School of War - Ten-Minute Warning: The Hypersonic Threat

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

A Chinese hypersonic missile targeting either U.S. coast would leave room for “about 10 minutes of warning time.” Zachary Krevor, CEO of Stratolaunch, is building vehicles to help the Pentagon learn to detect, track, and intercept this threat. Today, Krevor joins School of War to explain how China and Russia have outpaced the U.S. in hypersonic weapons testing, why AI-enabled missile “swarms” may be on the horizon,  and what it will take for America to defend itself against them. 2:32 What Makes a Weapon Hypersonic? 4:47 The Real-Life Top Gun: Maverick 6:14 From Model Airplanes to Hypersonics 9:09 Why America Stopped Investing in Hypersonics 10:55 Two Types of Hypersonic Weapons 14:09 Glide Bodies vs. Cruise Missiles 15:44 Surviving the Heat of Mach 5 20:20 Testing America’s Hypersonic Technology 23:20 China and Russia’s Hypersonic Advantage 25:24 How to Stop a Hypersonic Missile 29:09 The Coming Age of Hypersonic Swarms 40:38 Can Golden Dome Stop Hypersonic Weapons? This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

If you're like me, you're a fan of Top Gun, both the original and the sequel Top Gun Maverick, which of course opens with Tom Cruise flying a futuristic test aircraft on the edge of space before, things got a little out of hand and he comes rapidly back to Earth. My guest today runs the company that fields the real-life version of that aircraft, which, alas, here in the real world, is autonomous and not piloted by humans. And they use it to test hypersonic technology, missiles essentially, that fly faster than five times the speed of sound and which can maneuver in the atmosphere. China already fields such weapons, and Russia has used them in combat in Ukraine.

Today, an introduction to hypersonic weapons. Let's get into it. It is a perspective for war. The Lanky invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the race. The beaches, we should fight on the landing ground,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never threaten. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Dr. Zach Krever. He is the president and chief executive officer of strato launch, which is a hypersonics company. We have never, Zach, discussed hypersonics on School of War, at least in a sustained fashion. And that is a huge oversight on our part. And thank you so much for coming on the show today to give us the chance. Thanks a lot for having us. We're excited to be here. I want to go back to, well, if it's not the start, you'll tell me what the actual start is, but to what for certainly childhood Aaron was the start of any awareness of something like hypersonic flight, which is I remember as a kid being a frequent visitor to the Aaron Space Museum on the mall in Washington, D.C., seeing this otherworldly spaceship like aircraft, the X-15, which looked kind of like a rocket, but you apparently put a person in it and flew that person at ridiculously, ridiculously high speeds within the atmosphere. And so, A, I'm curious if you shared that fascination as a kid given what you do now.

And B, you know, give us a sense of what hypersonic flight is and how it started, how humanity and the United States got there. Yes. So the X-15 is just an amazing aircraft. It's a legend in aviation history, as you're referring to. Really, I mean, right next to the X-1, right? Which was the first aircraft to break the sound barrier. So the X-15, that aircraft being piloted, as you just mentioned, by legends of aerospace, by the way, as well. I mean, you read down that pilot list of who flew the X-15, Neil Armstrong, Scott Crossfield. I mean, it's a who's who of heroes in aviation.

And it's incredible that they did it in the 60s with slide rules. So this aircraft was 199 flights, average flight cadence of once every 17 days, about 120 flights above hypersonic speeds. So just friendly reminder, hypersonic speeds five times the speed of sound. Speed of sounds Mach 1. Hypersonic speeds is Mach 5. It's actually, just for future reference, it's a whole flight regime, Mach 5 to Mach 20. And the X-15 program and that wealth of data became such a bedrock for innovators such as us,

but then even before us, the NASA in the early 2000s, folks who were starting to explore hypersonic technologies in the 80s, were all built off the foundation that X-15 left. And the other, of course, cultural reference that may spring to mind for people are the opening scenes of Top Gun Maverick, which is basically what I picture your company doing. It's basically my only frame of reference. Oh, certainly, absolutely. The Dark Star program, maybe just a quick, at least I find it, amusing anecdotes. There was the prop version of that from Top Gun out at an Edwards Air Show.

