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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."
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
So we can respond in two hours, now all we need is intel that isn't two DAYS old...
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 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.
"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.
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
"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?
If you don't need forward bases, you don't need allies. America becomes the uncontested ruler of the entire world. We retire into a "fortress America" that becomes more decadent, insular, despotic and xenophobic with every passing year. Eventually our empire, like all empires, falls. In the eyes of the current administration all but the last are Good Things and the end will be too far in the future for them to care about.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
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.
What would your solution be? What is your grasp on international politics? It's my barely informed grasp of politics that seems to indicate that some countries simply do not like us, period, no matter what our policy is (barring implosion and utter devistation for the US). Besides that, if we cave to the nations who don't like us to get them to like us, we alienate the nations that do like us and then they don't like us much (this is especially true when said nations are on opposing sides of the same conflict).
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq? Considering all past wars on other nations, there was extreme pains taken to avoid destroying strategic targets such as power generation stations, water reclaimation plants, amungst other targets. In fact, dispite the sounds of war, Iraqi citizens seemed to be largely unaffected unless caught directly in the middle of fire fights (noted by markets opened and filled dispite the siege occuring in and aroudn the capitol). Was there a diplomatic solution? Perhaps. How exactally do you negotiate with a dictator that abuses his people, and doesn't even bother to veil his hatred for you and your beliefs?
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...
Quote: "Perhaps you'd care to name a nation that spends more on aid to other nations and their poeple than the USA does?"
oh oh let me!
Saudi Arabia gives a greater percentage of its gross national product to foreign aid that any other nation in the world. Following Saudi Arabia is Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Even countries like Luxembourg give 2x that of the United States. Per capita we spend less on forign aid than any of these countries. So what's so special about us? These countries are certainly not economic power houses but still manage to find the generosity to provide more of their money to forigners.
... 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.
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.
Well, you _can_ win by just dropping bombs, but the price is pretty horrific.
That depends on your definition of 'win'. The Vietnamese would not see the US as winners, nor would Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Afghanistan and the jury is still out in Iraq but I doubt the US can win that one either. Killing lots of people is, more often, likely to lose the war. The only way to win is to earn the popular support of the people and that is something that the US has yet to learn how to do. Ghandi did it without an army and he beat the British when they were the strongest force on the planet.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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
It appears, winning a war is not a matter of throwing bombs alone, see Iraq, see Vietnam...
ahh but you are wrong grasshopper....
I can win any war by throwing bombs, espically if I have the largest bomb pile. It's how far I am willing to go in throwing those bombs.
IRAQ could have been completely dealt with in 6 hours.. Simply carpet bomb the entire country and finish it with a few well placed nukes. kill every man/woman/child in the country and you win. It's very simple.
trying to avoid wiping out a country completely and still win.... this is another task all-together... and is still difficult but do-able.
right now in iraq and what we did in vietnam is acting like police... it is always a complete failure at the end with lots of casualties on both sides... NO police action was ever sucessful in the history of man... the romans learned it early on.
in vietnam we were not wanted, so the people fought us... Guess what is happening in IRAQ.
I say pull out right now, and tell them if they rebuild to be asshats... we will be back... but not as police.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"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!
Resolution for what? Sadam still being the legal leader of his country? And that was our business why?
Did he have WMD? Nope.
Did he support Al Quedda? Nope. They hated him almost as much as they hated us.
Was he a threat to our "allies"?
- To Kuwait, whose citizens now hate us? Not really.
- To Israel? HAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, right.
- To Saudi Arabia, homeland of most of the 9/11 terrorists? No.
So, what was the problem? What did we have to get tough about? Nothing. It was all a pack of lies told to convince us that we were doing the right thing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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.
"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