US army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific

Gestart door VandeWiel, 18/11/2011 | 10:08 uur

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Ronald Elzenga

Need for Speed: Will Hypersonic Weapons Pay Off?
By James Hasik
May 05, 2017

Last month, Guy Norris reported for Aviation Week & Space Technology on how the Chinese government has revealed a national plan for hypersonic aircraft research. On this side of the Pacific, people have been getting stressed. Norris's earlier report in February covered a classified assessment within the US government that warned of possible breakthroughs in Chinese hypersonic technology, and of how American efforts were "lacking urgency." Norris, Joe Anselmo, and Graham Warwick even produced a Check Six podcast episode on the issue. But during the previous administration, the Army, Navy, and Air Force Departments did all seem to be talking up new ideas for fast-moving weapons. So does the Pentagon need to be putting more money there? Does any other defense ministry? Perhaps, but sometimes necessity is truncated by feasibility. For with hypersonics, the tactical advantages are great, but so are the technical challenges.

There are at least three ways to make weapons go hypersonic: making a missile that flies very fast, firing a very skinny projectile with a discarding sabot from a cannon, or just firing a projectile from a railgun. As Norris noted, American research on hypersonic missiles has been underway in "starts and stops" since 1947. Tank guns have been firing discarding sabot rounds since the 1940s. When "the long rod" exits the barrel of Rheinmetall's famous 120 mm L/44 or L/55, the main guns for Abrams and Leopard 2 tanks, it's moving at about Mach 5. Not much stands in the way of that. It's perhaps no surprise that Will Roper's Strategic Capabilities Office at the Pentagon has recently gotten enthused about equipping longer-range naval guns with even longer-range "Hyper-Velocity Projectiles" (HVPs). Railguns have been discussed for decades; of late, BAE Systems and General Atomics have each been working on prototypes, and DRS has been working on the necessary power systems.


For this reason, the Wall Street Journal recently called the Navy's proposed Mach 7 railgun projectile a "battlefield meteorite with the power to blow holes in enemy ships and level terrorist camps." (After all, in The Expanse, when the Martians divert power to the railguns, you know they're getting serious.) However one attains those kinds of velocities, the kinetic energy alone is enough to do great damage. Hypersonic weapons are also very difficult to intercept; just note the herculean efforts expended on anti-ballistic missile defense: shooting the things down is considerably more expensive, and that leads to unfavorable economics against the inbounds. But for all that awesomeness, there are at least eight serious issues with going so very fast.

Shock. Launching a projectile to Mach 7 over a militarily useful barrel length means accelerating the little guy at 20,000 times gravity. That's several times what cannon rounds experience in conventional guns. Plenty of munitions makers—Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Alliant Techsystems, Leonardo, Rheinmetall, Denel, etc.—have learned to shock-harden the electronics of precision-guided shells to the lesser extreme. As the Navy is still looking for sources of supply, shock-hardening railgun and chemically-propelled long darts is apparently proving a bit more challenging.

Sensing. At high Mach numbers, aero-structures become encased in plasma sheaths—envelopes of disassociated nuclei and electronics, of high conductivity, that interfere with all electromagnetic transmissions. Think about how many astronaut movies feature those tense few minutes when mission control can't talk to the capsule during atmospheric reentry. Making missiles or munitions that don't fly blindly hypersonically requires datalinks and sensors that can operate through that mess. The US Air Force started looking for a way to address the problem in the late 1950s. It's still far from solved.

Control. With direct fire, one might not need much guidance for hypersonic weapons, as the atmospheric effects are insignificant. But elevate the barrel, and every hundredth of a milliradian of deviation from true means a meter off at 100 kilometers range. Get anything wrong about the ballistic calculations, and terminal guidance is required from those really robust sensors. Against maneuvering targets at long range, like ingressing aircraft, that's even more important. The problem is that Mach 7 tends, as a former railgun program manager once told me, to "burn the control surfaces off the weapon" as it flies. Move a missile faster and further, and the problem gets worse. Beverley McKeon of CalTech has recently suggested (and patented) the idea of "morphable... ionic polymer metal composites" to control flight at those speeds. That sounds awesome, but not of an advanced TRL.

Air resistance. Perhaps fortunately for projectiles, those speeds don't last very long. Without propulsion, on long flights, fluid dynamics eventually return the round to its aerodynamic terminal velocity. That means that at long ranges, a railgun or cannon round will be arriving at roughly the speed of any conventionally fired round. At that point, the added smash of hypersonics would require the constant propulsion of a missile. That, in turn, is expensive. There's a reason that passengers aren't flown across the Atlantic in Concords anymore; those speeds were never economical for large loads.

