In October 2020, AviationWeek reported on the recent report and blueprint created by ASTRO America, sponsored by DARPA.
Writes journalist, Steve Trimble:
“A future factory called the Hypersonic Production Accelerator Facility—for building potentially thousands of scramjet propulsion systems for hypersonic cruise missiles—may not need the U.S. Defense Department or the defense industry to pay the up-front costs for facilities and equipment.”
ASTRO America is a nonprofit organization formed to advance American competitiveness in key Defense industries. Working with the U.S. government, it teams with strategic industry partners to address market failures inhibiting technology development and manufacturing readiness.
“Additive manufacturing makes the new generation of scramjet designs possible to build but creates certain financial pressures,” writes Trimble.
“The entire supply chain—from the feedstock suppliers for the electron-beam welders to the prime contrac-tors—could be co-located within the Hypersonic Production Accelerator Facility (HPAF). The vertically inte-grated process would be capable of producing, testing and qualifying mate-rials for new designs in almost half the time and for about one-fourth the cost of a traditional distributed supply chain.”