EMERADO, N.D. – Lawmakers and defense experts gathered on Wednesday to showcase plans for a new complex that will house the SkyRange mission, a hypersonic missile testing program that North Dakota’s senior U.S. senator called a “game-changer” for the nation.

The announcement was made during a ceremony at Grand Sky Business and Aviation Park, attended by U.S. Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, along with a number of state lawmakers and local leaders.

The new $500 million facility will contain nearly 300,000 square feet of hangar space, 300,000 square feet of office space and support more than 600 jobs in the Greater Grand Forks region. Groundbreaking is slated for spring of 2024, with an estimated construction timeline of 36 months.

Hoeven – a member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee – said the SkyRange program will allow for more testing and be a boon to national security.

“SkyRange is a game-changer for the United States, because we are going to be able to develop hypersonic missiles with 50 tests a year, not four tests a year,” said Hoeven, R-N.D. “That’s how we stay ahead of the Chinese (and) that’s how we stay ahead of the Russians.”

George Rumford, director of the Department of Defense’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) – the agency overseeing SkyRange – added that such testing facilities serve as powerful deterrents against adversaries.

“Simply put, wars are won on test ranges,” he said. “That’s what matters. Test ranges are the greatest ability for deterrence that our nation has. When we show the world what we can do, it really gives pause to those who want to do harm to the world and our freedoms.”

Hoeven said that when he heard of the Air Force’s plans to decommission Global Hawk aircraft, he worked with military leadership to allow them to be repurposed for the SkyRange program.

“The Air Force had said they were going to retire the older Global Hawks – the Block 10, 20 and 30 – and park them in the desert or sell them to India, all these bad ideas,” he said. “I said ‘no, we’re going to fund those until we come up with a good use for them.’ And that good use is SkyRange.”

He added that the current process employed by the Department of Defense for testing hypersonic missiles on ships in the Pacific Ocean is inefficient and gives adversaries insight into the United States’ testing schedule.

“There’s no way we could develop hypersonic missions trying to track them through ships,” Hoeven said. “It’s expensive, time consuming and just doesn’t work. The DOD is seeing what our competition is doing and recognizes this is a paradigm that we need to stay ahead in, and win the race in hypersonics.”

Cramer said the new facility is a testament to Grand Forks’ innovative spirit in the field of unmanned aircraft systems.

“As I said from my very first day in the House of Representatives, I’d rather be positioned toward the future of war fighting than the past,” he said. “This is the vision of the future. It’s because of what’s gone on right here – it’s because of this hub.”

Rumford said the SkyRange mission complements what he called the three pillars necessary to win a conflict – the ability to see, kill and blind your enemy.

“If you look at what we have here in Grand Forks, you actually contribute to all three of those missions,” he said. “That’s what really matters – if you want to be relevant, you have to be able to support those three things.”

“Blinding is anytime you’re doing something and the enemy isn’t aware that you’re doing it,” Rumford added. “When we line up a bunch of ships, we’re exposing ourselves – we’re not blinding them. But when we put up some Global Hawks and run hypersonic tests, they’re blind to what we’re able to do, and we’re able to effect that test that much faster. At the heart of kill the enemy, if you really look at how warfare will be done in the future, it’s going to be autonomous systems. It’s going to be a lot of can our software beat their software.”

The planned SkyRange facility will be supported by a TRMC-run data processing center located at Hector International Airport in Fargo – home of the 119th Wing mission of the North Dakota Air National Guard.

Banish covers news pertaining to K-12 and higher education, as well as county commission coverage.