Lockheed Martin’s new compact hypersonic missile enables America’s stealth fighters to engage targets at Mach 5 speeds

Hypersonic missiles are weapons that are capable of achieving sustained speeds in excess of Mach 5 while maneuvering. But while speed may draw most of the headlines, it’s the combination of velocity and unpredictable course changes that make these weapons so difficult to intercept.

“Mako does not travel in a pure arcing ballistic flight path. It is a true hypersonic weapon that operates and maneuvers in a high-altitude hypersonic regime,” Paul Sudlow from Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control previously told Sandboxx News. “Its high speed and maneuverability enable it to penetrate advanced air-defense systems, engaging targets at or below hypersonic speeds, depending on mission requirements,” he added.

Adding the Mako missile to America’s stealth fighters

The Mako missile was developed under the auspices of the Air Force’s Stand-In Attack Weapon program. A total of some $35 million was awarded to Lockheed Martin in three separate developmental contracts (associated with developmental phases 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3).

The aim was to field a weapon that could effectively engage China’s anti-access/area denial assets in the Pacific — so the weapon has to be quick, powerful, and survivable.

Hypersonic missiles are traditionally too large to fit inside the internal weapons bays of stealth fighters. This is because they usually require a large rocket motor and sufficient fuel stores to carry them to high speeds and altitudes. They then separate from the booster and continue on unpowered or under an alternate form of propulsion (as is the case with the Air Force’s scramjet-powered Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile).

The Mako missile’s ability to be launched from within America’s stealth fighters dramatically increases the potential vectors the weapon can attack from, substantially complicating matters for air defenses tasked with identifying and intercepting inbound threats.

Intercepting a maneuvering Mach 5+ weapon launched from a fighter or bomber you can see on radar might be an extremely difficult proposition today for even the most advanced air defense systems, but intercepting one from seemingly anywhere would be even harder.

As Sudlow told Sandboxx News today, this high-speed weapon is also designed to allow for stealth aircraft, like America’s 5th-generation fighters, to fly out ahead, locate a target, and then relay that target data back to Mako-armed 4th-generation fighters carrying Lockheed Martin’s Sniper Networked Targeting Pod for engagement.

This will allow older 4th-generation platforms to play a vital role in combat operations, even against targets in highly contested airspace, and further increase the destructive capabilities of 5th-generation jets.

To this end, Sudlow also confirmed that the Mako missile has already been fit-checked to be carried externally by the F/A-18 Super Hornet, EA-18G Growler, F-15E Strike Eagle, F-16C Fighting Falcon, and even the P-8A Poseidon. In effect, Lockheed Martin designed this weapon to be carried by nearly any aircraft in the US arsenal carrying fairly standard 30-inch lugs.

That means the Mako missile could be another new long-range weapon in the Navy’s arsenal, alongside its recently revealed AIM-174B air-to-air missile. Both Mako and the AIM-174B are believed to offer ranges well into the hundreds of miles, meaning these two weapons could provide a significant long-range one-two punch against air- and sea-based targets. Lockheed Martin even says the Mako missile could be fired from the vertical launch tubes on the Navy’s warships if equipped with a booster, similar to what’s been done with the AGM-158C LRASM.

Nevertheless, in the long run, this weapon could find its way back to the Air Force — assuming the Navy opts to put Mako into production. This could see it carried by 4th-generation fighters supporting forward F-22 or F-35 operations, or even see it carried internally by the F-22 Raptor itself — which is still the stealthiest fighter ever to reach service.

The weapon can also be carried internally by the Air Force’s F-35As and Navy and Marine Corps F-35Cs. The only American stealth aircraft that can’t fit this new missile is the vertical landing F-35B, as its internal storage capacity is limited by the presence of the aircraft’s lifting fan.

Named after the fastest shark in the sea

Mako was originally developed as a part of the US Air Force’s Stand-In Attack Weapon (SiAW) program. That effort aimed to field an air-launched weapon meant specifically to counter elements of anti-access area denial defenses like air defense radar platforms, surface-to-air missile systems, and anti-ship missile launchers.

