Inside Australia’s plan for hypersonic-proof materials

There are currently two major ways it’s thought manoeuvrable hypersonic vehicles and missiles could work. The first, known as a hypersonic cruise missile, would see a rocket blast to Mach 5 before using an air-breathing engine, or scramjet, to maintain its momentum. The second, known as a glide vehicle, sees a rocket blast into the sky before releasing a separate hypersonic missile that has built up enough velocity to travel under its own speed. The two-step system means it can cruise along in the upper atmosphere with enough atmosphere to maintain lift but without too much to create drag.

However, when objects fly so quickly, the friction created can increase temperatures to more than 1,000 degrees. Quickstep will work with UNSW on the ‘Hype-X’ project to identify and test materials that can survive those extreme conditions. Initially, the research will focus on the applicability of existing materials before exploring novel materials and manufacturing processes to fill capability gaps.

Here, the Australian business’ CEO, Mark Burgess, talks about the company’s pioneering research and the future of hypersonic technology. 

What is it that makes this new generation of hypersonic research different to what’s come before?

We had a conversation with one of the US primes on Friday, and they said, “Make no mistake, the definition might be Mach 5, but the design intent is double figures and as high as possible into double figures.” There’s trying to make a technological leap from what their peers might be working on. We’ve got to work on that in terms of both an offence and defence in military application.

They are looking at things differently than before. A few years ago, no one was talking about hypersonic flight, and very few people were talking about hypersonics outside of a space environment. I think there’s just been an acknowledgement that competitor nations have made more progress than Western nations and that there’s going to be broad applicability of hypersonics in the future, as well as the material science that underpins it.

How did all of this come about? Because it feels like quite a big deal to get this.

We had already done some work on current and near-term missile airframe design materials and manufacturing processes. Before the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise was announced (a government plan to encourage Australia to produce more of its own missiles rather than rely on other countries), there was a lot of spend on missile space. For our business, it was an important opportunity. The government seemed to be taking a long-term structural view of the industry. We’ve put in a very clear statement of intent to the government that we want it to be the horizontal provider of airframes to the Enterprise.

Hypersonics is an exciting element of aerospace. We aligned our positioning as an airframe provider in the guided weapons enterprise. We’ve started doing work with the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG) and Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) on what else we could do in terms of materials, science, and the design and development associated with all forms of missile applications in the hypersonics space.

If you tie together what’s going on in the commercial, military and space environments with the fact that composites are such an important component of all three, then it’s a natural continuation of some of the R&D work we’re already doing.

What we’ve seen from the DSTG and DMTC is that they’re interested in pathways to commercialisation. There’s a lot of hype around it and a lot of genuine development work. The potential for collaboration, particularly with the states, is significant.

We did a lot of front-end work with both, and they came out with a solicitation for this work on materials development. We were successful in launching a partnership. There’s another solicitation coming out for high-temperature structures, and we’ve got some good connectivity with Lockheed Martin around areas for potential collaboration for commercial and military applications in the hypersonic space.

We see our role as necessary in trying to pull through some of that technology with our structures and manufacturing capability in how we commercialise, whether it’s hypersonic flight or hypersonic flight for space or military applications.

It’s not ridiculous to think of a world where you would go to an airport and get in a hypersonic plane that will go up into space. Is that something you agree with?

I think that’s related to the ability of those advances in materials to underpin a much broader set of technology advancements. But this is about much more than just sending rockets off into space. It could be to do with intercepting all forms of adversarial threats, whether they be land or sea or space or potential applications for travel. 

But it requires a new set of materials that can be produced at a rate that can deliver the environmental outcomes for your payload, which doesn’t exist at the moment. It’s a new technological frontier that has broad applications. And we’re not starting from a blank sheet of paper, but there is loads of stuff in play that we’ve never seen before.

Do we know if we could even create those kinds of materials to withstand those kinds of speeds in the way they want to do it? Is it even possible?

I was fortunate to go to Eagle Farm (an industrial hub in Brisbane) a few weeks ago. It’s not at the leading edge when you compare it to what’s going on in other countries. But if you roll back the clock 10 years, some of the things that we’re doing would not have been seen as plausible 10 years ago. Now they’re being done. The materials being developed and produced at a low rate here in Australia are infinitely capable of getting to the kind of temperatures these structures will have to survive to. The bigger challenge will be, “Can you produce them in a volume and at a cost that makes the whole application commercially viable?”  

