Steve Trimble A company known for lasers, power systems and drones has a plan to break into the elite club of advanced missile and munition suppliers.
Steve Trimble
General Atomics, a company mainly known for drones, electromagnetic power and nuclear energy, now wants to jump into the hypersonic and high-speed missile market.
Armed with technology gained from recently acquired companies and a new high-speed, geometric shape, General Atomics-Electromagnetic Systems Group (GA-EMS) has submitted proposals for two experimental hypersonic vehicle programs: the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Screaming Arrow and the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Mayhem.
The scramjet-powered hypersonic concepts are leading several projects that include a ramjet-powered, long-range air-to-air missile; an air-launched missile designed to intercept other missiles; a new candidate for the Army’s Long-Range Precision Munition program; and the gun-fired Vintage Racer loitering munition.
“We have a lot of strange skills,” GA-EMS President Scott Forney told Aviation Week at the Association of the U.S. Army’s (AUSA) annual meeting. “Since we’re private, we don’t advertise much of this, and this is the first time we’ve unveiled our missiles.”
GA-EMS’ heritage rests on electromagnetic technology for railguns and aircraft launch catapults, but now the company has set its sights on challenging a high-speed munitions market dominated by the largest U.S. defense prime contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Technologies.
But Forney considers the company’s lack of missile heritage an advantage: It means GA-EMS can embrace new ideas. An example appeared during an interview inside the company’s private meeting room inside the AUSA exhibit hall. Forney lifted a cloth covering, revealing an unusually shaped projectile for a 155mm cannon.
“You’ll notice this is not round. It’s a Reuleaux triangle,” Forney said.
The shape of the projectile body has three corners like a normal triangle, but each side curves at constant width. The cross-section of the Reuleaux triangle projectile resembles the shape of a guitar pick.
“We think we get a huge advantage with maneuverability and lift by using a Reuleaux triangle,” he said. “We have a projectile and two missile development programs that use the Reuleaux-triangle approach. When you look at the control surfaces [of those missile concepts], what you should notice is they look probably smaller than you would expect to see in most missiles. We don’t need them because the lifting-body capability of the Reuleaux triangle gives you a huge advantage.”
GA-EMS also is using an unconventional machine to test the aerodynamic performance of the Reuleaux-triangle projectile. The company acquired the device from a canceled Science Channel show called “Punkin Chunkin,” which featured hobbyists launching pumpkins at supersonic speed from homemade cannons.
“We are not like our [competitors],” Forney said. “They’ve been doing this for decades. So when they do design [a new missile], let’s be honest, they take an existing design and modify it. We don’t have that luxury. So we’re trying to do new things that haven’t been tried before.”
Missiles are new to the GA-EMS product portfolio, but recent acquisitions provide some experience. In 2016, GA-EMS acquired Huntsville, Alabama-based Miltec Corp. from Ducommun for $14.6 million in cash. Since its founding in 1997, Miltec has been known primarily as an engineering services provider for prime manufacturers, the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) and the Missile Defense Agency. But Miltec spent nearly a decade working on a concept for a Low-Cost Interceptor (LCI), an Army-sponsored program that sought to develop a missile costing less than $100,000 that could shoot down cruise missiles and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).
The LCI project performed a successful flight test in 2005 with a 10-in.-dia. missile body. The Army later tasked Miltec to redesign the LCI for the 7-in.-dia. launcher of the Surface-Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (Amraam), including an Aerojet Rocketdyne dual-pulse solid rocket motor and a Ku-band radar seeker. But the 144-in.-long, 325-lb. surface-launched interceptor with a range of more than 30 km (19 mi.) failed to make the transition from the development phase to a program of record.
Miltec’s engineers also were deeply involved in the origins of the Army’s 15-year-old campaign to develop a boost-glide hypersonic missile. As part of a $44 million contract awarded in 2006, Miltec’s engineers were tasked by the SMDC to support the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) program, which produced the prototype of the Common Hypersonic Glide Body now used by the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike missile programs.
As part of its analytical role in the AHW program, Miltec developed a six-degree-of-freedom code for aerodynamic design modeling of hypersonic vehicles, Forney says. “All of our [hypersonic] programs now use that,” he adds.
In 2017, GA-EMS next acquired Syntronics, a Fredericksburg, Virginia-based company. The acquisition added a supplier of guidance and actuation systems for high-speed weapons.
Finally, GA-EMS’ long-standing Space Systems unit is contributing its experience with advanced, low-size weight and power sensors for satellites to the new missiles portfolio. The technology adds to Miltec’s engineering and design experience and Syntronics’ expertise with electronics.
“We build everything in-house. We outsource hardly anything,” Forney said.
For hypersonic missiles, the exception to the GA-EMS insourcing strategy is the propulsion system. Again, the company is taking an unconventional route to product development, relying on startup company Innoveering. In 2019, the AFRL awarded Innoveering a contract to develop a scramjet engine for a hypersonic vehicle. The result is a proposal by GA-EMS for the ONR’s Screaming Arrow program, which seeks to demonstrate an experimental hypersonic cruise missile that can be launched by a Boeing F/A-18E/F.
GA-EMS also has assembled a national team to submit a proposal to the AFRL for Mayhem, a large, expendable vehicle that can carry multiple payloads with an air-breathing hypersonic propulsion system, Forney said.
“We’re putting our skills together from all of our programs, and we are definitely the ones that nobody sees coming,” he noted. “But we’re quite serious about it, and we’ve invested a lot of internal funding to get ready for this.”
The preparations have included tests of a gun- or artillery-launched UAS called the Vintage Racer, designed to enter a contested airspace at hypersonic speed to avoid being shot down. As the vehicle slows down, it extends a pair of folding wings to remain aloft at 60,000 ft., with a sensor to collect intelligence and an onboard warhead to strike any targets.
In 2019, the company briefed then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy on a version of the Vintage Racer that could be launched from a Lockheed Martin Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). According to briefing documents shown in an Army photo of Forney’s presentation to McCarthy, the PrSM would be fired into enemy airspace and release multiple Vintage Racers, which would form into a collaborative swarm to search for targets.
More immediately, GA-EMS is self-funding development of the Aircraft Self-Protection Missile, a 55-lb. interceptor that would be carried by an MQ-1C Gray Eagle to shoot down any incoming missiles. “Their only job is to protect the aircraft,” Forney said. “As we pivot into more of a peer [competition], we’ll be able to protect our aircraft.”
The MQ-1C, which is made by GA-EMS’ sister company, is the intended carrier for the proposed new Guardian Angel, a 40-km-range winged missile. “The wings are just to give us easy aloft time so we don’t have to put a lot of propulsion on it, and then we can take our time with targeting,” Forney said. The Guardian Angel would use the same electro-optical seeker tested at 60,000 ft. for Vintage Racer, he said.
Self-protection is only the first step in GA-EMS’ air-to-air missile strategy. The next stage calls for developing a ramjet-powered, ultra-long-range air-to-air intercept missile for fighters. The Supersonic High-Altitude Ramjet Capability (SHARC) is planned to become available in 2026, depending on funding. GA-EMS is one of 55 companies that the AFRL selected for the Eglin Wide Agile Acquisition Contract (EWAAC), which allows the Armament Directorate’s Agile Weapons Division to award task orders over the next 10 years for digital designs of new missiles. The SHARC concept is GA-EMS’ proposal for EWAAC funding to support digital design and development of new missiles, Forney said.