Flexible Expendable Telemetry Collection for Hypersonic Testing (FETCH)

Instrumenting a flight path over the open ocean, such as the more than 4,000 nautical miles from Vandenberg AFB to the Marshall Islands, requires the use of some temporarily placed assets covering the planned flight path. A number of potential technologies can be applied to this problem. Each comes with strengths and weaknesses in terms of development time, development cost, cost to deploy, cost to retrieve (if retrievable), cost to retrieve the telemetry data, reliability, and security. NuWaves proposes the Flexible Expendable Telemetry Collection for Hypersonic Testing (FETCH) project to develop an air-deployed buoy to receive, record, and retransmit the telemetry data from a test vehicle. The approach seeks to produce a buoy which is low enough in cost to allow it to be a single-use buoy which is scuttled once the flight test is completed and the telemetry data has been retrieved. To make a single-use buoy economically attractive and less expensive than other approaches, both the RF payload and buoy cost must be minimized.