Cummings fine-tunes Hellhound drone for Golden Dome mission

[ad_1] Cummings Aerospace unveiled a variant of its Hellhound drone designed to fulfill homeland protection missions on the House and Missile Protection Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, this week.

The corporate is taking its S3 variant and beefing it up into a brand new S4 variant to tackle air protection missions, notably countering drone threats, that might match inside the framework of President Donald Trump’s homeland missile protection defend dubbed Golden Dome.

The turbojet-powered, 3D-printed Hellhound S3 drone can carry quite a lot of payloads, and the corporate is placing that model ahead as a loitering munition possibility for a contest that the U.S. Military is planning to kick off this 12 months.

The S4 variant, designed to tackle Golden Dome mission units, is a scaled-up model of the S3 that adopts its modular structure such because the detachable nostril that permits the unmanned aerial system to shift from countering drones to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance or serving as a weapon itself like a low-cost cruise missile, in line with Sheila Cummings, the corporate’s CEO.

The S4 is “actually a multimission functionality in addition to a multilaunch platform functionality,” she added, “so ground-based is form of the first, however then the airframe and launch canister can assist each an air- and sea-based launch.”

“Mobility and multimission functionality are clearly paramount to any type of layered method for Golden Dome,” she stated.

Whereas the S3 variant is roughly 12 to 14 kilos, relying on the payload, the S4 falls within the 45-pound vary. However the majority of the potential makes use of the identical software program, additive manufacturing strategies, 3D-printed supplies and different commercial-off-the-shelf elements.

The S4 is within the engineering improvement part and the corporate is constructing prototypes. The plan is to enter flight checks with the potential from as early as this fall via subsequent spring, Cummings stated.

Just like the S3 manufacturing technique, the S4 design additionally takes into consideration the fact that it's going to have to be manufactured at a big scale.

The army is altering the way in which it acquires weapon programs and, in lots of instances, requires corporations to show they will construct programs at scale as a part of aggressive acquisitions. Traditionally, a weapon system is likely to be chosen for its efficiency on the battlefield with out a lot consideration paid to the quantity of labor it will take to construct a system and even how secure the provider base was.

The Huntsville-based firm selected an area subsequent door to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, residence to this system workplace and testing and improvement for Military aviation, in 2021 and designed and constructed a facility meant to supply massive numbers of the drones.

A big portion of the Hellhound air automobile is made utilizing commercially accessible 3D printers in-house and shopping for commercially accessible commonplace elements that aren't distinctive to just some suppliers, Cummings stated.

“If you consider low-cost options — that’s a part of the technique — is we've got to design one thing that we will get screws from a number of distributors, we will get 3D print materials from a number of distributors,” she stated. “We speak about beautiful payloads, that’s a unique problem, however electronics, we've got to verify we will supply them from a number of distributors.”

For the Huntsville facility, Cummings stated her aim is to supply no less than 100 S3 air autos a month.

“The identical distributed manufacturing method that we've got thought-about for the Hellhound S3 via our provider companions is identical method that we’re trying to take with S4 once more,” Cummings stated, akin to, “the mixture of U.S. and worldwide companions [and] licensing agreements for the automobile design, whether or not it's with the federal government or with trade companions, to be able to meet the manufacturing demand.”

The corporate is “effectively suited to convey ahead the answer set for Golden Dome as a part of that layered defensive technique,” she stated. “Cummings Aerospace was constructed on missile protection applications. That’s how we first obtained began, and so we've got, during the last 16 years, contributed to nearly each interceptor, sensor or [command-and-control] program inside the missile protection portfolio.”