Project Mayhem, The Air Force's Secret Hypersonic Bomber, Has Begun Cooking

The Air Force's new hypersonic stealth bomber, Project Mayhem, is under development. The development of a bomber that could travel at Mach 10 took a major step forward.

Project Mayhem was intended to be a Mach 10 air-breathing replacement for the Air Force's SR-71 hypersonic stealth bomber.
The US Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded a $334 million contract to several engineering firms, including Draper, to oversee the design, prototyping and testing of Project Mayhem.
The heat at hypersonic speeds makes building and testing hypersonic aircraft difficult.

The design of new generation weapons and defense systems is a science based on speed. In 2018, when Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled the country's Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile system, a video clip of the missile exploding in Florida made headlines. While the video wasn't as flashy as a brand new iPhone, the message was apocalyptically clear: The age of hypersonic weapons was here.

What makes these weapons deadly is that they are designed to defeat modern air defense systems, and this hypersonic threat has only grown in the five years since Kinzal's debut. When it comes to the hypersonic missile arms race, it looks like the US will follow Russia or even China.

But that may be because the US military is focused on a bigger prize: hypersonic bombing.

Meet the Air Force's stealth hypersonic bomber: ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and Strike program called Project Mayhem.

A powerful bomber will have some advantages over its missile-based counterparts, but a larger one will come in handy. Where missiles like China's Kinzhal, Zircon, and Dongfeng-17 are expensive (around $100 million) to launch, a hypersonic jet traveling at speeds higher than Mach 5 (Project Mayhem will travel at Mach 10 ) can adapt and reuse, and on and on

The idea for a hypersonic aircraft came from the Space Race, which ended in 1967 with the North American record flight of the X-15A-2 at Mach 6.7. Advances in aviation led to mechanical marvels like the supersonic SR-71. Project Mayhem will likely use a multi-battle propulsion system, using a jet engine to reach Mach 3 before transitioning to an airfoil for hypersonic speeds. But designing an aircraft that can be reused at such a speed has serious limitations.

At Mach 5 and above, things heat up very quickly thanks to friction and air resistance, so any aircraft that hopes to go that fast and survive the experiment must be covered in advanced materials that haven't been invented yet. None of this takes away from the fact that maneuvering at such speeds would be a major engineering feat, and that combining a conventional jet engine with a jet engine has never been successfully achieved.

Because of this unique operating environment and the need for precision-sensitive design, Project Mayhem turns to model-based engineering (MBE) to digitally build all hypothetical aircraft systems.

"A key element in hypersonic development is establishing MBE as a cost-effective way to evaluate design concepts before prototype construction begins," Frank Serna, Draper's director of Air Force Strategic Systems, said this week. Draper, who helped design the propulsion systems on the Apollo spacecraft, spent decades working on hypersonic systems.

Draper announced Wednesday that it has partnered with engineering firm Leidos, which won a $334 million contract with the Air Force in December, to begin work on digitally creating the Air Force's stealthy hypersonic bomber. Project Mayhem is likely to closely simulate the heat and speed conditions of hypersonic flight.

The Air Force has had the dream of a hypersonic jet in its arsenal for decades, and now it seems that engineers and scientists are working to make that dream a reality.