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from the Los-Angeles-to-Boston-in-less-than-an-hour dept.
In May of 2013, the Air Force successfully tested the X-51 WaveRider — an uncrewed, hypersonic "scramjet" capable of reaching Mach 5.1, or more than five times the speed of sound — by flying it at hypersonic speeds over the Pacific Ocean. Now, the Air Force is looking ahead to its next aircraft.
Air Force Chief Scientist Mica Endsley told Military.com this week that the agency is working on the next generation of its hypersonic vehicle. While the X-51 was a test designed to show that a scramjet craft was feasible, the Air Force now wants a vehicle that can "operate at the kind of temperatures you have when you are going at hypersonic speeds," and plans on building a guidance system that can also work at extreme speeds. The goal is to produce the new craft by 2023.
That is, of course, a long while away, and the US military has had some trouble with hypersonic defense technology. The X-51 was only successful after a string of high-profile failures, and last year, a hypersonic missile being tested by Department of Defense exploded during takeoff.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/2/8708255/x-51-waverider-mach-5-2023
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @08:12AM
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Friday June 05 2015, @08:30AM
Those vehicles fly very simple and predictable parabolic trajectories and can be aimed by making very small corrections, most of them early in their ascent. The reentry vehicle can be a perfectly optimized conic shape allowing immense speed because it doesn't need to turn very much. You want more maneuverability out of an aircraft, and it's powered during most of the flight. Creating a maneuverable aircraft at those speed is an immensely difficult engineering task and we don't have the technology especially materials science and the understanding of aerodynamics.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @09:11AM
All true for ICBMs, but I'd imagine that a guided surface to air missile like the R-300/SA-10 Grumble would need to have quite a bit of manoeuvrability, as it's radar guided. Of course, a missile like that won't fly for too long: at a maximum range of 150 km it will fly for less than a minute before it either runs out of fuel or hits its target, so you don't need materials that can survive for a long time at the high temperatures such speeds produce. It really ought to hit its target long before that becomes an issue.
Which brings us back to the question of why such an aircraft. Obviously it's not for firing hypersonic missiles as the GP asserted: we've had those things since the at least the late sixties.