India test-fires its first long-range hypersonic missile

India on Sunday announced that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has successfully test-fired the country’s first long-range hypersonic missile off the Odisha coast, a step towards strengthening the military’s capabilities with a new weapon system.
“The hypersonic missile is designed to carry various payloads for ranges greater than 1,500km for the armed forces,” the defence ministry said in a statement. The locally developed missile was tested on Saturday night from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island.
The missile was tracked by various range systems, deployed in multiple domains, and the flight data obtained from down range ship stations confirmed the successful terminal manoeuvres and impact with high degree of accuracy, the ministry said.
“India has achieved a major milestone by successfully conducting flight trial of long-range hypersonic missile from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island, off-the-coast of Odisha. This is a historic moment, and this significant achievement has put our country in the group of select nations having capabilities of such critical and advanced military technologies,” defence minister Rajnath Singh wrote on X on Sunday.
Only the United States, Russia and China have developed technologies to field fast-manoeuvring hypersonic missiles that fly at lower altitudes and are extremely hard to track and intercept.
In September 2020, India took the first steps towards developing a new class of ultra-modern weapons that can travel six times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 6) and penetrate any missile defence, with DRDO carrying out a successful flight test of the hypersonic technology demonstrator vehicle (HSTDV) for the first time from the Odisha launch facility.
That flight test proved a raft of critical technologies including aerodynamic configuration for hypersonic manoeuvres, use of scramjet propulsion for ignition and sustained combustion at hypersonic flow, thermo-structural characterisation of high temperature materials and separation mechanism at hypersonic velocities, the defence ministry said at the time.
The weapon has been integrated into the hypersonic vehicle.