New Navy Ship Weapons Launcher Will Fire Hypersonic Missiles

By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

Lasers, longer-range maneuverable interceptor missiles, over-the-horizon attack systems and paradigm-changing hypersonic missiles will all fire from US Navy surface ships decades into the future. Laser-driven ballistic missile defense from surface ships is even emerging as a possibility.

These evolving attack systems, including upgraded and proven, highly effective weapons such as Tomahawks, SM-3s, SM-6s and high-impact, drone and helicopter-killing lasers, will likely keep upgrading well into the future. However, there will likely be even larger, longer-range, and more lethal new weapons emerging in future years as well. The Navy and Missile Defense Agency are working on power-scaling of lasers and how they integrate with Aegis radar and fire control systems to perform ballistic missile defense missions. Could ship fired lasers travel all the way into space? Does not seem beyond the realm of the possible.

Vertical Launch Systems 

For this reason, industry and the Navy are correctly looking to supplement, build upon and enhance very effective Vertical Launch Systems on Navy surface ships. New weapons, propulsion technologies and energetics are rapidly emerging, generating a need for new innovative launcher technologies. In the near term, this means engineering ways to support a fast-arriving generation of ship-launched hypersonic weapons. This is the fundamental premise and concept of operation informing Northrop Grumman’s innovative EJECT launch technology, a system engineered to supplement VLS and support hypersonic missile as well as other emerging larger ship-fired missiles and weapons.

“The bottom line is that the Navy’s surface ship launcher technology is kind of at a crossroads here. The current system was designed nearly half a century ago, and while still an elegant solution, the technology is aging. And when you look at the future, large surface combatants for example, DDG(X), the Navy’s next surface combatant is being designed now and will be at sea late into the century. The Navy needs a launcher that enables increased lethality and has the flexibility to address new threats,” Roy Pascal, Senior Program Manager at Northrop Grumman, told Warrior in an interview.

Video Above: A next generation destroyer called DDG(X) is designed to sail alongside existing DDG 51 destroyers