iNarrators.com - News that Matters

US-AUS develop Hypersonic Weapons

Saturday, 17 March 2007

Hypersonic missile

US and Australia are developing long range missiles with hypersonic speed that could whip around the world in just a few hours.

[US spends billions of dollars towards development of Military & Weapons and has been the only country in history to use the most advanced and dangerous military technology on human population like the Nuclear Atom Bomb, Chemical White-Phosphorus, Laser-guided weapons etc.]

The following is a special report by Jeff Hecht from NewScientist.com

Ultrafast missiles designed to strike targets around the globe will be the first technologies to use hypersonic flight, with early prototypes set to begin flight tests this year, according to plans announced by the US and Australia.

NASA set the record for hypersonic flight in 2004 with its X-43A test vehicle, which reached 9.6 times the speed of sound, or Mach 9.6. However, by then the agency had already pulled the plug on its planned follow-on vehicle so it could focus on reaching the Moon and Mars.

Now, the militaries of the US and Australia are leading the development of the high-speed technology. The projects include a test vehicle called the X-51A, run jointly by the US Air Force and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and a separate DARPA-led vehicle called Falcon. In addition, a joint US-Australian programme called HIFiRE (Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation) has just announced plans for 10 test flights over the next five years.

Intake shape

All are based on so-called scramjets (supersonic combustion ramjets), which mix fuel with air and ignite the mixture as it flows through the engine at supersonic speeds. This means the vehicles do not need to carry oxygen to ignite their fuel, as rockets do. And unlike jet plane engines, which use fans to compress air, they use no moving parts – the shape of their air intakes sucks in and compresses air at supersonic speeds.

The engine for the X-51A uses the gas flow system tested in the X-43A and is being built by US firm Pratt and Whitney. That design uses a rectangular intake, which compresses the air and generates a shock wave that pushes the air through the engine vertically.

Boeing is building the vehicle, which will be mounted on a solid rocket booster and fired from a B-52 bomber flying at an altitude of about 10 kilometres. The scramjet will kick in after the rocket reaches Mach 4.5, boosting its speed to nearly Mach 7. The first flight tests are planned for mid- to late 2007.

The US Air Force and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation are pushing a more advanced, 3-D gas flow system in their USD$54 million HIFiRe project. The goal is to compress the gas in three dimensions – sideways as well as vertically – using a round intake.

Extra dimension

The extra dimension of compression allows "more shock waves and more efficient compression of the flow with lower losses", says Bill Lyons, manager of international research analysis at Boeing Phantom Works. The design should decrease atmospheric drag, allowing the vehicle to increase its range or the weight of its payload.

Ten tests of HIFiRE are planned to take place beginning late this year on the Woomera range in South Australia. Boeing, a partner in the project, announced on Wednesday that it would run three of the tests, beginning in early 2009. The programme hopes to demonstrate advanced scramjets capable of sustained flight faster than Mach 8.

DARPA's Falcon project is even more ambitious, with plans to reach Mach 15 to 20 – speeds needed to reach and return from orbit. Its first test flights are scheduled for December 2008.

Still, practical hypersonic flight remains a long way off. The first US Air Force missiles are estimated to become operational in 2035, and unmanned aerial vehicles that could fly as far as 3000 kilometres are even further off. "We're pretty close to the point where we could design a missile, but we're not there," Lyons says. In the longer term, air-breathing hypersonic craft could cut the cost of reaching space.

Comments

Add New

RSS