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DARPA Looking into Hypersonic Bombers
while(true) writes "As reported previously here on Slashdot, hypersonic jets from NASA has recently been in the news. Now DARPA is showing interest in the military applications and is to host a conference on hypersonic unmanned bombers. These bombers could be based in the US and yet strike from space at any place in the world within 2 hours. BBC has a report about these air/spacecraft that could be operational by 2025."
What the U.S. Army needs is, invisible hypersonic GIs. It appears, winning a war is not a matter of throwing bombs alone, see Iraq, see Vietnam...
So we can respond in two hours, now all we need is intel that isn't two DAYS old...
And these would be useful how? The USA already has the capacity to project massive physical force anywhere in the world within a matter of tens of hours (or minutes, if you include the Minutemen). How much more do they need? In any case, B-52s are more than good enough for the kind of wars they've been fighting lately.
It should make us wonder if this sort of rapid response is always a good thing to have? Perhaps having more than two hours to decide to blow someone up is a good thing given some folks apparent rash decisions.
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The thing I don't see any of these articles discussing is the technology that has been hiding in the wide open for this project for years. The aerospike technology of the X-33 has been an engine test-bed for this bomber for years now. Darpa funding has simply allowed a direct competition from manufacturers for the project now that a major technological hurdle has been passed. Come to think of it, this is kinda how stealth technology came about. Only when proof of concept was demonstrated with that program, everything went black.
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Well, I'd revise that to say "killing people isn't relating to people at all." With that said however, what is the "sophisticated" way to relate to certain violent criminal types (and yes, I'll even throw in certain US actions that are violent and criminal and misguided)? Do you walk up and shake their hand?
If Bush just went up to Osama one day, said "Hey, lets just put this all behind us" and shook his hand kissed his cheeks, you think Osama would say "Yeah, this is all a big mess. You US guys are really OK, lets be friends"?
I think you gotta face the facts that some people just won't stop, the hate runs too deep and is all they know. If you don't stay ahead of the millitary game you put yourself at the mercy of those people. Its the sad but true fact of living on this world. We won't ever all get along.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
"but not very much for making good relationships. " Perhaps you'd care to name a nation that spends more on aid to other nations and their poeple than the USA does?
"I think the point with hypersonic bombers as opposed to ICBMs is 1.) they are reusable ... ICBM's are not, and if I'm not mistaken these are the type that skim the atmosphere to get oxygen then benefits from no resistance of space thus making them more fuel efficient"
I don't mean to be mean, but this is the stupidest thing I've read in a long time. We have a stockpile of over 10,000 ICBMs. they only reason reusability comes in to play is if we plan on running out. The same can be said for fuel efficiency.
Also, do you have any idea how much it costs to design, test, and roll out a few hypersonic planes? Neither does the government, because they've tried three times and dropped it after severe cost overruns and technical problems. I don't think saving a hundred thousand dollars on fuel is valid justification for spending 30 billion designing a superfluous 'defense system.'
Kevin Fox
MOD parent up.
:). I may strongly disagree with Bush, DMCA, RIAA, Echelon, etc but that doesn't mean that I don't love my country.
I'm tired of the US bashing. Yeah sure we suck sometimes. Well so does everyone else. Its amazing what we accomplish with the population (top 5 in the world) and landmass (top 5 in the world) we have.
Sure we've fucked up some countries in our time. We've also rebuilt some and funded others.
Anyway this was just to draw more attention to the the parent poster
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
But for some reason, the mainstream media in the US has chosen to simply roll over and play dead for the government. Remember all the play given to that boring and irrelevant Lewinsky case? But the fact that the government lied to get us into a war, the fact that the government has marked the enquiry on what went wrong on 9/11 as classified, crucial things involving life and death for thousands of Americans, have barely been mentioned here in the US.
You wonder whether the Republican Party doesn't simply have thousands of incriminating photographs in a file somewhere...
... which is apparently the peak US-bashing time on Slashdot. The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah.
Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.
An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).
Hypersonic flight, whether ballistic or not, is incredibly hard to control. Manned or unmanned, incredibly hard to control. This sort of project will develop the skills and capabilities needed to engineer such an audacious plan. That knowledge barely exists now. How do you build something so insanely complex and difficult to control? How do you make it reliable? Someday, that knowledge of how to build impressive stuff will be used to build impressive stuff you'll use everyday.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
The only supersonic passenger plane (the Concorde) is being retired and DARPA wants to build a bomber that travels three times as fast. There's something screwed up in this country when we place a higher value on delivering bombs than people.