How does that kind of research process work? How do we find those materials and be able to develop them at the rate we need?

A large part of what we’re doing now is trying to understand the mission profile. What’s the application, and then what performance characteristics do you need to see? You then characterise a suite of known materials and the suite of materials that may have relevant applications in their own right or in a pairing with other materials. Do any of those exist? If they do exist, how do you prove your scientific and engineering assumptions about what performance characteristics you could achieve? And then go through a trial process to either concur or eliminate the engineering and scientific assumptions you’ve made.

You then want to get into flight trials. The surest way of provenance is getting these things on flying vehicles. There are some ground-based testing applications, but it’s never the same. Then we can start to understand what those characteristics are. We’ve got unique test capabilities like Woomera, where you can recover the air vehicle. You’re not always able to do it – it usually ends up at the bottom of the ocean! So, I think what we’re doing here in Australia will help develop the technology in this space. It’s a fairly typical engineering process that you go through to work out which materials work in what configurations. What’s producible beyond a one-off in a lab and then developing structures? 

The other thing that’s quite interesting with these air vehicles is the operating characteristics on the outside of the vehicle are entirely different to those inside the vehicle. But you’ve also got to deal with the transition between the two. So going from two, three or four thousand F outside to 200F inside. It’s not just about coping with extreme heat. It’s also about how do you cool things? How do you bring the internal temperature down to a survivable level for whatever’s inside? And what does that material composition look like? And indeed, what does the design of the airframe look like? It’s not all about materials. It’s also about ensuring the airframe can withstand the loads and the stresses.

You work with UNSW on this. How does this partnership work with the academic side and business side?

There’s a clear recognition within academia and government that they can take technology to a certain point, but they have to have industry pulling that through into a commercial pathway. They can do research, fundamental science, and applied science, but they need partners like us to say, “How do we take this from prototype to production?” 

How can we produce this in volume and at a cost that makes it commercially viable? It’s been part of our pitch to the US OEMs that a lot of technical competencies exist in Australia, but often the air gap is an absence of commercial reality. And that’s where we come in. We work in partnership with academia and with the government to pull that tech into something that is a discernible product that can be made in volume and at a cost that’s attractive. 

This has become a much bigger story in the last year because of this almost arms race between big Western countries. How far away are we from seeing hypersonics enter our lives? Might we see hypersonic missiles in the next couple of years?

What you see in the media about where China and Russia are is that they’re seemingly more advanced than where we are with deployed weapons. Now, how good are they? There is a palpable sense that they’re ahead. I get the sense that, specifically Americans, are thinking, “How do we leapfrog them?” But I think there is this, particularly in AUKUS, a real sense that if we pull our capabilities together, we will get there faster than if we do this on our own. They recognise that there’s some great tech and great science based in the UK and Australia. Their openness to collaboration is because they’re worried about where they sit relative to the opposition.

How big a deal was this work for Quickstep?

We’re delighted. It’s great to see the Commonwealth making the investment they’re making. If you get the chance to go to Eagle Farm, it’s a pretty impressive capability. They’ve got 70 or 80 people split between government, academia, and industry. It is something that requires continual investment. They are beginning to place research and development work out in the industry, and I expect to see more. Aside from the large foreign OEMs, there aren’t any companies like ours in Australia that have the engineering depth, the manufacturing competency, and the composites knowledge to add some meaningful value. 

They do a lot of work with Advanced Composite Structures Australia (ACS) in Victoria. But that’s much more of the early-stage development and low-volume prototyping of parts. They’ve made it clear to us that they need help with the engineering and manufacturing development. So we’re pleased to get it to get the award. And we’re hopeful that there’ll be more. And then, we’ll see this as a unique research and development line for the business. It’s directly relevant to what we’re trying to do in the guided weapons enterprise. And I think a good opportunity for Australia to say in a very high-profile domain, “We might not be the biggest, but we’ve got some significant scientific, academic and industrial capabilities that will be meaningful to the overall development program.”