What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project ACX-01 of PE 0603468E. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Enhanced Propulsion Efficiency: Analyze new propulsion technologies, such as Rotating Detonation Engines (RDE) among others, that offer the potential for increased fuel efficiency in flight, leading to longer range and reduced operating costs. - Improved Thrust-to-Weight Ratio: Design a higher thrust-to-weight ratio that could enable more agile and responsive aircraft. - Advanced Flight Capabilities: Analyze unique characteristics of new technologies, e.g. RDEs, that could unlock new flight capabilities and operational scenarios. - Higher Thermodynamic Efficiency: Design new propellant methods for increased pressure that allows for more work to be extracted from the combustion process. - Compact Engine Design: Analyze new design spaces for increased efficiency to allow for a more compact engine design for a given power output. - Scalable Production: Develop processes and production lines for high throughputs of hypersonic components.
The FY 2027 increase reflects studies and concepts initiations including, but not limited to, the advancement of new technologies to enable scalable, fast, and agile production of hypersonic components at significantly reduced costs through enhanced propulsion efficiency, improved thrust-to-weight ratio, advance flight capabilities, higher thermodynamic efficiency and compact engine design.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2027 | Request | 56.0 |
This activity is 11% of project ACX-01's FY2027 request and 10% of PE 0603468E's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
14 activities in project ACX-01
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.