China has spent years developing a robust industrial and research sector supporting hypersonic weapons development. To catch up, the United States has its work cut out.

The debate over whether the United States is losing the hypersonics race to China is often overly simplistic. China has displayed the DF-17 boost glide missile and continues to invest in longer range and sea strike concepts. Russia claims that its Avangard strategic glide vehicle is operational. Russia has also used hypersonic weapons in combat: in November 2024, it fired the Oreshnik, a MIRVed intermediate-range ballistic missile traveling above Mach 10, at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and used it a second time against western Ukraine in January 2026. The Pentagon classified the Oreshnik as an experimental IRBM based on the RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile. Iran has employed its Fattah missile against Israeli targets, with researchers from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies identifying Fattah debris from strikes in both April and October 2024. By early 2026, Iran had reportedly developed the Fattah-2, a variant integrating a hypersonic glide vehicle, and used in strikes against fortified Israeli military positions.

Hypersonic weapons have now moved from demonstration to combat employment. The United States has moved through uneven development of a range of hypersonic weapons, including the Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon, Dark Eagle, Conventional Prompt Strike, the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, and the Glide Phase Interceptor.

Yet the real import of the hypersonic race is more than creating and successfully testing a missile. It encompasses laboratories, test facilities, furnaces, machine shops, supply chains, and production lines, spanning aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, controls, and materials. The central question is whether it can discover, qualify, manufacture, and sustain the materials and components that allow vehicles to survive flight above Mach 5. On that measure, the public evidence points to a serious Chinese investment advantage, though the operational military implications remain less certain.

Why Hypersonic Weapons Are So Hard to Make

At hypersonic speeds, compressed air around a vehicle generates extreme thermal and mechanical loads. Leading edges, nose tips, engine inlets, control surfaces, and protective skins experience different heating rates during the same flight. Materials expand, oxidize, ablate, and fatigue. Electronics must function near structures exposed to temperatures far beyond those tolerated by conventional airframes. A NASA history of hypersonics describes the field as one in which aerodynamic heating dominates the engineering problem—a judgment that remains central to modern weapons design. 

The hardest cases involve sustained atmospheric flight. Ballistic reentry vehicles face an intense heating pulse over a limited period. Boost glide vehicles and air breathing cruise missiles remain in demanding thermal environments for longer portions of their trajectories. Refractory alloys, carbon-carbon composites, ceramic matrix composites, ultra-high temperature ceramics, oxidation resistant coatings, and thermal protection systems all become central to performance. A 2024 Nature Communications review emphasized the need to move resilient refractory alloys, composites, and ceramics from laboratory design into manufacturable flight components. 

The challenge is rarely the existence of a promising material. A certain specimen can perform well in a controlled laboratory test, yet still fail when engineers attempt to place it into full-rate production. Small differences in porosity, grain structure, coating thickness, or bonding can change performance under hypersonic conditions.

China Is Pouring Resources into Hypersonic Development

China appears to have built this part of the ecosystem with unusual alacrity. A Congressional Research Service report cited a 2018 statement by then Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin that China had conducted roughly 20 times as many hypersonic tests as the United States. Three years later, then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten told reporters that China had conducted hundreds of hypersonic tests in the preceding five years. By way of comparison, Hyten noted, the United States had conducted nine.

Beijing has also worked hard to develop the infrastructure underlying the tests. University of Colorado Boulder engineer Iain Boyd reported in Aerospace America that China had built 30 to 40 hypersonic wind tunnels over the prior 15 years, compared with five or six in the United States, and that Chinese researchers had produced substantially more peer reviewed hypersonics papers than US researchers during the preceding five years. Sustained publication growth usually reflects a larger workforce, more laboratories, more experimental campaigns, and more institutional attention. China has continued to expand that infrastructure: in 2023, the Chinese Academy of Sciences operationalized the JF-22, a detonation-driven shock tunnel capable of simulating flight conditions up to Mach 30. The JF-22 joined the earlier JF-12 tunnel, which played a central role in developing the DF-ZF glide vehicle used on the DF-17. By contrast, as of March 2026, the US Air Force was still soliciting contractors to reactivate a shuttered NASA hypersonic wind tunnel at the Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. A 2024 CASI dataset covering 2012 to 2020 identified 14,979 hypersonics publications containing at least one Chinese author—a corpus that dwarfs any comparable US figure from the same period. 