That contract ultimately went to Northrop Grumman for a new missile system derived from its radar-hunting AGM-88G Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range (AARGM-ER).

But Lockheed Martin recognized that its entry to the competition could have much further reaching implications than the suppression of enemy air defenses alone. As such, the company is pitching this new missile design to the Navy as a multi-purpose air-to-surface weapon.

“For the US Navy, this is a multi-mission, highly capable system, highly survivable, affordable, so you’re going to hold many targets at risk with one weapons system that’s ready now,” Rick Loy, Senior Program Manager at the company’s Missile and Fire Control division told Naval News.

Its name, Mako, is derived from the world’s fastest shark, the Shortfin Mako, which is capable of swimming as fast as 45 miles per hour (74 kilometers per hour). It’s a fitting name for a weapon that’s capable of screaming across the sky at better than 3,836 miles per hour.

At 13 feet, the missile is, appropriately enough, about as long as a Mako shark might grow. At 1,300 pounds and about 13 inches in diameter, this broadly capable missile is only about an inch longer than the AIM-120 AMRAAM that America’s stealth fighters were designed to carry; though Mako comes with significantly more heft, at nearly twice the AMRAAM’s diameter and more than three times the weight.

Designed in a ‘digital engineering ecosystem’

This new Mach 5+ missile was among Lockheed Martin’s first to be designed from the ground up entirely within a digital environment, which is in keeping with broader Pentagon efforts to use digital design and testing to reduce the real-world costs associated with testing and design revisions.

By designing and then testing the weapon in the digital world first, Lockheed Martin can produce a much more mature design at the onset of operational testing.

Likewise, despite the high level of capability promised by this new weapon, Lockheed went out of its way not to invent any unnecessary components. Instead, when possible, it pulled from several already-fielded systems with existing and proven supply chains to reduce the number of variables that could potentially affect a production order.

As Lockheed Martin’s press materials point out, the firm also brought manufacturing engineers in at the earliest stages of development to help streamline the sometimes messy transition from advanced prototyping to serialized production.

Lockheed Martin has not been specific about the guidance system carried inside the Mako, but that could be by design. The weapon’s original intended mission set for the Stand-in Attack Role suggested the use of a multi-mode seeker that would likely include anti-radiation (radar-hunting) capabilities alongside GPS/inertial guidance and potentially a millimeter-wave radar seeker to boot, allowing the weapon to close with just about any target on the surface of the earth whether moving or stationary.

Yet, as Lockheed Martin has pointed out in promotional materials, the Mako was specifically designed with modularity in mind, allowing for the “rapid integration of mission-specific elements like warheads and seekers.”

Further, Lockheed specified that this modular design fully embraces the concept of open system architecture, meaning the Pentagon would not be beholden to the firm for future upgrades or updates. This is in keeping with force-wide Pentagon initiatives to field a new generation of weapon systems and platforms that are easier (and cheaper) to upgrade over decade-spanning service lives that are common for many of today’s military technologies.

Making hypersonics affordable?

One of the biggest challenges facing the laundry list of hypersonic weapons in active development for the US military is cost. In 2021, the Defense Department projected that some of America’s hypersonic missiles may cost as much as $106 million per weapon — more than the purchase price of a brand-new F-35 — leading many to argue that these missiles simply aren’t economically viable.

As a result, significant efforts to reduce the overall cost of these weapon systems have been underway for some time, with more recent assessments out of the Congressional Budget Office now projecting the per-unit cost of another Lockheed Martin-sourced hypersonic missile, the AGM-183 ARRW, at roughly $15-$18 million a piece.

And Mako continues this pursuit of cost savings by leaning into new additive manufacturing — or 3D printing — technologies. The Mako missile’s guidance section and fins are all produced through this additive manufacturing process, which Lockheed claims is ten times faster than traditional production methods while coming in at just 1/10 the cost.

Lockheed Martin has not disclosed the price point for this weapon, but it would certainly be predicated on projected order size, which would be impossible to assume at this point, with no contract yet in place for any branch to purchase this new weapon.

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