AQM-127 SLAT

The AQM-127 Supersonic Low-Altitude Target, known as SLAT, was a target drone developed in the 1980s by Martin Marietta for the United States Navy. It was derived from the company's work on the cancelled Advanced Strategic Air-Launched Missile and used a Marquardt hybrid rocket-ramjet: a solid rocket booster gave the initial thrust, and after burnout the rocket chamber became the combustion chamber of a ramjet sustainer. The drone was meant to replace the MQM-8 Vandal, to be launched from a variety of aircraft, to fly at Mach 2.5 at an altitude of 30 feet and to be recovered by parachute for reuse. Martin Marietta won the design competition in September 1984, but flight tests from November 1987 were mostly failures, and Congress cancelled the program in the summer of 1991.