We had that, and then they put that right next to us. We were displaying the Tallinn A, the United States' first reusable autonomous hypersonic airplane. And we had flown, right? Darkstar, obviously a prop there. And boy, as folks would come over after seeing that, they would say, oh, this is a hypersonic airplane too. We're like, yes.

But that one, that one went mock 10. What have you done? We're like, no, no, no, no. That was a movie. Like, no, no, no, that one's impressive. What have you done? And it was really amusing to have those conversations. But that top gun reference is great because it's highlighting how important and how new

hypersonics capability is to our country, especially when you consider what our peer competitors are flying these days to have an airplane be able to go Mach 5 and above and maneuver, just adds a whole set of capability for the United States and its allies. So we'll come to that. But first tell me about yourself and how you first got interested in this whole world of aerospace engineering and ultimately, you know, of rockets and hypersonics did you like me as a kid share a fascination with the X-15, or how did this all begin? Yes, absolutely. So the X-15 and basically any airplane I could get a hold of. I didn't recognize it at the time when I was 10 and 12 that I had the aerospace bug already. But I bothered my parents all the time. I don't know if you remember those snap models that you'd put together with the model glue that that would smell.

So I had a whole fleet of F-16s, F-18s, the X-15, the X-1. Then I'd fly them around my house, still smelling like glue, which I'm sure my parents loved there. And then it was a high school trip. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. We went over to NASA Ames. And so it was one of those traditional get kids interested in STEM, and it was very effective. I thought, how cool is this to work at a place where you could test everything from space shuttle tiles? to see the demonstration of a wind tunnel near full-scale aircraft going into wind tunnels.

So I was hooked. That being said, my dad was a chemical engineer, my mom chemistry professor. My dad, a lot of exposure to aerospace, is retired now, but made the heads-up displays for a variety of those fighter jets, tanks. And he told me, son, you need to have a strong stomach to be in aerospace, thinking back to the cycles that aerospace has experienced. So I went through undergrad at UCLA, received my mechanical engineering degree, Bachelor of Science, just to have that wider horizon.

But I told my dad upon graduation, I can't shake this. And so I went into Georgia Tech, aerospace engineering degree from my master's in PhD from Georgia Tech. And then from there was great. I had a chance to work at Lockheed Martin, primarily on the Orion spacecraft. But then also had some exposure through their advanced design group, which is where I started learning about hypersonic flight. And then I had a chance to move over and join Sierra Nevada on the Dream Chaser program, which has a quick aside. I encourage folks to look up the history.

It's a Tom Clancy spy novel, started with the Boar Four that the Australians saw the Russians fishing out of the Black Sea. And so as folks are aware, Dreamchaser is a re-entry vehicle and really love the challenge of how. having to work in that fight regime, particularly the Mach 5 to Mach 20. Then had an opportunity to join Strattel Launch when we were owned by the Volcan Estate. We are doing a variety of different programs, including one of them that became the precursor to Tallinn A. So it became a pretty interesting fascination building off that airplane excitement that I had when I was a kid. Yeah, I shared that excitement. And then our past diverged pretty dramatically.

I'm guessing largely due to my lack of facility with math. We don't have time to get into the details, but I feel like that was probably the foundation of it. So back to the story of hypersonic itself, and it will again intersect with your life and career. But my understanding is the United States is at the forefront of this stuff early in the Cold War or the X-15 is the great emblem of that. Obviously, the center of attention. You have people like Neil Armstrong flying it. I mean, that's the center of the world from a test pilot perspective. But towards the end of the Cold War and thereafter,

it seems to fade from significance in American investment. And you could argue, you know, everything sort of shrinks at the end or after the end of the Cold War. But we do continue to invest in technological edges in other categories, but not really hypersonics there as a priority for a while. What happened? Really, like you said, kind of the Cold War dissipation there, some of the reduction in the defense spending, and then trying to understand what could be the uses of hypersonics there. We had this ballistic missile stockpile that we remained focused on, and then how do we defend against ballistic missiles, rightfully so,

because that was one of the credible threats and still is, of course, there. And so just the fact that hypersonics was still overall very nascent there, and there wasn't just a lot of research into it, other than starting to advance materials and engine technologies. And that's where the story starts to pick up with NASA in the 2000s. And maybe it would be useful to just sort of talk through theoretical use cases for this kind of technology. Because you just alluded to ballistic missiles, which, you know, just to review that most listeners probably know, you know, this is a rocket that fires, the thing goes up into space and it comes back down.

