Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber

derekmead writes "Hot on the heels of the U.S. Air Force's most recent failed test of an unmanned hypersonic vehicle, Russia now says it wants to jump into the hypersonic game with a long-range bomber. Will Russia's newest Bear fly at 4,500 miles an hour? The Russian military sure hopes so. 'I think we need to go down the route of hypersonic technology and we are moving in that direction and are not falling behind the Americans,' Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Russian television. 'The question is will we copy the Americans' 40-year experience and create a [Northrop] B-2 analog or will we go down a new, ultramodern technology route, looking to the horizon, and create a machine able to penetrate air defenses and carry out a strike on any aggressor.' The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds."

Comments

Good

[Sparticus789]

Glad someone else is stepping up to the plate. Development on such equipment could easily lead to civilian hypersonic aircraft, getting rid of 15 hour flights to Australia and such. Also sparks research on better ways of space travel, as the scramjet is closer to being space capable than a traditional jet engine.

Re:Good

[Richard_at_work]

The tanks leaking was not the reason for taking off with a low fuel load - see my post above.

In service, Concorde made plenty of profit for British Airways (no idea about Air France) and the clientele that flew on it loved it - it had a smooth, quiet ride and engine noise was not an issue for those in the cabin (the engines are set back toward the very end of the cabin and some distance from the fuselage, not to mention underneath a wing).

Re:Good

[Sparticus789]

Fifteen!? Luxury! From the UK you're looking at about 24 hours *flying* time, ignoring any time on the ground when you stop over somewhere in the middle. It's a good job I enjoy reading on flights :) Faster planes would be good... faster and more efficient planes would be amazing!

15 hours for a non-stop flight. Looking it up, it would appear the longest flight time for a commercial flight is 18 hours 50 minutes, from New York to Singapore.

Re:Good

[Xiterion]

Propelling a train in a tube with air pressure would make the problem of drag worse, not better. Sure, it's better for the vehicle, but overall you have to cram your air mass through the tube, drastically increasing the surface area that is exposed to the high velocity air stream. That's not to say such a pneumatic tube scheme couldn't work for lower speed transports, just that it doesn't seem to be a feasible option for ultra high speed transport.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently read that the Concorde, while taxiing into takeoff position, used as much fuel as a modern airliner uses getting all the way to its destination

That says more about the reliability of your reading material than the fuel efficiency of the Concorde. It's incorrect by three orders of magnitude.

A 777 uses ~120000kg of fuel for a transatlantic flight. A Concorde uses ~80000kg for the same flight, and ~200kg to taxi into takeoff position.

Re:Good

[ColdWetDog]

You forgot the 'boom' part of it in the middle.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

He read that on /. a few weeks ago, and a number of us dug into the details. It turns out to come from the BBC, and is a heavily-rounded, but essentially correct, comparison of the Concorde's taxi allowance to some 737 flavor on one of the shortest scheduled airline flights (just across the English Channel, IIRC), asphalt-to-asphalt.

Of course, the short hop is carrying enough fuel for the hop (plus a bit for diversion, etc.), while the Concorde is lugging fuel for an entire Atlantic crossing, so the roughly comparable passenger load didn't mean as much as we were meant to think.

Re:Good

[nojayuk]

The problem is that engine design improvements for airliners over the past fifty years have been aimed at subsonic flight regimes producing the modern high-ratio bypass turbofans where the core jet turbine only produces 15-20% of the direct thrust and the fan produces most of the "push". Sadly fans don't work in supersonic regimes although if some aerodynamic Einstein ever comes up with a solution then the world will beat a path to her door.

That restricts supersonic flight to rockets, scramjets etc. and to pure jet engines with variable intake nacelle structures that can slow the incoming air to subsonic speeds so it can be compressed, burned and turned into thrust. The Olympus 593s that powered the Concordes are fifty-year-old designs. Modern engines with similar capabilities are a bit smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient but they are not even twice as efficient as the originals.

Re:Good

[Solandri]

In service, Concorde made plenty of profit for British Airways (no idea about Air France)

Concorde as a plane made a profit. As an aircraft model, it did not. The problem was its huge operating cost for a trans-Atlantic flight (somewhere between $1500-$2500 per passenger - if the crash hadn't killed it, the spike in fuel prices in 2007-2008 would have). That meant your clientele were only a thin sliver of the overall market, and most of them were concentrated on a few routes (between major economic centers, or an economic center and major resort destination). On top of that, a few planes completely saturated your market on a route. That's fine if you're the only carrier which flies the plane on one of those golden routes. But if you were hoping to sell hundreds of the planes to recoup the billions of pounds/francs spent developing the aircraft, you're totally screwed.

