Boeing

The warhead of the Boeing Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) successfully penetrated a thick, reinforced concrete target with no adverse affect on the casing or the fuze in a recent sled test.

"This successful test is significant in demonstrating the effectiveness of our low-cost, low-risk warhead design for JASSM," said Jim Gates, vice president and program manager for JASSM in the Boeing Phantom Works.

The sled test was conducted Jan. 24 at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., using an inert warhead and an instrumented fuze. The purpose was to collect full-scale test data to validate the models used for predicting the performance of the warhead casing and fuze.

"The warhead performed as predicted and met all expectations," said Elmer Lueker, the JASSM payload integrated product team leader in Phantom Works. "After experiencing shock loads as high as 12,000 Gs, there was no deformation of the casing and the fuze timing delay performed to the millisecond." The warhead struck the thick, reinforced concrete target, penetrated through it and traveled another half mile down range. The clean exit hole it left indicates that it had maintained the desired straight trajectory while traversing the thick target.

According to Lueker, the casing sustained nothing more than scratches on its nose, and the aft closure and fuze assemblies were intact. "This is a real tribute to the quality of the design and analysis tools we've developed for this program," he said.

The warhead is approximately 60 inches long, 12 inches in diameter, and 900 pounds in weight (which includes over 200 pounds of explosive). It uses a fuze that has already been qualified on another program.

A live warhead test also is planned at Eglin Air Force Base in the near future. In addition to these tests, the warhead has already successfully passed a "fast cookoff" requirement for munitions testing. This test exposed a live warhead to a jet fuel fire environment over a long period of time to ensure it will not explode.

The Boeing JASSM program is being conducted in the Phantom Works in St. Louis, Mo. The program is on schedule and on budget and offers an affordable, effective, low-risk weapon system solution that meets all requirements and provides other significant operational benefits as well.

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