Slashdot Mirror
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."
Another story from The Guardian here ...And if your interested in another or Darpa's projects which might fall under the YRO category: here
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Why do you have such fast bombers?
The better to bomb the living fuck out of you, my dear.
"Darpa says: "This capability would free the US military from reliance on forward basing to enable it to react promptly and decisively to destabilising or threatening actions by hostile countries and terrorist organisations.""
Someone should let them know the solution is 50 years old.
Kevin Fox
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.
Why on earth would I care about DARPA projects? It's not like they've affectd my day-to-day life. I mean, why do people care about DARPA anyway? It's not like they built the internet or anything. Oh well. Maybe I'm just out of the loop.
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
It seems that the U.S. government has an endless amount of money for killing people and destroying property, but not very much for making good relationships.
The least sophisticated way of relating to other people is killing them.
in my understanding, the speeds of manned fighters and bombers have been limited by the need to keep the human inside alive during excessive G forces.
... haha
I wonder what the upper limit of these speeds might be, that wouldn't tear up the ship itself (like some falling meteor).
But the article did mention that a simple titanium rod would serve as an adequate 'bunker buster' only from the speed it would be traveling from space. In rod we trust
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
An unmanned system to deliver a bomb to any point on the Earth's surface within two hours... Well, what's wrong with an old-fashioned ICBM? Seems a whole lot of money to spend, and the only benefit I can see is that this thing is reusable. Reusability isn't necessarily all that great - look at the Shuttle...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Check out article four of this treaty.
--
Freeper Logic
I have to say I think the idea of intercontinental ballistic missiles loaded with a conventional warhead makes more sense. You could put a couple of those anywhere in the world with only 30 minutes notice.
"The whole project goes under the acronym Falcon - Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States."
hmmm... I think that's the most contrived acronym I have *ever* seen... was "COOL DEATH EAGLE" already taken?
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Two hours was the striking distance for the roving bombers in Dr. Stragelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
In what appears to be another carefully planned "shock and awe" tactic, DARPA is running its www.darpa.mil website on the Microsoft IIS/5.0 server.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Who Do You Want to Liberate Today^H^H^H^H^H In 2 Hours?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I was in grad school as an aerospace/fluids engineer in the mid 90's during the aerospace boom (a bit like the dot-com boom). Hypersonic aircraft were on the drawing board but never made it. Turns out we didn't have a sufficient understanding of hypersonics. Building hypersonic wind tunnels and shock tubes is very difficult so computational models were used heavily. The computational models did not have sufficent validation due to lack of experimental data, so designing hypersonic vehicles turned out be a lot more difficult than originally thought. Also the materials problems in building aircraft that can tolerate the heat of hypersonic flight is still very significant. Titanium ceramic materials were developed, but manufacturing and machining with these materials was prohibitively expensive and difficult. Back then it the thinking was that the hypersonic modelling and material problems could be rapidly overcome and this technology was a few years off, it never happened though. I kust wonder if this is not just another Darpa pie-in-the-sky project where they are assuming difficult and unsolved problems can be surmounted. Guess we'll see if this project materializes, but I am skeptical. I think the Columbia disaster painfully illustrates the significant problems of hypersonic flight. MM
You wouldn't have a computer to play on and entertain your bullshit notions about the world if not for the sacrifice we make in this country.
I'm an athiest, but God Bless America just the same for this.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I should hope it has built hypersonic aircraft. Otherwise there's been a huge conspiracy to mislead the public, and that concorde thing must be a hoax too.
Hypersonic is five times the speed of sound. The Concorde is supersonic only. Although the x-15 has been acknowledged as a hypersonic test platform it was:
A. A rocket
B. A test aircraft flown by NASA
To date there are no known flying hypersonic aircraft. Although there are a few test platforms for various airframes and engines (ramjets, wedge shapes, waveriders, etc) I know of no flying hypersonic aircraft that is public.
This will prove handy-dandy when someone needs a-killin'
tone
It is well documented that the USA has developed and maintains a large stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Even now the US is sitting on huge armaments of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, some of which are armed and ready to strike any city in the world within two hours. This rogue nation has already invaded and occupied one soverign state and has explicitely threatened several others. We cannot afford to wait until the USA has already struck -- we must force the Bush regime to disarm, or preemptively invade immediately to force a regime change. Our citizens' safety demands no less.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You may not be aware of it, but most of this 'new' capabilities was avilable to the US in the late fifties, in the form of the Navaho intercontinental cruisemissile. True, it was a one way weapon on operational missions, but test missions were flown with retn to base.
It's funny... the US developed the Navaho based on the idea the germans had in the A4b / A9, which was contrived as a way to lenghten the range of the A4 (V2), only to cancel it and develop the Atlas ICBM wich offered the potential for longer range and shorter reactiontime... History seems to run in circles, just like a wheel...
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
Much as I abhor the idea of war, I find myself fascinated by the instruments with which it is waged. I am ashamed of this.
American society needs to get over this Cold War fascination with ever larger, more powerful, and more complex military technology. The military is not the solution to every problem, they are just a last resort when we have no real solution.
We need to expend more effort developing technologies that will really improve our lives, no matter how gee-whiz hypersonic bombers, planetary annihilation lasers, and the like, may be.
