It's a good question. One major reason may be because air launched hypersonic missile tech is father along, and the Air Force and Navy want to use air assets they already have to move the deployment into the field faster. So its a development to operational field and money resources thing.
Martin Marietta ASALM design study included a ship based SAM. My point here is that it was a containerized ramjet powered missile. Northrop Grumman's proposal for a Maritime Strike Missile powered ramjet (hypersonic?) exhibited recently has what to me seems to have an uncanny resemblance to Martin Marietta ASALM from the late 1970s.
it wouldn't surprise me if they leveraged that tech , especially in light of the urgency at hand to deploy. A Navy Admiral recently interviewed about HALO mentioned that whether the final design was hypersonic or ramjet powered (less than Mach 5), what mattered most was getting a high-speed offensive weapon in service. Northrop Gummans proposal might fit that thinking.
It looks like the NG product is that, more or less, to my untrained eye.
Was supposed to be LRASM-B. Five minutes after the announcement it was cancelled. Then recently something LM was working on was released and it looks sort of like ASALM.
Depends what kind of data it was. Maybe yes, maybe no. Is it even still readable? Who knows? Could be in the form of boxes of moldy punch cards or faded drawings.
Yep, typically it goes off to Iron Mountain or similar for storage.
In an ideal world, maybe.
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Any idea what pylon that was intended to represent? Clearly some effort went into showing dual carriage on some kind of pylon.
Other than a B-52 I can't think of any US plane that could possibly carry more than 1 large hypersonic weapon on a single wing-mount pylon.
If that's the case that could be an F-15 pylon. I'd suggest maybe F-35 but is there room?
Maybe the twin launcher is for the F-35C.
The Bone probably could if you don’t mind initial cruise altitudes below 20 kft, and it does look a lot like their external pylon. Then again, will any Bones be left in service by the time it hits IOC? The BUFF should be able to just mount six to the HSAB’s if it has the standard 30 in lugs for 2,000-5,000 lb weapons.
To save overall length for carrier ops, I would guess the booster is inside the Ramjet's combustion chamber à la ASALM/LRAMS-B. However, keep in mind that Boeing as stated in the past that their publicly released artwork for hypersonic weapons is not necessarily representative of the weapon's actual configuration.
