The U.S. Air Force is working to combine an aerial target designed to simulate ballistic threats and a liquid-fuel rocket motor into a new, lower-cost hypersonic missile dubbed Angry Tortoise. The first test launch of the experimental design is expected to come by the end of the year. The project reflects growing interest across the U.S. military in pursuing new avenues to field hypersonic weapons, and to do so affordably, after years of persistent struggles in this realm.
Angry Tortoise broke cover at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2025 Air, Space, and Cyber Conference earlier this week, at which TWZ was in attendance. Aerospace firm Usra Major has confirmed to us that a contract it received from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) in May, valued at close to $28.6 million, is for this particular effort. Neither the project’s name nor its explicit focus was disclosed at the time, though the expected end result was described as a “tactical flight demonstrator.”
The Angry Tortoise project “works by leveraging partnerships with commercial companies to integrate their existing technologies into Department of War (DoW) weapon systems, enabling rapid delivery of new capabilities,” according to an information card AFRL had available at the conference this week. “The integrated advancements made through the Angry Tortoise project will provide the warfighter with the ability to deliver quick, precise strikes on both stationary and moving targets, giving military commanders more options to counter threats. The project’s focus on public-private partnerships is crucial to accelerating the delivery of these new capabilities by combining commercial innovation with AFRL’s technical expertise and resources.”
The key element of the current Angry Tortoise design is the 4,000-pound-thrust-class Draper rocket motor, a closed-cycle hydrogen peroxide-kerosene design. Despite being liquid-fueled, Draper can be stored for extended periods of time at room temperature. Most commonly used liquid rocket fuels are volatile and corrosive, which limits how long rocket motors that use them can be left ready-to-fire. This also typically makes them more hazardous to handle after being fueled. This has long made more stable solid-fuel rocket motors attractive for military applications, especially when it comes to tactical weapons, despite the performance advantages liquid-fueled types offer.
Usra Major describes Draper as a “tactical” derivative of an earlier design called Hadley, which uses a more traditional fuel mixture with liquid oxygen as its oxidizer. Hadley is notably the rocket motor that powers Stratolauch’s Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle. Usra Major developed both Hadley and Draper in cooperation with AFRL. The origins of Angry Tortoise lie in these developments.
“It started off as, they had an application [for the rocket motor work] for space access applications,” John Remen, the strategic engagement lead for AFRL’s Aerospace Systems Directorate, told TWZ correspondent Hope Hodge Seck in an interview on the floor of this week’s conference. “We were challenged to look at, hey, we want to change this paradigm in hypersonics and affordable mass, to be able to put more mass on target at low cost, effectively, and so forth. What ideas do you guys have that can do this?”
“And we were, like, hey, you know, this is right in the right thrust class,” he continued. “This is the right size, it’s additively manufactured, low-cost. And so, hey, let’s brainstorm. What could we do in terms of a quick demonstration to show some kind of a tactical missile application?”
Angry Tortoise combines Draper with the front half of an existing rocket called the Economical Target-2 (ET-2), produced by Teledyne Brown, according to an earlier story from Avaition Week. Standard ET-2s, which the U.S. military currently uses to simulate ballistic missiles as part of test and evaluation activities, use solid-fuel rocket motors.
“So, what we’re doing is basically taking the back half of it [off], and had to use a new outer shell and everything, because we now have liquid propellant tanks on the inside, the thrust take-out for the engine, and so forth,” AFRL’s Remen explained.
AFRL and Ursa Major are now aiming to launch Angry Tortoise for the first time at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico in December. The Draper rocket motor has already been hot-fired more than 300 times in ground-based testing.
The expectation is that the missile will be able to reach speeds of up to around Mach 4 or Mach 5, with Mach 5 typically considered to be the boundary between high-supersonic and hypersonic speed. Angry Tortoise is only expected to reach around Mach 2 during its first test flight due in part to the physical limitations of WSMR. Though WSMR is a sprawling range complex, hypersonic systems can fly so far so fast that they often ‘out-range’ even larger facilities on land.
“In 2026, we’re going to fly that system long-range in the Pacific,” Dan Jablonsky, Ursa Major’s CEO, said at the opening to a separate panel at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference.