on the way down but at enormous rates of speed. And then you've got cruise missiles. You know, basically it goes back to World War II, doesn't it? You know, you have the V2s, the ballistic missiles, and the V-1s, the cruise missiles. They're just all a lot faster and go a lot further today. But those two basic technological models, the thing that goes up and down and the other thing that flies through the air. What are the, what is, either from an offensive perspective or anything else you'd like to talk about, what is the potential for hypersonic technology within that?

obviously the research back in the Cold War that we were referring to, the XOFSI was manned flight of some kind. So maybe interceptors or things like that. But what are the ranges of possible uses? Yes. So a variety of both offensive and defensive uses for hypersonics. From an offensive perspective, yes, a ballistic missile. It launches. If it's coming from across the country, you generally know where it's going to hit with pretty decent precision within the first couple minutes of that launch. Then you have 40. to 90 minutes to do something about it. And again, that's been the threat for a number of decades. And so we rightfully were investing. How do we defend our country against that? But now with this new class of hypersonic systems, you're looking at being able to do a similar ballistic missile type profile, and I'll come back to that, or something that the cruise missiles are doing but at much faster speed.

And so what I'm referring to really is there's two classes of hypersonic weapons. There's the glide bodies, which is that's what's similar to a ballistic missile, at least in the launch phase, but then it separates. Then what happens is that glide body comes down, starts maneuvering through the atmosphere, making it very hard to detect, track, and then ultimately intercept. And it's maneuvering, again, above speeds at Mach 5. And the Chinese demonstrated this, referring to publicly available information in 2021. they did an around-the-world missile test where then they separated a hypersonic glide body and it did a variety of maneuvers. That's why General Millie at the time, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he called that a Sputnik moment because that's a real live opener. By some comparisons, for example, that glide body could come in and it could choose to target the East Coast or the West Coast.

We'd have about 10 minutes of warning time to do something about it. And then referring to that cruise missile class, a way to think about that is submarine lines. launched, maybe fighter jet launched. Again, referring to public information, Russia is flying those, demonstrating those today in the Ukraine conflict. So thinking about something that's on the, maybe the west coast of the United States, where we're based, strata launch is based. I mean, you could think about something that could be launched with some pretty decent standoff distance from a submarine. We'd have about three minutes of warning time before targets San Francisco or Los Angeles. And can I, let me ask a really ignorant question here, which will show

how little I know about this technology. The glide version of the technology that essentially sort of begins like a ballistic missile and ends as a hypersonic maneuverable vehicle, is that glide phase powered? That is to say it's firing a sort of stage of fuel or engines as it comes in, or is it maneuvering at those high speeds just as a somehow more maneuverable ballistic object? Or both? Do my categories not make sense? Absolutely makes sense.

And that's a good distinction between the glide bodies and the cruise missiles. The glide bodies are generally separating no propulsion and able just to use the atmosphere to maneuver and provide such tremendous cross range. That's what, frankly, makes them so challenging because now they're really hard to predict. You only have that thermal signature. There is generally no propulsion element that you can also count on tracking. the cruise missiles, the hypersonic cruise missiles, generally flying a little bit lower in the atmosphere and a bit flatter trajectory

because they do have that propulsion element. Typically what's referred to as an air breathing propulsion, it's a scramjet technology. Actually, the United States was one of the first ones to demonstrate that back in the 2000s with NASA. And that's what powers those vehicles to still go over a couple hundred nautical miles, even though they're flying relatively low in the atmosphere,

