“None of this will happen if our team is unable to convince the Congress that we need to take a right turn in our space architecture,” Mike Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said.

“I think it was the right decision to pause the program. I call it a strategic pause to make sure we were doing things right,” Vice Adm. Jon Hill, MDA director, said here Aug. 8 during the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

The U.S. Army will award a contract using other transaction authority within the next three weeks for a company to produce a common hypersonic glide body (C-HGB), according to a service official.