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Orbital speeds within the atmosphere, basically. Edit: I suppose that means the vehicle wouldn't need any aerodynamic lift when going at full speed; indeed, to maintain altitude it'd need negative lift.
Barely within the atmosphere, I assume. Mach 20 at commercial jet altitudes would probably melt the aircraft.
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They are. Chinese and Russian “advances” in hypersonics are pure marketing. The US was testing scramjets in the 1960s. The US has a hypersonic space plane. Alas, the media fell for it and billions are now being spent on “catching up” with our “peer” competitors.
All ballistic missile reentry vehicles are hypersonic too. Talk of "hypersonic" without specifying the technology and actual capabilities is quite silly. Presumably hypersonic cruise missiles is implicit context.. but I don't believe the general public understands that and the media is doing a generally terrible job of communicating it.
The Chinese hypersonic weapons everyone is worried about is a boost glide vehicle. Basically a ballistic missile with a hypersonic lifting body as its warhead as opposed to a blunt body RV you usually see. This makes it more maneuverable and potentially harder to hit.
The weapon the air force tested today is similar to that but meant to be launched from bombers instead of ground launched.
The actual scary ones are hypersonic cruise missiles. Nobody has fielded one operationally yet. But the US is by far the furthest ahead in this technology. In march they had a successful test of HAWC the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept. Scramjet powered cruise missiles like HAWC are more dangerous than conventional ballistic missile or boost-glide missiles because they actually fly. And therefore can do the things normal cruise missiles like Tomahawk can do. They can take circuitous routes. They can change their altitude. They can fly somewhat evasively. They can fly to an area and pick targets of opportunity. And other things.
Why does it matter? We've gotten much better at shooting down conventional cruise missiles. A few years back an Arleigh Burke destroyer had a number of Chinese built subsonic anti ship missiles fired at it by Houthi Rebels. It shot down every single one of them. These missiles are comparable to the Neptunes that recently sank Moskva in terms of performance. So modern warships aren't as vulnerable as Soviet era antiques. You need better weapons to kill them. hypersonic cruise missiles are much harder to intercept. Boost glides are of dubious utility in my opinion.
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What's the defense against a hypersonic missile then? Current Aegis and CIWS defensive tech will not hit something traveling that fast. Surely the Pentagon doesn't even need to justify budget increases when we give them more budget than they ask for every year regardless.
> Current Aegis and CIWS defensive tech will not hit something traveling that fast. Aegis BDM is designed to hit hypersonic reentry vehicles. CIWS is irrelevant, why even bring it up?
Ballistic hypersonic reentry vehicles. The entire point is that these new weapons are maneuverable in the atmosphere at mach 8+ all the way to the terminal phase.
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>Alas, the media fell for it and billions are now being spent on “catching up” with our “peer” competitors. These things are no joke. I felt the same before actually looking into it. China can effectively deny the South China Sea to our carrier fleets with their land based hypersonic weapons. There is absolutely no means of intercepting them with current technology.
The Pentagon does this every decade. They constantly need some sort of existential threat to respond to in order to justify budget increases.
I assume you have a smart phone and not an Amiga. By analogy, if your enemy has "iPhone" level weapons, would you want to face them with an "Amiga" level weapon? I doubt it.
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My money is still on Aegis BMD intercepting the missile during the terminal phase. Hypersonic glide-boost weapons are mainly for avoiding mid-course interception. When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase.
>When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase. Except the associated plasma shielding makes it invisible to radar. And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase. At those speeds, you're talking horizon to impact in seconds. We really have nothing…
All hypersonic ballistic missile reentry vehicles have this plasma stealth. That doesn't stop Aegis BDM from tracking and intercepting them. Have you ever seen a reentry vehicle coming in? They're as bright as meteorites, very easy to see.
> And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase.
These are the hypersonic cruise missiles; very different from hypersonic boost-glide missiles. This is what I mean about the media talking about "hypersonic" generically without specifying the technology they're actually talking about; it leads to people believing that 'hypersonic' is itself the technology.
It was an AGM-183 ARRW. The test on the 14th hit Mach 5, but they claim a theoretical top speed of Mach 20. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-183_ARRW
Reading through the timeline on that page, it sounds like Congress has decided to kill the project. I wonder if this successful test will turn that around.
We finally got ourselves out of the Middle East, but we gotta keep the military-industrial complex fed, I guess. We already spend more total and per capita than the next top ten countries combined.
It's so sad. We could do so much domestically, or just worked on influencing foreign policy by helping other countries, instead of military force projection.
How much of this is hype and boasting about military advances. According to this article hypersonic missiles are far from practical https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-physics-and-h...
I'd love to pick this article apart, but instead I'll just offer this: The Phoenix missile (which used to be carried by the F-14) is borderline hypersonic [0]. And it is shot at airplanes. Now imagine an Exocet-type missile but at a much higher speed. A fast missile does one very important thing - it reduces the time the defender has to react, and thereby increases the odds of the attack succeeding. Glide-paths, targ…
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All ballistic missile reentry vehicles are hypersonic too. Talk of "hypersonic" without specifying the technology and actual capabilities is quite silly. Presumably hypersonic cruise missiles is implicit context.. but I don't believe the general public understands that and the media is doing a generally terrible job of communicating it.
>All ballistic missile reentry vehicles are hypersonic too Sure, but ballistic trajectories are trivially interceptible. It's not just about speed. The new arms race is with hypersonic glide vehicles that are capable of maneuvering all the way to the target at mach 8+. With that, the weapon becomes impossible to intercept with any existing technology.
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My money is still on Aegis BMD intercepting the missile during the terminal phase. Hypersonic glide-boost weapons are mainly for avoiding mid-course interception. When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase.
>When you're going hypersonic, 'maneuverable' is relative; the turning radius is quite huge and such missiles will be easy for Aegis to track during the terminal phase. Except the associated plasma shielding makes it invisible to radar. And the Russian ones are capable of sea skimming and maneuvering at mach 8 in the terminal phase. At those speeds, you're talking horizon to impact in seconds. We really have nothing…