say just above a typical jetliner altitude 50,000 feet. I imagine the materials science aspect of designing these things must be tremendously challenging slash interesting if that's your thing just because of the atmosphere, right? That's another thing I wanted to ask you is, this is a funny way to put the question, but could you sort of describe the terrain of the atmosphere? That is to say, given the different profiles of these two categories,

and the way that they fly, how the objects interact with the atmosphere is kind of everything. So what challenges does the atmosphere provide? What opportunities, you know, how do you think about this ocean of air that these things are flying through the consistency of which changes, depending on where you are? Yes, the consistency does change, and that's really important to think about. How I'll start is the, again, hypersonics flight regime. Think about Mach 5 up to Mach 20. thermal energy is going as the square of velocity. So you're talking about an exponential increase of heat that you're going to have to deal with with these materials.

And then to your point, Aaron, as you start to get into the Mach 9, Mach 10 regime, what's happening is the air starts to disassociate, starts becoming a plasma and ionizing. So material solutions that you've been using in the lower hypersonic regime don't necessarily work at those same temperatures. Same with your communication strategy,

same with your control elements what are your flight controls and then of course as you're moving at those faster speeds your own control algorithms have to operate at a faster frame rate to keep up with with those kinds of maneuvering because as you can as one can imagine right when you're when you're fine at those speeds any kind of disturbance and and things can spiral out of control pretty quickly there for that vehicle so the material element is really a key aspect of addressing the hypersonic challenge being able to find materials, and it's a really interesting engineering challenge because you're trying to find materials that A, can withstand that thermal energy, right? But again, don't necessarily work at the same as Mach 5 or Mach 10. But also, you want to go fast. You want to have a lot of range. Well, to do that,

you want really thin leading edges. So now you're talking about, well, how do I make this material that withstands all this heat? I can structurally support, but is, things so I can not put a bunch of drag onto my vehicle and make sure I accelerate to these speeds. So it's been a really interesting area to work as an engineer. And I mean, I hesitate to ask because maybe the answer will be so wonky that I'll be hopelessly lost. But what works? I, you know, I assume it's not stuff that, you know, my car is made out of or things that I'm encountering in everyday life. Well, you'd be surprised. There are ways to get steel to work there. So, So there's ways to do that.

But typically you start to explore your metallics, your in canals, your titanium. And then as you get into those higher speeds, now you're starting to work with composites or technologies that were flying on space shuttle, for example, some kind of thermal protection system there. And so it's an interesting aspect because as one can imagine, the material properties between those are very different. for example, failure mechanisms of a metallic are yielding, right, whereas you're getting into the composite area, those start to become brittle. So a way to think about that, right, is you've bent an aluminum coat can, right? But sometimes that coat can come back. Whereas something that's a really brittle substance, you nick it, say you take a piece of fod on takeoff, right? Now you've

damaged that composite material can start to cause a burn through. So again, at kind of the lower hypersonic speeds, you can still work in a lot of the metallic type materials, but as you're getting up higher, you need to start working with some of those more brittle composites. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO powered by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the Joint Force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it.

That's how you fight at the speed of war. And this vehicle that your company is working with is the Talon A, this thing you reuse. it goes out and then comes back, which I presume the standards for that, or then from an engineering perspective, even higher than something that's disposable, that you're going to blow it up at the end of each use or crash it. What do you use this vehicle for? And what are the challenges in designing it specifically? Yes, so straddle launch uses the Tallinn A to accelerate hypersonic capability for our country and our allies.

So it's a flight test platform that demonstrates a variety of offensive and defensive technologies in the hypersonic environment. So a way to think about that is we're demonstrating sensors, instrumentation, materials. And I should clarify, too, the previous point is I'm referring to composites. It's really the ceramic aspects that you're bringing together, a variety of ceramics there. And so as we demonstrate them in the hypersonic environment, our customers get to understand, Does their technology actually work, which creates a lot of certainty? Because typically in heritage development programs, you're not doing flight test or flight demonstrations till the end of the program. Well, when you don't have that truth source of data, because, again, we've just not done a lot of hypersonic flight in this country, especially compared to those peer competitors.