The Chinese advantage is not limited to a missile parade or a single test. It reflects the patient accumulation of laboratories, graduate students, test facilities, state directed research priorities, and manufacturing capacity. Civilian universities play a large role because hypersonic materials research is dual-use; while lightweight alloys, high temperature composites, coatings, ceramics, and thermal structures are vital to weapons development, they also have obvious applications in civilian technologies such as spaceflight, aircraft engines, energy systems, and commercial aerospace. That character complicates research security.  

The United States Is Moving on Hypersonics

The United States government has explicitly identified hypersonic materials and manufacturing as national security constraints. In June 2020, President Donald Trump issued a Defense Production Act determination stating that industrial base production capability for ultra high and high temperature composites for hypersonic, strategic missile, and space launch systems was essential to national defense and could not be provided adequately and in a timely manner without presidential action. In March 2023, President Joe Biden issued a second Defense Production Act determination covering air breathing engines, advanced avionics, position navigation and guidance systems, and constituent materials for hypersonic systems. 

The Department of Defense can fund more prototypes, but prototypes do not solve shortages in suppliers, furnaces, skilled labor, nondestructive inspection capacity, coating processes, or qualified production lines. Rebuilding those capabilities takes years. According to a Government Accountability Office assessment, the Department of Defense dedicated approximately $1 billion to hypersonic facility modernization from fiscal year 2015 to fiscal year 2024. The Department’s Test Resource Management Center planned to increase flight tests to roughly 50 per year beginning in 2025 through the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonics Test Bed (MACH-TB), using more flexible commercial testing platforms. These investments confirm that the shortfall is recognized, but the lag between funding and operational capacity remains significant. New suppliers must prove that their products behave predictably under extreme operating conditions. Existing suppliers must expand output without losing quality. In hypersonics, production scale is an engineering problem as much as a budget problem. 

A Government Accountability Office review identified 70 US hypersonic weapon and technology efforts across the government and noted the importance of test and evaluation resources such as wind tunnels and open air ranges. The United States has world class expertise in national laboratories, universities, and defense contractors. Its challenge is converting that expertise into a repeatable development pipeline fast enough to meet military demand. That requires facility access, workforce depth, stable funding, and test opportunities that allow engineers to learn quickly.

This effort also requires robust supply chains. To use one example, the transition metal niobium—regarded as a critical mineral by the US Geological Survey (USGS)—is used in several high-performance alloys because it can improve strength and resistance to deformation at elevated temperatures. USGS reports that the United States remains fully import reliant for niobium, and that Brazil accounts for most global mine production, followed by Canada. China has invested in portions of the Brazilian niobium supply chain through corporate acquisitions and equity positions.

Tungsten, tantalum, carbon fiber precursor materials, advanced ceramics, specialty coatings, and high purity processing inputs also sit within narrow supplier networks. Each has different risks, and none should be reduced to a single point of failure. The broader lesson is that hypersonics depends on an industrial ecosystem.  

The Hypersonic Race Isn’t Over Yet

China’s DF-17 shows that Beijing has moved at least one boost glide system beyond demonstration. Public reporting on the DF-27 suggests interest in longer range strike options, while Chinese naval and air launched concepts indicate continued investment across several mission areas. Russia’s Avangard demonstrates a declared strategic glide capability, although outside analysts continue to debate production scale and reliability.

US hypersonic efforts span offensive strike and defense, including Dark Eagle, Conventional Prompt Strike, HACM, and GPI. The CRS Dark Eagle brief describes the Army system as a ground launched missile with a hypersonic glide body and a reported range of 1,725 miles. Northrop Grumman has said its Glide Phase Interceptor work is aimed at countering regional hypersonic threats and reaching preliminary design review in 2028. 

The more durable advantage will belong to the country that can shorten the loop from research to qualification to production. The contest will be shaped by materials scientists, test engineers, machinists, coatings specialists, metallurgists, acquisition officials, and suppliers whose work rarely appears in missile range comparisons. Their cumulative progress will determine whether hypersonic weapons become boutique systems or scalable military capabilities.

About the Authors: Morgan Bazilian and Macdonald Amoah

Morgan D. Bazilian is the director of the Payne Institute and professor at the Colorado School of Mines. A former World Bank lead energy specialist and senior diplomat at the UN, he has published widely on energy and minerals security.

Macdonald Amoah is an independent researcher with interests across critical mineral supply chains, advanced manufacturing gaps, the industrial base, and the geopolitical risks in the mining sector.

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