There’s a new acronym in town, and it packs a punch. BAM—ballistic aero-optics and materials—is the name of the nation’s newest, biggest and most advanced enclosed hypersonic testing facility.
For five years and $65 million—$50 million for research and $15 million supporting specialized equipment, including integrated hypersonics and autonomous vehicles—the half-kilometer-long, eight-feet-in-diameter facility was equipped with modern instrumentation and critical capabilities to help bolster the country’s national security efforts. With a controllable atmosphere including simulated weather effects, hypervelocity aerothermodynamics, beam propagation, correction and control, and much more, the BAM was officially dedicated at the George H.W. Bush Combat Development Complex (BCDC) on the Texas A&M-RELLIS Campus in Bryan, Texas, on April 24.
The BCDC is an organization within the Texas A&M University system that focuses on applied national security, research, development, testing and evaluation. The complex was created in response to the 2018 move by the Army Futures Command to Austin, Texas, which established a tight triangulation between some of the nation’s top military, aerospace and educational efforts.
“The intent to move the Army Futures headquarters to Austin was so that you would have military, innovators and academia all together in a hub where they would come and talk about ways to innovate and excel America’s technology processes,” says Patrick Seiber, who served as communications director for AFC upon its establishment in 2018 and serves currently as public relations director for the BCDC. “And among the criteria was proximity to top tier research universities like Baylor, Rice, the UT system and A&M. What the Texas capital did was not only sell Austin, but they sold the whole Texas triangle.”
On July 31, 2019, the Army Futures Command initially agreed to a -million, five-year cooperative for design and construction of the BAM. Two short years later, that expanded to a .2-million IDIQ contract—designed to increase funding for specialized equipment and research.
“This move formed a strategic partnership with the Army and the DoD writ-large by forming this organization at the A&M University system,” says Nathan Tichenor, research associate professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M. Following this cooperative, Tichenor says the BCDC then moved to identify a handful of critical technology areas of particular interest to national security, the DOD and the U.S. as a whole, including autonomous systems, air-ground vehicles, robotics, wireless communications—and ballistics.
“Directed energy and hypersonics are some of the things that we were working on already,” says Tichenor. “We built a facility called the Innovation Proving Grounds on the RELLIS campus that focuses on robotics, autonomy and networking.” In order to properly focus on ballistics, another facility would need to be built.
On top of the Army’s initial $96.2-million investment, the A&M system invested $80 million into facilities and the Texas legislature appropriated $50 million to support the project.
“This is a matter of commitment. There is a pretty significant mutual investment here,” says Seiber.
BIGGER BANG FOR YOUR BUCK
“We set out to build the BAM as a very large-scale facility to help supplement our current capabilities as a country,” says Tichenor, “to look at hypersonic materials for extreme environments in directed energy technologies.”
To pull the pieces for this groundbreaking facility together, the university would also need to pull together key people from the surrounding community: from labs and agencies, from industry and academic partners across the country, and ultimately, from general contractor Bartlett Cocke.
Bartlett Cocke has been involved in this project “since the beginning,” says Tichenor. “At the end of 2019, we had this idea sketched out on a paper napkin,” but the general contractor, alongside architect Jacobs and an astounding 40 subcontractors, would help bring that sketch to life, beginning with intricately detailed design work.
There are just a few facilities in existence that bear any resemblance to the BAM: the AEDC Range-G at Arnold Engineering Development Complex on Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and the Army’s Redstone Test Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. Both helped outline what to recreate in the design of this new facility, as well as what to create from scratch.
Tichenor says, “There are some facilities out there that we loosely modeled the BAM off of, but the design is really a from-the-ground-up, unique design inside and out. There’s a lot to this design that was customized to our needs.”
Jazmin Sanchez, project manager at Bartlett Cocke, echoes: “Nothing is normal about this project.” After breaking ground in August 2021—in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic’s effect on the global supply chain—Bartlett Cocke was challenged in ways as unprecedented as the project itself.
“Because there weren’t a lot of facilities to base this design off of,” says Sanchez, “it was trial and error with both the budget and schedule. We were also dealing with the post-COVID market—supply-chain issues, materials procurement, an increase in lead times. So that was another thing that pushed the schedule. With every trial and error, we’d go back to square one and try again.”
DON’T JINX IT
Considering the unconventional nature of this project, regular testing was conducted—and is continuing to be conducted—to ensure optimal safety along the way. “Ensuring the safety of our workers is our primary goal,” says Sanchez.
“These are some high-risk tests being conducted, but we’ve relied on our experienced personnel as well as the design team to tell us what those parameters are and to ensure that we follow them very, very strictly. We don’t take anything lightly here.”
After four years of trial and error, trying again and testing, the BAM stands—or lies, rather—at half a kilometer long, eight feet in diameter and is constructed primarily of U.S. steel. While Sanchez is proud to report zero incidents so far, with one month of testing remaining, “I don’t want to jinx it,” she says.
The BAM’s current half-kilometer capacity is already proving meaningful. Tichenor says, “We are already working with many customers who are interested getting in line to come and utilize the facility.”
Through all of the project’s challenges, the nuance and the unknown, Tichenor credits Sanchez and her team at Bartlett Cocke. “It’s a unique assembly of unique parts and pieces that have never been assembled in this way before,” he says.
If anything, the sustained success amidst unprecedented adversity on a remarkable project bodes well for the future of the BAM—including its plans for expansion.
“We envision a full kilometer,” says Tichenor. “From a national security standpoint, from an operational standpoint and for the critical technologies that we’re trying to develop, that’s really meaningful and useful. We can test things at a full kilometer in a fully controlled and characterized environment. Nobody else in the country can do that, so that will be a new tool in the tool belt for the United States.”
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