US Military Seeks Hypersonic Weaponry

Dr. Eggman writes "In an interview with the Star-Telegram, the Air Force's chief scientist, Mark Lewis, talks about the USAF's latest research direction. The service is working on hypersonic missile and bombers for the purposes of reconnaissance and attack. In response to Chinese and Russian anti-satellite developments, the Air Force plans to develop weapons capable of sustained travel at Mach 6 to allow them to deploy against and take out anti-satellite launch sites before the enemy can fire their missiles. Furthermore, should the US spy satellite network be brought down, the Mach 6 recon flight systems would be capable of filling in. Air Force officials hope to deploy a new interim bomber by 2018, followed by a more advanced, and possibly unmanned, bomber in 2035." We've discussed on a number of occasions the scramjet technology that would power such vehicles.

Comments

HVM

[Missing_dc]

Didn't we develope Hyper Velocity Missiles back in the early 80s? No payload, they killed by traveling at mach8. I wanted one as a kid.

This is just corporate welfare

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

All these pie in the sky projects are simple ways of creating high paying white collar jobs in the home districts of powerful senators. The real serious immediate threat facing America is the possibility of a terrorist group smuggling in a low grade weapon, nuclear, biological or chemical into the country and detonating it. These hypersonic toys do nothing to protect us against such threats. But border security customs security and port security creates lots and lots of blue collar jobs at the ports and borders. Not at the home district of "bridge to nowhere" pork barrel Senators.

Regan talked about welfare queens. These hypersonic engineers are the new welfare queens.

Re:Wasting resources?

[Waffle Iron]

However, we do know that if you take our current healthcare problems, and try to bandaid on a fix like national healthcare, we will end up with some beast of a system that costs more and provides less.

Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.

We HAD mach 3 birds and weapons

[TheHawke]

The legendary SR-71 Blackbird, her kid brother the YF-12A interceptor, and the flexible, quick-shooting ASAT weapon. Why go faster? Hypersonic aircraft would run into even tighter restrictions flying in domestic airspace, fuel constraints, not to mention the logistics if the aircraft's requirements are so exotic it requires highly trained crews to maintain it.
"Kelly" Johnson, the father of the U-2/TR-1 and the Blackbirds, came up with a kinetic energy weapon that used no explosive in it. Dropped from 100,000 feet from a Blackbird bomber, the one ton device would have the kinetic energy of a large container freighter hitting at terminal velocity. No explosives whatsoever, just pure momentum. Couple that with a GPS guidance system and you'll have your own man-made meteorite that'll flatten whole city blocks from the impact alone, with pin-point accuracy.

Re:Wasting resources?

[j. andrew rogers]

Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.

You are conflating demographic and environmental factors with healthcare outcomes.

If you, for example, remove non-medical causes of premature death (car accidents, homicide, etc) Americans outlive other industrialized countries. Healthcare is only a small factor in life expectancy, and average healthiness is almost completely unrelated to healthcare in the industrialized world. The environmental and demographic factors are atypically poor in the US relative to the industrialized world.

If you look at direct measures of healthcare outcomes, such as diagnostic accuracy and disease survival rates, the US leads the industrialized world by a large margin. The elephant in the room in the recent Lancet Oncology study, for example, was that cancer survival rates in the US are much higher than in any other industrialized country in the world -- about 20-40% on average depending on the country and the cancer. So in this sense, Americans are paying more but they are also receiving much more.

The real situation is that the US has terrible non-medical factors that drag down its statistics but compensates with the best average medical outcomes by a huge margin. In most of the rest of the industrialized world, you have middling to good non-medical factors and middling to poor medical outcomes. In other words, the aggregate statistics are not measuring the same thing. Since we pay the medical establishment to produce positive medical outcomes, it would seem prudent to evaluate their efficacy based on those results and not on the number of automobile accidents people are involved in.

At a minimum, it would be foolish to trash a medical system that produces results such as cancer survival rates that no other system is currently coming close to. The US system may be byzantine and inefficient, but it also outperforms the rest of the world in the key metric of medical results. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water, at least not until a national healthcare system exists with equivalent medical outcomes.

Re:Dead before you hear it coming

[SETIGuy]

Bullets, bombs, missiles, grenades, lasers, modern cannons, etc.: You will be dead before you know what's coming. Actually, the bullets from small arms are designed to wound a large fraction of those they hit rather than kill them. That's one reason military rounds are typically full metal jacket rather than soft point. Soft point bullets expand or fragment upon impact and deposit more of their energy in the body. Military rounds are often designed to pass through the body with little expansion.

There is a logical reason for this. If you instantly kill an enemy soldier, you've removed one soldier from the battlefield. If you wound an enemy soldier, you've removed the wounded soldier and the two who are carrying him to safety from the battlefield and also terrified anyone within earshot. You've also increased the number of vehicles needed to carry the wounded, the number of hospitals, doctors and nurses required, and the overall cost of the battle. It's cold, heartless logic, but logic none the less.