There, you just don't have that true source of data. So you're carrying very high uncertainties, which manifests itself as more weight, less performance, etc. And then again, you go into that environment and you still learn something, again, because we just don't have that foundational data that we have, say, in other mock regimes like the subsonic flight regime. And so now when you learn something new, well, shoot, your program's taking you a couple years to even just get into flight. You've learned something new. Now you have to iterate. It takes you another year or two get into flight. It's just kind of a vicious cycle without that flight data.

And that's what strata launch does. Again, we're demonstrating these technologies in the flight environment. We're creating that certainty very early up front. So now folks can charge forward with their hypersonic development programs, knowing their capability works. The other aspect that we do is simulating what our peer competitors are doing so that we can give our defensive agencies a controlled environment to determine how well they can detect, track, and then eventually intercept a hypersonic system. So again, same thesis, though, incredibly valuable to them because they're learning how are their algorithms doing and actually controlling and closing that intercept web. How well can they see a hypersonic system a couple hundred nautical miles away when it starts to maneuver around there? And by having that early demonstrations, they can iterate on their algorithms to accelerate hypersonic defense in our country.

Well, let's talk about the enemy situation there or adversary situation or whatever you want to call it. You said the Russians have fired the sort of cruise missile version of all of this in combat. The Chinese have tested the ballistic missile adjacent, the glide version of hypersonic technology, but not used it in combat. What's the combat record so far in Ukraine, which I guess says something about hypersonics probably, but probably says mostly stuff about their particular design in, launching decisions and tactical employment decisions? Certainly. The adversaries, I'll call them adversaries, are having a pretty incredible effect. They have demonstrated some pretty amazing technologies in the hypersonic regime, as folks can imagine. Obviously, I can't go into a ton of

depth here, but they've been very effective. And so that's why the United States is working very hard to accelerate our own hypersonic capability focused initially on the offensive side, but now we're seeing the defense ratchet up. And so there was a great quote from Dr. Mike Griffin, who was under Secretary of Defense back in First Trump, the 2018 timeframe, where he talked about that the Chinese had done 20 times the amount of hypersonic tests compared to the United States in the last decade. And it goes back to that truth source. And that's why Russia is also using these kinds of systems, because every time you're using these systems, you're learning, right? Then you iterate, you put it back into the product there or back into the weapon, frankly. And it's that learning

now that you start to add new capabilities and is making them even more effective. And what I can say, Aaron, is right, a lot of the drone, there's been certainly plenty in the media about drone capabilities in the subsonic regime. What I can say is I think we can all imagine there's no reason that kind of capability and technologies can't be applied to hypersonic systems, again, moving at Mach 5 and above. And talk about the science of intercepting these things, if you will. I mean, it's easy enough for a layman like me to understand that it must be hard to do because it's fast, really fast, the thing you're trying to hit.

and also as a consequence of it's being fast, as you pointed out earlier, you just have less decision time. So it's not only you're trying to hit something that's moving fast, you may not know what you're going to shoot at it, you know, what target area it's moving into until the window of available time to intercept is very short. So I get that at a big picture, but, you know, how does this materially affect, for example, systems that we have that can intercept, say, ballistic missiles or cruise missiles? Like, what are the specific shortcomings of the system?

then we have to evolve past if we're going to be able to successfully intercept hypersonics. And then I suppose our friends in Beijing and Moscow are thinking along similar lines for themselves. Absolutely. And I think this is really going to, this is going to be a two-part answer. We'll focus first on the interceptors. We have amazing capability in this country. But as you're dealing with hypersonic systems, it now becomes about how are you closing the whole kill chain? And so what do I mean by that? Let's take that Chinese ballistic missile test that resulted in a glide body. Well, if that starts coming in, you're not sure exactly where it's going.