In terms of the Angry Tortoise project’s immediate goals, it is important to stress that it is presently a science and technology demonstration effort. At the same time, there is a clear eye toward seeing if this is a viable pathway to an operational weapon, and one that could be readily produced at scale at a reasonable price point.
AFRL is hoping to prove out “the performance, the capability, range capabilities, and so forth, just the fact that we can do a low-cost, quick manufacturer [design]. Like I said, it’s additively manufactured, so that speeds up the processes and so forth. You can actually just add a bunch of more machines on the line to put out more systems,” AFRL’s Remen said. For the “space application, might need 20 a year or 30 a year. But the DoD says, hey, no, I need 300 a year. Okay. How can I get that spun up?”
“It’s all TBD of okay, yeah, it was successful, what are we going to do with it from a military standpoint?” he continued. “Our job is to define and help them, help [Air Force] leadership, understand, here’s the art of the possible.”
Remen said that multiple unspecified commands had expressed interest in Angry Tortoise and the capabilities that could be gained from the project. He also noted that the design could well further evolve and that future iterations might be significantly different, including using solid-fuel rocket motors. As an AFRL project, one would imagine the service is eyeing this as a starting place for an air-launched weapon, but it might be adaptable to ground and/or sea-launched modes, as well.
In terms then of unit price, “it’s really going to go to what are you trying to do, and … what do you consider as a reasonable cost?” he added. “You know, we have a warfighting mission, so I’ve got to win the war. Sometimes it doesn’t necessarily matter how much it costs, because I’ve got to win the war, because losing the war is far more costly than it is to win the war.”
“At approx. 60% additively manufactured, Draper costs significantly less than other hypersonic propulsion alternatives,” Ursa Major also told TWZ in response to queries for more information.
At the same time, Angry Tortoise reflects a frustration with the current state of U.S. hyperosonic weapons development and their costs. “The project’s moniker jokingly references the Air Force’s struggle to keep up with international competitors in the affordable hypersonic missile field,” Aviation Week reported, citing Nils Sedano, a technical advisor in the Space Access Branch of AFRL’s Rocket Propulsion Division.
“I mean, you got your hypersonic missiles, like your HAWCs and so forth, 10s of millions of dollars and such [each],” AFRL’s Remen said. “We’re trying to be a lot lower cost in that, but it also may not be as capable.”
HAWC is the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, a project the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency conducted in cooperation with AFRL, which has fed into the Air Force’s current Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) program. HACM, an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile, is expected to fly in the upcoming fiscal year after suffering delays.
In its latest budget proposal for the 2026 Fiscal Year, the Air Force confirmed plans to reboot work on the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), which the service had previously moved to shelve following years of checkered test results. The stated plan had been to refocus resources on HACM. ARRW is in a different category of hypersonic weapon from HACM, and is designed to launch an unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicle, as you can learn more about here.
U.S. Army and U.S. Navy hypersonic weapons plans have suffered their own significant setbacks in recent years.
The Navy revealed earlier this year that it had halted work entirely on its Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (HALO) program, another air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile effort, in late 2024. The service blamed “budgetary constraints” and said it would “revalidate the requirements, with an emphasis on affordability.”
The Army also now has its own program, called Blackbeard, geared explicitly toward accelerating the development, and hopefully fielding, of a lower-cost hypersonic missile.
All of this comes as China, in particular, is at least investing heavily in expanding its arsenal of multiple categories of hypersonic weapons. A number of new designs broke cover ahead of a huge military parade in Beijing on September 3, as you can read more about in TWZ past reporting here.
Russia’s Zircon sea-launched hypersonic air-breathing cruise missile has also now been demonstrated in combat in Ukraine. Russian forces have also used Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles, which reach hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase of flight, in strikes on Ukrainian targets.
“As Secretary [of the Air Force Troy] Meink emphasized on Monday, we have to innovate faster,” Ursa Major’s CEO Jablonsky said at the panel this week. “The only way we’re going to be able to maintain our advantage is to innovate, and we have to innovate faster than our adversaries. As we think about the current threat environment, our own arsenal, our own strategic capabilities, we must face the reality that our adversaries are moving faster than we are.”
Ursa Major and AFRL are now presenting Angry Tortoise as one way to try to help change that paradigm.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com