SME consortium challenges majors on guided weapons

A group of Australian SME technology companies and manufacturers has challenged the big global defence companies vying for a share of $1 billion in federal funding to develop a sovereign guided weapons industry.

While the likes of Lockheed Martin, Thales and BAE Systems have lined up offering their global weapons systems, the group has ambitious plans including locally-developed hypersonic weapons.

Today Shoal Group, Black Sky Aerospace, REDARC Defence Systems, and Silentium Defence announced their HISPEX venture – a genuine and unique sovereign high-speed weapons collaboration.

HISPEX will pursue development of high-speed – including hypersonic – weapons and related systems and services to provide Australia with a locally-owned and controlled capability.

In the short-term, HISPEX will provide:

• A guided experimentation platform with the ability to represent increasingly realistic high-speed weapon trajectories
• A specialised Digital Engineering design capability for high-speed weapons, including a High-Speed Virtual Design Laboratory Flight data sharing
• The ability to leverage of flow-on benefits of Digital Engineering data, for subsequent intelligence analysis and usage within the Australian Defence science and technology community
• And a low-risk, commercially viable roadmap to development of sovereign guided weapons, including industry and academic partnerships.

The collaboration will support research and development of high-speed weapon technologies while growing the community of expertise in Australia.

HISPEX will provide accelerated technology maturation through an ongoing design effort supported by a series of flight tests, the first of which occurred earlier this year and can be seen in the video here.

HISPEX will be conducting a hypersonic launch later this year with further launches planned for 2022.

Picture: HISPEX

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