It has a 3,000 nautical mile range, just for example, just illustrating an example. In the glide phase? So once it's released, it can go 3,000 miles in any direction? Right. When it's coming back in and reentering, I mean, that's kind of the maneuvering. the maneuvering capability that we're talking about for these systems overall. So it's just pretty incredible there. And so as we think about that, well, now what does really that intercept aspect, that

kill chain really look like? Because with a short amount of time, right, are you launching multiple interceptors from a variety of different coasts and locations because you can't predict, exactly. And again, it's it's maneuvering all the way down to the ground as well. And that's what makes it so much so challenging, especially compared to ballistic missile offense, which is already hard, by the way. Hitting a ballistic missile, the successes we're having in this country are amazing. That's a really hard challenge itself, because what's happening in those scenarios, right? A ballistic missiles coming in, it's deploying countermeasures or, you know, for lack of a better word, chaff to

distract right from the intercept actually occurring. Well, now imagine, again, kind of thinking about the drone analogy, there's no reason you can't deploy those kinds of countermeasures off a hypersonic, offensive hypersonic system as well. So now you're having to pick up, well, which one's the real one, especially if, if, like I said, I can't obviously confirm anything, if other systems are being deployed there and reentering. So now which one is the real one? how do you actually think about that intercept aspect? Again, we have a great set of interceptors, but if we're having to launch, you know, 10 to 1, right,

that's going to stress our depth pretty quickly from that kind of perspective. But that's why, too, there's been a lot of work looking at a variety of other ways to perform intercepts, whether it's electronic warfare, directed energy types. because again, too, the other thing I think to consider is in this type of scenario, combat scenario, it's not like our adversaries are going to launch just one. You sort of got to my next question that right at the end where you're talking about

directed energy for intercepts, but I am kind of curious what the different categories of the cutting edge are right now, like having just sort of established where we are, I mean, what is the world of hypersonics to look like five to ten years from now in terms of new capabilities and new challenges for that matter? Right. I think a great analogy, a way to think about it, is drawing from the drone area and then the collaborative combat aircraft area. So we're talking about a lot of us are flying in the Mach 5 to Mach 6 regime, certainly more exquisite capabilities out there. I think first area to consider is going faster and longer ranges. I think that's where the United States will be going for a variety of, I'd say, inspired. reasons, but now starting to pick up as well with additional technologies. Department of War stated one of their top technological areas within their six priorities is collaborative communications. Again, there's no reason that hypersonic system is autonomous hypersonic systems

can't operate together in a coordinated fashion. Obviously, the technologies are a little more, are a bit more sophisticated. You have to have those control links that can handle moving at those speeds there, but that's definitely a technology area that we can expect to grow. And then you start applying that to, again, those faster speeds. And then we start talking about longer ranges. And so that's, I think, where we start to see hypersonics going as a country the next five to 10 years. You're kind of blowing my mind here. So let me repeat back what I think I just heard in slightly different terms. And you tell me if I'm understanding you correctly. So for all the talk about drones forms today, you were describing.

in a world in which there are hypersonic, either glide vehicle, swarms, or, you know, cruise missile style hypersonic weapons, swarms that are autonomous, semi-autonomous, whatever, and you can basically shoot around the world, and then they swarm and steer themselves, but making decisions for themselves in the terminal phase. Yes, I think. Cool, cool, cool, cool. Yes, especially with, I know AI, there's a lot of hype, but unfortunately from an offensive weapon perspective, that's actually a great application of AI, how to recognize, retarget,

do this. And so, again, we've seen, and it's been publicized, the ability of swarms at the subsonic, in the subsonic flight regime, whether it's Ukraine, whether it's Iran, there. And so it's pretty easy to imagine applying that kind of capability to a swarm of hypersonic systems. again, that now have this incredible maneuvering, incredible cross range, and that's only going to make it obviously a lot harder to defeat. I mean, maybe this just shows the limitations of my imagination, but in that world, it's very hard for me to visualize how physical interceptors could be effective. It just seems, in my mind, it's like directed energy then becomes kind of, or perhaps

