ARLINGTON, Va. — With hypersonic missiles becoming a serious threat to U.S. Navy ships, the Missile Defense Agency is focusing on using a space-based sensor for hypersonic regional defense to track hypersonic and ballistic missiles to transition to the terminal phase.

The MDA has been designated as the Department of Defense Executive Agent for Hypersonic Missile Defense.

“It’s going to maneuver and come in at high speed,” Vice Admiral Jon Hill said, speaking Feb. 1 at the Combat Systems Symposium hosted by the American Society of Naval Engineers, noting the challenge of defeating the hypersonic missiles.

Hill said tracking a hypersonic missile in flight will be the job of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor, a satellite with sensors to detect and track hypersonic missiles. Missile defense in the terminal phase would be the job of the Aegis on-board combat system and standard surface-to-air missiles.

Hill said of the hypersonic missiles that with the existing sensors “we see them, we capture data, we collect on them, while noting that the US sensors are “not always in exactly the right place, because a lot of between them are terrestrial and fixed because the sensors are specially designed for a particular part of the battlespace.

“We have that and the SM-6 missile with its nascent ability to deal with a hypersonic [missile],” he said. “We didn’t call him back like that when we got the letter from the NOC [chief of naval operations] to develop this program. But the idea was to handle high-speed maneuvers. [The SM-6] is really the country’s only hypersonic defense capability.

“We can do alerts today on hypersonics, so we’re not at zero,” he said.

“We’re going to take these first tracking hypersonic space sensors in coordination with the US Space Force and we’re going to put them into orbit,” he said. “It’s through a competitive process and we’re really excited about it. We have reduced the risk in the field so much that we are absolutely confident that these sensors will provide what we need when we install them.

The Admiral said terminal defense was necessary but not sufficient to defeat hypersonic missiles.

“We’re going to leverage spatial cues and fire control from space because to manage maneuvering around the world you have to look down,” he said. “The field of vision is limited by radars and we lack islands to install radars.

According to the concept, the HBTSS would detect the launch of a missile and the separation of the first and second stages of the rocket motors. Data from the satellite is relayed continuously and is used to create a track of the hypersonic glide vehicle. Remote tracking data was transmitted via satellite to an Aegis ship to calculate an intercept with a glide-phase interceptor.