Epoch 2, the satellite surveillance network for hypersonic missiles.

There is a type of modern weapon that is keeping many military strategists around the world awake at night, hypersonic missiles. These weapons can travel at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound, in addition to performing unpredictable maneuvers during flight.

This makes it extremely difficult to detect and intercept them using traditional defense systems, but now the United States is betting on a new strategy to face this challenge, an advanced network of military satellites capable of detecting missile launches directly from space.

The project is part of the MWT program, developed by the United States Space Force. The new constellation called Epoch 2 is made up of 10 satellites positioned in medium Earth orbit, that region of space is a strategic position, high enough to observe huge areas of the planet at once, but still close enough to detect extremely weak thermal signatures, such as the heat generated by maneuvering hypersonic missiles.

When this new network comes into operation it will join the 12 satellites of the first generation of the system, forming a kind of orbital mesh, a network of sensors so distributed that it becomes extremely difficult to neutralize it with anti-satellite attacks.