What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project S200 of PE 1160402BB. 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.
Efforts in FY 2027 will focus on completing the HSVTOL demonstration platform's development, achieving airworthiness certification, and transitioning from critical design activities to the manufacturing and final assembly of the demonstration vehicle. Key activities will include the completion of final Software Integration Lab verification testing, subcomponent manufacturing, and the development of the ground station and human-machine interface. Final assembly and ground testing will be initiated, encompassing manufacturing, assembly, and quality assurance processes for the demonstrator vehicle, as well as ground system checkouts, including engine run tests.
Decrease of $23.752 million is due to planned completion of the development of the demonstration vehicle and signifies the effort's transition to ground testing.
FY2025–FY2026: what came before
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
Continues efforts focused on engineering activities geared towards design activities for the HSVTOL demonstration platform. This includes completion of detailed design activities, finalizing control law development, software development, subsystem development, vehicle integration and engineering drawing release. Initiates manufacturing and assembly activities which includes material acquisition, tooling fabrication, ground station interface development and assembly of the demonstration platform.
Continue efforts focused on engineering activities geared towards design activities for the HSVTOL demonstration platform. This includes preliminary and detailed design, development, analysis, modeling and simulation, and system/subsystem verification of various engineering disciplines such as avionics, electrical, structural, propulsion, aerodynamics, and survivability, amongst other engineering disciplines.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 73.2 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 48.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 25.0 |
This activity is 23% of project S200's FY2027 request and 20% of PE 1160402BB'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.
3 activities in project S200
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.