there are other capabilities, you know, in electronic warfare. or something, but just the notion that you're going to be somehow firing interceptors to deal with that fast enough strikes me as a little fanciful, but maybe the technology there just catches up with the offensive technology. Right. I think a way to think about that is, again, what is that whole ecosystem to perform the intercept mission? And I think how we should think about that is it becomes a combination of capabilities, is what I say. We will certainly still need interceptors in those scenarios. But then, yes, also need the ability to deal with multiple hypersonic vehicles incoming simultaneously. And again, the drone is such a great parallel to

keep drawing from where technologies are advancing quickly and how do you defeat a swarm of drones there. Certainly that's being tested out in the Ukraine conflict there. And so as we all think about that. That's a application to this hypersonic swarm area as well will be extremely relevant. And so this layered defense area that our Department of War leaders have been talking about is a great analogy and certainly applicable to the offense against hypersonic threats. And then as I understand it, the test vehicle that you operate, this is unmanned. And you launch it from another enormous aircraft, right? Maybe you can kind of talk us through this. Are you using a degree of autonomy to fly that aircraft, or is it

just remote controlled? Just walk me through how the test regime actually works. Yes, so we're very proud of our reusable autonomous hypersonic airplane that's known as Talon A. And we are an air launch company. The reason for that is our customers, we saw from the start, needed a way to demonstrate hypersonic capability all over the globe as we support the United States and its allies. So yes, we operate the world's largest airplane, at least by wingspan, known as Rock. The secret sauce is a quick aside is it's all 747 moving parts, the engines, the landing gear, even the yokes that the pilots are flying. And what that is important for is we're seeing 747 reliability and maintainability for rock.

And then we use the spirit of Mojave, which is a 747 aircraft. as well as another carrier. So these aircraft carry our Tallinn A, so we mate them either to the belly, in the case of the 747 or to the center wing, in the case of rock. And then we go up to typical airliner flight conditions. We release Talenei. Talon A drops for a few seconds. It ignites its rocket motor.

And then it goes up, say anywhere from 60,000 to 150,000 feet, does a variety of hypersonic maneuvers, demonstrating that capability, and this is all autonomous. We're very proud of this capability, because not only is it autonomous, but adapts to the conditions of the day. And what does that mean? Hot day, cold day, so the atmosphere has changed. It's windy. Regardless, Talon A completes its mission. We're very proud of every time meeting our mission objectives for our customer. And then we come down and we hit a landing spot. Publicly acknowledged that we've been landing at Vandenberg. We've landed at a variety of other places. around the world.

So again, it's adapting on the fly. We're running an onboard simulation there so that Talon A can understand the conditions of the day. It senses itself at hypersonic speeds, makes a variety of maneuvers to control its energy, and then again, come down for a great landing. And our landing precision has been amazing. And what's the sort of cutting edge

of what various folks are testing with you? You mentioned sensors, you know, you're probably limited in the details you can go into here. But I am curious what's actually being worked out. Yes, I think a great example to highlight is a sensor that we flew with Northrop Grumman, and this is publicly acknowledged. Northrop Grumman put out a press release. It was a great partnership working with them, where they flew what's known as an inertial

measurement unit. And that sensor's job is to determine what is your attitude when you're fine. In other words, are you pitched up? Are you rolled over? What is that? attitude and that's really important because can your sensor keep up when you're going Mach 5, Mach 6, and beyond that there? Because what happens, that sensor detects that attitude and then feeds back that information to your flight computer to determine, oh, guess what, I need to move the rudder

a couple degrees or I need to move this L-Avon a couple degrees there. And so being able to demonstrate that in the hypersonic environment for them to allow their innovation cycle to accelerate was a great way to show the value of Talley. We've had a customer call us the Swiss Army knife of hypersonics, and I love that analogy, because we're also demonstrating materials. So can certain materials, metallic alloys, ceramics actually withstand the hypersonic environment that we're putting them in, then they can go off to the Department of Wars hypersonic priority programs and then get fielded and put in the hands of the warfighter. Okay, here's a really dumb question. How? Are you like tacking the material

onto the outside of your vehicle? And if so, doesn't that sort of affect your ability to control the vehicle safely? Like, help me understand how that works. I understand instrumentation and sensors, but something that has to be exposed to the atmosphere. How does that actually function? Yes, we actually do mount it on the outside of our vehicle. And that we had from the start in terms of the design phase. So we made sure that the vehicle architecture, was going to account for the fact that there were going to be these external protuberances, maybe the leading edges weren't always going to be smooth. And so in the design, we accounted for that so that we could test these materials.

