The Department of War has awarded Task Area 3 of the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program to Stratolaunch and Varda Space Industries, according to a Thursday announcement from the Test Resource Management Center and Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division.
The MACH-TB program is intended to provide a government-managed, commercially supported flight test infrastructure for hypersonic systems, which operate at speeds above Mach 5. Task Area 3 introduces reusable and recoverable flight test concepts, expanding beyond the one-time-use missile-based tests that have historically dominated development.
Under the Task Area 3 award, Stratolaunch and Varda will provide launch services and flight test vehicles designed to be recovered and reused, allowing multiple test flights from a single system. Stratolaunch operates a large, air-launched platform designed to deploy high-speed vehicles from altitude, while Varda focuses on spacecraft and reentry vehicle development.
These reusable and recoverable systems are expected to support repeated experiments and instrumentation recovery.
“This award marks an important milestone in advancing the nation’s hypersonics testing ecosystem,” said Tony Kestranek, vice president of S2MARTS at NSTXL. “By expanding into reusable and recoverable flight test solutions, MACH-TB 2.0 is enabling faster, more affordable, and data-rich testing.”
MACH-TB 2.0 is structured around multiple task areas intended to work in parallel. Task Area 1, awarded in late 2024 to Kratos Defense and Security Solutions, covers systems engineering, integration and testing across subscale and full-scale hypersonic vehicles, while a future Task Area 2 is expected to add additional test vehicles and integration options.
Following the Task Area 1 award, Kratos Senior Vice President Michael Johns said the program addresses “the need for rapid and affordable hypersonic flight testing to quickly develop and field hypersonic technologies.”
Program officials have stated that the combined task areas are intended to move toward a sustained test cadence of up to 50 hypersonic flight tests per year.
