“I believe, today, we could build a Mach 5 cruise missile [with] off-the-shelf materials,” said Charles Brink of the Air Force Research Laboratory. “We could go 500 nautical miles in 10 minutes.”
Brink should know: He ran AFRL’s record-breaking X-51 program. Now AFRL and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are co-funding a pair of follow-on projects: one for a hypersonic jet like the X-51, aspiring for Mach 8, and another for a different high-speed technology called “boost-glide.” Brink told a recent meeting of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s DC chapter that “those will probably both fly in 2018-2020.” The US Army also has a hypersonics program, and China is testing hypersonic missiles of its own.
Why bother? Ballistic missiles have been going at comparable speeds since Werner von Braun invented the V-2 some 70 years ago. The difference is that V-2s, Scuds, Minutemen, and so on follow a ballistic arc up out through space, while hypersonic systems like the X-51 fly at five or more times the speed of sound in the atmosphere.
Skeptics argue that pushing through all that air resistance just makes the engineering problem needlessly difficult. Believers like Brink and Breaking Defense contributor Robbin Laird argue hypersonics makes a major military difference. The value isn’t speed alone, they say, but a combination of speed, flexibility, and surprise.
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