Yeah if you got one of the $100 HP Touchpads during its closeout sale, it was hugely profitable for you. But the fact that HP never recouped its huge investment in developing the device means it was a financial failure.

and the clientele that flew on it loved it - it had a smooth, quiet ride and engine noise was not an issue for those in the cabin (the engines are set back toward the very end of the cabin and some distance from the fuselage, not to mention underneath a wing).

Concorde seat width was 17.8". Most economy class seats are 17"-18". Seat pitch was 37" which is slightly better than the 31"-34" norm for economy, but not by much. You basically paid first class price for an economy-plus class seat. But the service, speed, and experience were top-notch. I'm sad I never got a chance to fly it, but don't kid yourself - it simply wasn't economically competitive with regular air travel.

"doesn't seem particularly realistic"?

[G3ckoG33k]

"doesn't seem particularly realistic"?

Huh? Sun Tzu: Never underestimate your opponent

Oooh! Cold War II!!

[Anonymous Coward]

With the Military Industrial Complex as The Winner. Gotta insure that nothing stops the river of cash flowing into "defense" (on either side.)

Re:Back to the Future...

[Jeng]

Except for being the wrong plane for the job.

It is a surveillance plane, not a bomber and not a fighter.

It takes pictures and goes fast and there is no room for carrying ordnance. It can't even take off with it's fuel tanks full.

Didn't we go through this fast-bomber thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

XB-70 Valkyrie on our side, and the Soviets had something along those lines as well.

Then surface-to-air missiles showed up, and it became clear no bomber could hope to outrun them, so we went with low-observable and/or terrain-following tech. Remember, it's easier to make a missile capable of X speed (just a motor, a warhead, and fuel for one quick interception) than a bomber flying X speed (many warheads, release mechanism, crew, and fuel to carry all that stuff a thousand miles), so you need a massive technological edge to win.

So... does Russia really think they can make hypersonic bombers, but some enemy that's worth using them on can't make even faster hypersonic SAMs?

Re:Didn't we go through this fast-bomber thing?

[Baloroth]

There are other uses to a hypersonic aircraft than simply dodging missiles. The ability to arrive on target in minutes instead of hours, for example. Plus, even if the bomber isn't technically faster than the missile, missiles have limited fuel capacity and require a certain reaction time before they can be fired, so if you can build a bomber fast enough, by the time the missile is fired it can't reach you before it runs out of fuel. This is even more true if you are traveling at extremely high altitudes. If you have a bomber traveling at Mach 5 (1 mile per second, roughly) and a missile traveling at Mach 6 launched at the bomber when it is 20 miles away (easily possible for a high altitude bomber to hit a target that far away), it will take 100 seconds to hit, in which time the missile must travel 120 miles, which is outside the range of, say, a Patriot missile (which travels at Mach 5). And the higher the speed, the more fuel it takes for the same distance. A bomber can afford that. It's a lot harder for a disposable missile to do the same.

Oh Russia

[mumblestheclown]

You know, because a dictatorial kleptocracy with no political ideology to speak of and which is ranked #53 in per capita GDP needs to defend itself against brave young women in punk bands with these.

Re:Oh Russia

[shutdown -p now]

needs to defend itself against brave young women in punk bands with these

Haven't you heard? The so-called "brave young women" are agents provocateur on CIA payroll, with the goal of destabilizing the country and causing a revolution that would cause it to splinter, so that individual pieces can then be overrun by NATO and China to extract their precious natural resources, using local population as slaves. Don't you watch RT?

(also see this - and never underestimate the power of propaganda)

Re:Oh Russia

[jpapon]

Never mind the fact that we have perfectly good ICBMs which can do the job of a hypersonic bomber perfectly well, thank you very much.

Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Wouldn't you rather play a nice game of chess?

No. Let's play thermonuclear war.

>> Fine.