It seems to me that this is a defense department end run around an incompetent NASA.
For a while, the Space Shuttle was the only government sanctioned method of putting anything in orbit, then the first shuttle disaster happened and the military insisted on redeveloping non-reusable boosters.
Now the second disaster. The military might just think that they need their own space plane. This can put small satellites into orbit. It carries a payload to the edge of space. That payload is bombs but could be other items. It can survive the worst part of re-entry.
In the US, sadly, it is much easier to spend billions on a weapon then on a NASA budget item, especially given NASA's track record.
If this thing gets off the ground, with a few changes, after 10 or 20 years as a weapon the tech transfers into a cheap launch vehicle, and/or a hypersonic commercial airliner. DARPA does have a track record of sponsoring projects others cannot do that turn out to have non-military applications (the Internet is just one). The military purpose is just a way to get money into the research.
It seems to me that this is a regular "run-up-the-flagpole" idea that comes around every so often. It is rooted in the Sanger Anti-podal bomber project of Nazi Germany during World War II. Every 20 years or so since then, someone brings this up again.
Don't believe that this is right? Check out the x-20 Dyna-Soar project of the 1960's, or the Trans-Atmospheric vehicle projects of the 1980's. Remember the Reagan "Orient Express" speech?
Okay, move forward another 20 years, and now they are hypersonic bombers, not freighters or passenger vehicles. Now we are making no effort to conceal the military applications.
So it's supposed to be "cool" and all that, but it is just a re-tread and do we really need weapons of mass destruction? What happens when somebody cracks the system and uses one to attack our allies or attacks us? What then?
These things have always been too costly and too unproven to be workable. We haven't developed the engine technology as anything more than a drawing board idea.
It is the gee-whiz kind of idea that causes the rest of the world to crap their pants as we drum up another arms race that we don't need. It is a solution in search of a problem.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Why do you assume that a Cav can carry a non-nuclear weapon, but a MIRV can't?
A MIRV could carry a conventional weapon, but why would you?
Accuracy sucks. ICBM's are flying a long way, over basically uncharted territory. The specific gravitational anomalies and wind conditions have never truly been mapped. Yes, they launch regularly from Vandenburg to some islands out in the Pacific, but they've been doing that so much, they know how to adjust. Over the pole has never, for obvious reasons, been done.
Modern smart bombs and air to ground missiles can hit within inches. Or hit a truck on the move. The pilot can adjust at the last minute, or decide not to drop at all, because the intel was bad, and there is a large group of civilians in the way. An ICBM merely drops on their heads.
Throw weight. An F-15 Strike Eagle can probably carry as much as an ICBM in terms of explosive weight.
Image An ICBM launch would start a whole chain of reactions, in a lot of countries. The plume will be detected, and someone might launch in retaliation (Use it or lose it), even though they were not the target.
"We want to bomb you before we have time to actually think about it."
:\
The faster the planes can bomb, the faster the damage is done. Do you really want to live in a world where: a ruler can do something imprudent yet, not worthy of anhiliation and have his entire country bombed before dinner.
I don't.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
While we are still trying to get manned space flight in order, they are developed unmanned hypersonic bombers that can kill many people in little time..
Great, just great
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
> Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations).
b al health/aids/PWGFundingReport.pdf
Yes, if you ask what the US Federal government spends, as a portion of the total Federal budget, we look like punks. If you look at Federal expenditure as a portion of GDP, we look like punks. But when you look at the bottom line, we end up spending more dollars than anybody else. But that makes for bad anti-US rhetoric.
Take, for example, spending on AIDS/HIV prevention. Look at this document:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/nr/downloads/glo
The US government contributes more dollars to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS than anyone else. (see page 34.) Should we spend more so that our percentage of GDP is more inline with the UK? That might be a good plan. But to assert that we do nothing because our percentage of GDP is too low - that's ridiculous. Everything you could ever want to know about the amazing work that done with that money is here:
http://www.usaid.gov/
Go there, look at the work that money does, and come back and tell me it means nothing.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.