The UK wants to catch up with other powerful countries, so it is investing one billion pounds in a hypersonic rocket

The United Kingdom plans to invest approximately one billion dollars to develop its own hypersonic rocket and catch up with the technological gap.

Here's What We Know

The Ministry of Defence has selected 90 industrial enterprises and research institutions that will compete for contracts aimed at developing hypersonic technologies. These participants have been selected under the Hypersonic Technologies & Capability Development Framework programme and will compete for eight lots with a total budget of one billion pounds ($1.3 billion).

The contracts include hypersonic weapon concept development, missile modelling and testing, technology design and integration, missile airframe development, warhead development, hypersonic engine development, on-board computer development, and guidance system development.

It is clear that such an ambitious project requires not only significant financial investments but also time. The financing of the contracts is provided for a seven-year period, which means that we can expect the first results to appear in the very near future, in the 2030s.

As for the specific technical parameters of the future rocket, they are currently unknown, as the project is still under development. Nevertheless, we can imagine that these hypersonic missiles will be able to reach a speed of at least Mach 5 and actively manoeuvre and aim at targets.

Source: Ministry of Defence