What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 2966 of PE 0603673N. 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.
- Complete conducting system engineering analyses to develop system functional and performance requirements. - Complete establishing and managing the requirements baseline. - Complete performing system requirements decomposition to the subsystems. - Complete conducting a System Requirements and Design Review (SRDR). - Complete conducting a Preliminary Design Review (PDR). - Initiate design and fabrication of sub-scale sounding rocket flight test articles. - Initiate development of a structural system testbed to evaluate novel hypersonic control architectures. - Initiate prototyping of advanced control mechanisms and advanced high temperature seals. - Initiate detailed design of the full-scale flight test vehicle system. - Initiate integrating and qualifying sub-scale vehicle models for sounding rocket flight testing. - Initiate planning and executing sub-scale rocket flight tests to collect flight data on vehicle performance and control architectures. - Initiate performing laboratory testing of prototyped control mechanisms and advanced high temperature seals to assess performance and inform the full-scale vehicle design.
The increase in funding from FY 2026 to FY 2027 reflects the transition from early system engineering and preliminary prototyping to detailed design, fabrication, and integrated testing of critical technologies. FY 2027 efforts include detailed design of the full-scale flight test vehicle, qualification of aerodynamic models, execution of sub-scale sounding rocket flight tests to validate hypersonic vehicle designs and control architectures, and prototyping with laboratory testing of advanced control mechanisms and advanced high temperature seal designs. These development and validation efforts drive higher material, fabrication, and flight-test costs as the program advances toward full-scale demonstration readiness.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
Initiate the FLight Advancement of Structures for Hypersonics (FLASH) INP by working the following tasks: - Conduct system engineering analyses to develop system functional and performance requirements. - Establish and manage the requirements baseline. - Perform system requirements decomposition to the subsystems. - Conduct a System Requirements and Design Review (SRDR).
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) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 0.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 7.3 |
| FY2027 | Request | 27.7 |
This activity is 21% of project 2966's FY2027 request and 6.2% of PE 0603673N'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.
10 activities in project 2966
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.