Even human cloning would be better than this. Honestly.
Right, sure.
Kinetic weapons have the possibility to deliver effective yields greater than any of our current chemical devices.
1 ton of TNT yields around 10^10 J.
You, accelerated to 1 km/sec, will yield approximately 100(kg)*(1000 (m/sec)^2/2 = 5*10^7 J on impact. Not even close.
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.
...the U.S. has learned that it can't depend on too many countires for support. Especially when those countries are making a profit from savage dictators or bent on restoring the European status quo to where it was around 1680.
So, the U.S. has decided not to be in a position to have to depend on anyone.
If we're attacked, we'll be able to respond without having to listen to complaints from Middle Eastern kleptocracies, European hegemonists, etc.
Good move, IMHO.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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.
With the leadership of this country seriously questionable, the developement of these bombers may further encourage irresponsible wars/police actions/whatever.
On the other hypersonic bombers sound really really cool.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
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.
Yea but the TNT radiates it's energy in all directions from a volume that isn't as concentrated as a kinetic weapon.
All of the kinetic energy in a titanium rod by contrast would be directed on the target. It would penetrate a hardened target extremely well.
If TNT worked was effective against armored targets wouldn't modern tanks use explosive shells rather than depleted uranium darts????
"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!
Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations).
Percentage of that dedicated to military aid to allies: ~50% (to Israel, mostly)
Percentage of total aid that comes directly back to US companies: ~70%
Percentage of people polled that think we spend too much on foreign aid: 75%
Average response to the question, "how much should we spend on foreign aid?": 8.4%
What you reap is what you sow.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
It's fun to be a smart ass.
But the figures for US foreign aid and how much goes to military "aid" are accurate. Google for it, and you will find many reliable sources.
As for the other figures, they're just from a survey. From the Boston Globe, if I recall correctly.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Yes, the USAF and DARPA have been interested in hypersonic bombers for a long time. Hence the X-15 hypersonic test aircraft and the NASA X-43 hypersonic ramjet test aircraft. The stunning success of the SR-71 coupled with the shootdown of the F-117 over Serbia has soured the USAF's opinion of stealth slightly in favor of higher speeds for avoiding air defenses.
That is why the "Future Strike Aircraft" (which shall probably be designated "B-3") will be relying on high speed rather than purely signature reduction.
*Note that the FSA will not be hypersonic, it will cruise at 2-4 Mach.
As long as there are threats, the US will need to have a strong military. And the rest of the world should be glad that the US is not in the business of building an empire.
And to fund this war mindset continually, we'll invent the threat, continually.
The US is building an empire, and the rest of the world is not glad about it.
This whole "peace through strength" mindset is total bullshit and if we could
rid the world of people that think that way, the rest of us would be better off.
Yeah, I know, I'm dreaming.
To save you time, here's your response:
"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who
rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions
the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went
on your way."
"Catapult - Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon" is a book about exploring "the mind of the weapon maker". An artist in (inevitably) California got an art grant to build a catapult by claiming it was conceptual art, to find out what it's like psychologically to build a tool of destruction.
He concluded that the project was a failure, because building the catapult felt just like building anything else. Bzzt! It was a success.
If you're like me, you're just as fascinated by the unarmed SR-71 as you are by weapons. The fascination is with the height of the technology the military uses, not with the horrors that it can produce.
I bet you're not at all fascinated by the machetes used in the Rwandan genocide.
What's shameful is failing to apply our critical thinking skills to the political process.
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
Skynet!
Hacking the Network
> 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.
Nothing has happened yet. Writing a story about this is like saying that the US is drawing up contingency plans for an evacuation of Liberia. News flash! Military planners have detailed mission plans for a variety of operations in every country on the globe. By the same token, DARPA investigates new technologies all the time, but doesn't necessarily fund research with equal emphasis.
DARPA has nothing to do with whether the Democrats or Republicans are in charge of the government. Just as Colin Powell and hundreds of thousands of career military personnel have served under various Democratic and Republican administrations, the folks at DARPA do their job regardless of who decides what projects get priority.
I'm not thrilled about the direction this country has taken since 9/11 either, but let's not equate this DARPA story with the end of American innocence. Calling Chicken Little on all things military only makes non-Bushites look simplistic and ill-informed.
Don't blame DARPA. Blame your elected officials. More accurately, blame the American public for failing to exercise their democratic responsibilities. Blame those who don't vote, blame those who make excuses about why they don't pay attention to their own government. Blame the fat and happy Americans who wave the flag when we send the boys and girls to Iraq, then are totally shocked that the war isn't truly over.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Bush will invade shortly to prevent the construction of these weapons. You can't have these dangerous WMDs. I hear there are nucular facilities in the same country too.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Are all of our military thinkers as anachronistic? The enemy of tomorrow will operate like Hamas, not the Red Army. These bombers are pointless playthings that demonstrate a serious inability to grasp the evolving threat scenario.
True. But war has historically been a great spur to innovation (computers, rockets, etc.), and technology developed for the military often has peaceful uses. If the military can fund the expensive design and testing work on hypersonic engines, we may eventually see a mach-7 airliner.