Axient Joins NPS' Hypersonics Week

Recently, Axient was asked to provide a deep dive on the hypersonic threat to the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) for Hypersonics Week. NPS’s Hypersonics Week is “a collection of interdisciplinary sessions on the capabilities, engineering, threats, and strategic implications of hypersonic weapons.” The event was open to all faculty and officers and had both classified and unclassified presentations. In addition to Axient, intelligence experts from the Naval Warfare Center Dahlgren and China lake presented.

Axient (legacy SEG) and the MDA/AB Glide Phase Intercept program were approached by NPS about two years ago to discuss ways to collaborate in the hypersonic field. SEG worked with an NPS student (LT James Wickham) and provided him with a SEG model and technical support for his thesis work on Hypersonic Trajectory Optimization. He went on to win the RADM Meyer System Engineering Award from ASNE.

About two months ago, NPS reached out again and asked Axient to participate in their “Hypersonics Week.” Topics included:

• Foreign Hypersonics Threat
• Hypersonic Phenomenology: Wake and Plume Modeling
• Engineering the Hypersonic Threat
• Modeling Hypersonic Flight
• Radar Simulations and RF Signature analysis

The intent of the series is to expose the future technical leadership of the Navy (future Major Program Managers, Commanding Officers, etc.) to the concept of Threat Engineering and how threat models are used in the development of requirements for Navy and MDA defensive systems.