And they might not actually withstand it, withstand that heating environment. And therefore, how could we do that, give the customer that value, but then still be able to come in and land? And so hence, we use some backing and thermal protection materials in our design to ensure that customers can test on the external aspects or external locations of TALNAE, but we can still come in and land in case their material does not survive the flight.

What happens above Mach 20? Why does hypersonic range have a ceiling? Is it super hypersonic, super duper hypersonic at that stage? What's different about above Mach 20? You're starting to reach orbital speeds there. And so that's where you start to get into the transition until you reach the speed at which you're going to sustain an orbit around the earth there.

But you just couldn't go that speed in the atmosphere? Like you have, I apologize for the deeply elementary nature of these questions, but it just strikes me in theory if it, if it's dangerous at Mach 15, it would be even more dangerous at Mach 25, but it's not possible to do it at Mach 25 because it will somehow go into orbit? What does that mean? No, there are still, uh, uh, uh, certainly can do flights at that speed there. Yes, as you can imagine, technical challenges and environments,

there certainly have to be a part of the consideration as you're moving that fast. But again, it really just comes down to do you have those material systems, do you have those control algorithms there? And there's actually been a variety of programs looking at how can you fly at sustained speeds in low, very low Earth orbit, V-Leo, is what it's called, before eventually the drag, because there still is some atmosphere, a little bit, not enough to control your vehicle.

You need some kind of external propulsion source to be able to control your vehicle. But at some point, that drag starts to bring you back into the atmosphere. So how can you sustain flight there at those really high speeds and essentially high altitudes? With all this discussion of the Golden Dome an investment being made in this more holistic system of missile, defense for the United States, how much thinking about hypersonics and defense against hypersonics

is going into that program? There's certainly a lot of defense against hypersonics that's being considered all over our Department of War there. So certainly Golden Dome is one important consideration for defense against hypersonics. Space-based intercept is a part of that, right, but also starting to have its own programs. But there's a variety of other initiatives. that have been named as well, whether it's the Guam defense system, has its own program element there. How are we protecting our carrier battle groups against hypersonic systems there? How are we training our servic men and women there so that the first time that they see a hypersonic vehicle is not in combat there? And so certainly Golden Dome in defending our homeland needs to address the hypersonic challenge.

But the hypersonic challenges is all over the world. Hypersonics can be used in a variety of offensive applications. And so there's a variety of initiatives the United States and its allies are working on to address hypersonics, like I said, across the world. And one last question for you, sort of at the policy level, of course, longstanding efforts to control the arsenals of and research into, for example, nuclear weapons, amongst other categories of weapons. Not going great at the moment is my impression, given, for example, the rapidly expanding Chinese arsenal, many other things. To what extent is there a conversation about arms control for hypersonics and restriction of development and research

through any kind of diplomatic process? There's been a lot of discussion about that. And certainly some initial thoughts within a few decades ago that hypersonic weapons would be so provocative because again, they're so hard to detect or to detect track and intercept. That being said, these days, I'd say the genies out of the bottle. Again, when we think about what our peer adversaries are doing, you can just research hypersonics and what they've publicly demonstrated already that's out in the literature. There's a lot of capability that's already out there. And so really hypersonics is another weapon delivery method.

I think it's the way to think about that. And so as the conversations continue to evolve over arms control already, it's folding in hypersonic weapons because they are effective and certainly capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Dr. Zach, Trevor, CEO of Strato Launch, totally fascinating conversation. I probably should have studied more diligently at math when I was a kid. And I'm grateful to you for educating me and the audience in all these matters. Great. We thank you for the time, Aaron. We really enjoyed being here and having this conversation.

And look forward to continuing to evolve and accelerate hypersonics capability for our country and look forward to another time to chat as we see how these developments continue to progress.