Cheapter and easier

[scorp1us]

Given that the ISS is ~360 km from the Earth, and it has a 92 minute orbital period, it seems that bombs could be lifted into space, then launched from there. With sufficient supplies and advanced notice you could get enough stuff in position over the long term and deploy in minutes 4500mph = 2km/s and therefore could be at the surface in 180 seconds (3 minutes) once launched. Then there's the issue of changing orbit, which lets assume takes 1 orbit. So you can stike anywhere in the wold in 95 minutes. Can you fuel, prep and deploy a plane in that time? I think not.

Re:Cheapter and easier

[fm6]

I think if anybody started positioning atomic weapons in orbit, people would get uptight. Maybe uptight enough to launch a pre-emptive strike.

Re:I want

[aaaaaaargh!]

Why do you want a million dollars?

Re:Back to the Future...

[Richard_at_work]

It can take off with full tanks, it just doesn't because it's single engine performance (needed to be considered incase you lose one on takeoff) is poor - they used to fly with full tanks from Kadena regularly, depending on the mission profile.

Also, there is plenty of room for weapons bays in the payload bays aft of the cockpit - that's where the YF-12A had its Aim-47A missiles stowed. Yup, there was an interceptor variant of the A-12/SR-71 tested.

It's still the wrong aircraft for the job, because it's been out of service for nearly two decades, and the jigs and tool sets have been destroyed for nearly twice that long.

The Russians Need to Prove...

[fm6]

...that they're still a world power. That means building a lot of expensive, useless weapons, because that's what world powers do. Ah, for the good old days, when you could just round up the slaves and put up a pyramid!

Checked Craigslist?

[macraig]

Russia Wants a Hypersonic Bomber

What a coincidence! I happen to be selling one on Craigslist right now.

Want a bomber? Here's one...

[MiniMike]

The Russians want their plane operational by 2020, which doesn't seem particularly realistic — we are talking about five times the speed of sound here, and Russia is just starting engine development. The U.S., meanwhile, has been investing in its Waverider program since 2004, and the last test of the X-51A scramjet-powered missile failed after just 15 seconds.

Maybe they'll be funding computer hacking/espionage methods instead of scramjet or hypersonic airplane development- that way, they'll have a hypersonic bomber (plans, at least) soon after we do, at a fraction of the development costs.

Or maybe they'll just think they have the plans.

Re:Just what the world needs

[ravenshrike]

Hypersonic is Mach 5+.

Could be too costly

[gmuslera]

Please, don't do it with rounded wings, not sure how much it will cost to build it, but the lawsuit could be in the order of billons of dollars.

Re:Back to the Future...

[Moofie]

It's almost like the conditions at mach 3 and mach 6 are pretty different or something.

Re:How far behind US technology?

[ModelX]

So with the Russians just starting on hypersonic engine design, looks to me like they are only 15 seconds behind the US :)

Or maybe not, according to wikipedia they were doing something 20+ years ago:

First working scramjet "GLL Holod" in world flies on 28 November 1991 reaching speed mach 5.8. However, the collapse of Soviet Union stopped the funding of the project.

After NASA's NASP program was cut, American scientists began to look at adopting available Russian technology as a less expensive alternative to developing hypersonic flight. On November 17, 1992, Russian scientists with some additional French support successfully launched a scramjet engine "Holod" in Kazakhstan6. From 1994 to 1998 NASA worked with the Russian Central Institute of Aviation Motors (CIAM) to test a dual-mode scramjet engine and transfer technology and experience to the West. Four tests took place, reaching Mach numbers of 5.5, 5.35, 5.8, and 6.5. The final test took place aboard a modified SA-5 surface to air missile launched from the Sary Shagan test range in the Republic of Kazakhstan on 12 February 1998. According to CIAM telemetry data, first ignition of the scramjet was unsuccessful, but after 10 seconds the engine was started and the experimental system flew 77s with good performance, up until the planned SA-5 missile self-destruction (according to NASA, no net thrust was achieved).

Some sources in the Russian military have said that a hypersonic (10-15M) maneuverable ICBM warhead was tested.

Re:Just what the world needs

[UncleTogie]

Operational but not deployed.

Retired and not operational.

Re:Back to the Future...

[sjwt]

I remember reading that if you where to update the SR71 engines with modern alloys (rememberer that the SR71 is a 1960's era plane) that it was possible for them to reach around the Mach 6 range.. as the limiting factor in the fitted engines was their ability to withstand the heat they produced..

Now that would be something to see!

"Early 1990s studies of inlets of this type indicated that newer technology could allow for inlet speeds with a lower limit of Mach 6.[46]"
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird