completed successful tests in 2025 and 2026 of a new rocket engine technology useful for hypersonic missiles. In November 2025 Firefly signed on to launch the twenty hypersonic test vehicles that Kratos was building for the military.
In addition, the Air Force did a classified suborbital test flight out of Cape Canaveral in Florida in March 2026. Though no information was released about who built it or launched it, it was likely done by a private company, though we do not know for sure.
Startups have also entered the field. Up Aerospace in June 2025 tested its own suborbital rocket designed to market to the military’s hypersonic test program. Radian Aerospace is building its own recoverable capsule to compete against Varda for hypersonic defense contracts.
Let’s review. When this hypersonic program was government-run using old big space companies from 2010 to 2014, it averaged just over one test flight per year, almost all of which failed. And the cost was in the billions. And from 2014 to 2020 nothing was accomplished.
The Pentagon then began asking the new space private sector for proposals. Since 2022 the War Department has either completed or has contracts for a total of 81 total hypersonic test flights. In that same short time frame it has also completed 24 test flights (nine HASTE launches, ten Stratolaunch flights, and five Varda capsule tests) as well as two ground tests of two new rocket engine designs, all within about three years.
The contrast is striking. On its own, the War Department couldn’t get the job done, while spending billions. Like all government agencies, it did not have the wherewithal to work efficiently and effectively.
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang
When it instead contracted the work out to the private sector, acting merely as a customer, suddenly test flights were happening at an incredible pace, at a rate of eight per year in the first three years, a rate that is likely to go up considerably in the future. The increase was because the private sector was competing for business with the goal of making profits. To win that business it had to produce, and do so quickly at low cost. Stratolaunch saw profits in hypersonic testing, and moved to grab it. Rocket Lab saw the money that Stratolaunch was making from the military, and improvised quickly to grab its own share. So did Varda. Soon, a host of other companies and startups joined the race.
The result was that the military suddenly could test hypersonic technology in multiple ways, do it repeatedly, and do it at a relatively low cost.
In other words, freedom, competition, and free enterprise works. Government does not. This is a lesson every American must learn, especially those Americans who have somehow become convinced sadly that socialism, communism, and centralized government is the way to go. It is not. It never has been. And whenever societies tried to make it god the result has always been bankruptcy, poverty, and failure. Just ask the citizens of the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, and Venezuela.
You could also ask the people running the military’s hypersonic program. In the past three decades it taught that lesson very well indeed.
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Paul Allen should have been the cancer-free sibling…that nasty sister of his hurt Stratolaunch.
That is why I support government research labs so no one family squabble can nix things.
You support government labs to make sure nothing gets done?
Quite. As Mr. Z points out, family squabbles are hardly a prerequisite for nixing things.
That’s already the case without government-run labs. We don’t need your reflexive statism to ensure we have multiple options, as Bob’s article points out many competitors. If one falters, others will pick up the slack.
Like Fogbank?
Jeff, more than ten separate companies, many with other sources of income, means we’re in good shape for hypersonics. No matter how much your preference is to spend billions to do nothing.
Thank you for featuring this important story!
My only comment is in response to your closing in which you suggest citizens of the usual suspects be asked for their commentary. Only past citizens will provide an “accurate” response, as the same forces that prevent freedom, and the progress that accompanies it, will respond in a manner that gives further evidence of why force is “non-competitive” with the progress which always accompanies freedom!
To John Hare
I don’t call Artemis II nothing.
The time when government gets nothing done occurs when you have folks who hate government get elected to government—although that isn’t always the case either as when cost cutters gave the world a little something called the Flint water crisis that actually cost the taxpayer $400 million to clean up.
That-Nate, is a what penny wise and pound foolish REALLY looks like.
And the result was a damaged brand for the GOP in Michigan that has even dumber people in government headed in.
We have good folks at Oak Ridge, Sandia and LLNL…I knew a few of them, like the late Doug Revelle who got to live long enough to see infrasonic work funded a bit better. I also thought a lot of Mr. Spaulding.
It’s not a matter of hate. It’s a matter of consequences for failure. A company that fails goes away, as in Sears, Toys-R-Us, Kmart, etc. A government effort that fails, or a company that’s “connected”** simply gets more funding to fix the problem.
**Crony Capitalism, aka Socialism cloaked.
Jeff Wright,
I don’t call Artemis II nothing.
I wouldn’t call Artemis II something. It won’t go down in history books, and no one will care about it next year. Few people care about it this summer.
The time when government gets nothing done occurs when you have folks who hate government get elected to government
Do you mean people like the Founding Fathers, whose main goal was to get government out of everyone’s hair? Do we really want government to do everything? That sounds a lot like communism. Governments are founded only to:
Getting thing done is not on that list. Whenever government does anything else (do more), some people benefit at the detriment of others. Government chooses winners and losers, and ultimately everyone loses.
It is so much more productive when We the People get things done. That is when the things done mean something and lead toward prosperity rather than austerity.
although that isn’t always the case either as when cost cutters gave the world a little something called the Flint water crisis that actually cost the taxpayer $400 million to clean up.
As you noted later in your comment, government caused the Flint water crisis, supporting the idea that we don’t want government in charge but we do want We the People in charge.
Yep, we build it, china steals it.
There’s a good reason for the expression “Good enough for Government. work”!
Just remember, it took Uncle Sam’s USAMRIID to isolate Ebola-Reston brought into the US by the PRIVATE Wuhan known as Hazelton (Fortrea).
This is why we need something like Wildfire, preferably in space.
As much as I opposed shutdowns…even local talk radio didn’t push back hard enough early–I lament conservatives sounded like PETA in being against animal research. It just needs to be in a real outfit, not something like Hazelton.
Rand Paul talking about “dangerous research.”
I guess he wants to shut down Oak Ridge too, like those weirdo nuns wanted a few years back?
You are dead wrong with your ideology Nate.
There’s a big difference between a radioactive cloud drifting on the wind out of Oakridge and something transmitted person-to-person globally.
“dangerous” is not a binary condition (such as “unique”). It has gradation.
This is incoherent, and it doesn’t support the argument I think you’re making, which is that lavishly funded government programs are better than relying on the private sector. Jeff, your evidence only thinly supports your claim, and your reasoning completely fails to persuade. The evidence, amply provided by Robert above, tells us that the military did very poorly on its own with traditional methods-your preference-and when it instead sought services from the market, there’s been a significant uptake in hypersonic flights, and for less money.
I do not understand why you are so fearful of success and so confident in failure. Is our goal dogmatic alignment, or is it military and economic dominance? Yours appears to be the former.
Some of it is also “you can’t railroad until it’s railroading time”.
I’m not sure where that came from, but it’s a common thing in time-travel fiction. Even if you know everything (which very few people do), you cannot build a railroad if you’re transported too far back in time. The needed infrastructure is just not there.
Cost-cutting’s dirty little secret
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1SMDagJp4Y&ra=m
The folks in shock over the rise of D/S are as naive as those within that movement.