Highly focused effects. Consider a 127 mm solid slug fired from a railgun at Mach 7. That projectile could put about 90 mega-joules of kinetic energy on a target at close range. That's about the energetic output of 21 kilograms of high-explosive fill, or roughly what a 127 mm HE round would carry. But for the long range, instant gratification, and general awesomeness of the railgun concept, one might wonder what's wrong with today's basic five-inch. The benefit is that all that energy is focused on the point of impact. Like a tungsten penetrator from a tank gun, that tends to go through most things, making for an incredible bunker-buster. The drawback is that the destruction is very localized. Contrary to the Wall Street Journal's description, firing railgun rounds at a camp would mostly put deep holes in the ground, and just occasionally splatter a terrorist if one were unfortunate to be standing in the wrong place.

Electromagnetic signature. Putting scores of megawatts into the armature of a railgun produces a huge electromagnetic signature. As with the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) on the Ford-class aircraft carriers, one might wonder whether an enemy could target those pulses. The Navy has built shielding into its catapults, but a railgun could make for a whole other magnitude of noisy—effectively building in its own counter-battery signal.

Barrel wear. The US Navy's five-inch gun barrels have a service life of about 8,000 rounds, courtesy of prime contractor BAE Systems and the depot in Louisville. The Navy currently thinks that it can get 400 rounds out of a railgun, but the service is hoping for a few thousand. The lower figure is just getting close to operationally interesting. The higher combustion temperatures needed for propelling those HVPs would also circumscribe the barrel lives of the Navy's existing five-inch guns.

Power. Shooting with chemical propellants from the five-inch is appealing because it's right now the only option. Only three warships afloat anywhere have enough power to fire up a big railgun: the US Navy's three Zumwalt-class destroyers, which each have capacity for 75 megawatts of electrical output. The trouble is that each already has two 155 mm Advanced Gun Systems, which throw rounds 83 nautical miles (assuming that the Navy actually buys the rounds). As of today, there's no other answer to the power problem in the procurement pipeline.

Now, for a moment, suppose all these problems were addressable. Hypersonics, after all, are clearly attracting interest. The Mitchell Institute studied the hypersonic issue last year. The American Enterprise Institute studied it this year. The Congressional Research Service has released its own secret report. The development of relatively inexpensive, controllable, hypersonic projectiles might actually "change the paradigm of missile defense," and shore bombardment too. If guns could be so useful, navies might not build fleets of air defense ships with 50 to 100 relatively expensive missiles, but just one or two guns. They might, instead, build ships like the old French anti-aircraft cruiser De Grasse, which sported 16 (yes, sixteen) five-inch guns along her 12,350 tons when she was completed in 1954. My Marine Corps friends are doubtlessly perking up at the idea of clouds of precision-guided five-inch raining down on their enemies. Perhaps it's an idea so crazy it might just work. Or, there's maybe a reason no one has tried it yet.

James Hasik is a senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security.

http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/05/05/need_for_speed_will_hypersonic_weapons_pay_off_111317.html

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

AF Chief Scientist: Air Force Working on New Hypersonic Air Vehicle

Military.com Jun 01, 2015 | by Kris Osborn

Scientists with the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Pentagon's research arm are working to build a new hypersonic air vehicle that can travel at speeds up to Mach 5 while carrying guidance systems and other materials.

Air Force Chief Scientist Mica Endsley said the service wants to build upon the successful hypersonic test flight of the X-51 Waverider 60,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean in May of 2013.

Endsley said the Air Force and DARPA, the Pentagon's research entity, plan to have a new and improved hypersonic air vehicle by 2023.

"X-51 was really a proof of concept test. It showed that you could get a scram jet engine, launch it off an aircraft and it could go hypersonic. It was able to go more than Mach 5 until it ran out of fuel. It was a very successful test of an airborne hypersonic weapons system," Endsley said.

The 2013 test flight, which wound up being the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever, wrapped up a $300 million technology demonstration program beginning in 2004, Air Force officials said.

A B-52H Stratofortress carried the X-51A on its wing before it was released at 50,000 feet and accelerated up to Mach 4.8 in 26 seconds. As the scramjet climbed to 60,000 feet it accelerated to Mach 5.1.

The X-51 was also able to send back data before crashing into the ocean -- the kind of information now being used by scientists to engineer a more complete hypersonic vehicle.

"After exhausting its 240-second fuel supply, the vehicle continued to send back telemetry data until it splashed down into the ocean and was destroyed as designed," according to an Air Force statement. "At impact, 370 seconds of data were collected from the experiment."

Endsley added that the next-generation effort is not merely aimed at creating another scramjet but rather engineering a much more comprehensive hypersonic air vehicle.

"What they are trying to do now is build the whole system so that it is not just about the engine. You have to have materials that can operate at the kind of temperatures you have when you are going at hypersonic speeds. You have to have guidance systems that will function when you are going at those types of speeds. There are a bunch of technological challenges that have to be addressed to make a functioning system that will work," she said.

The new air vehicle effort will progress alongside an Air Force hypersonic weapons program. While today's cruise missiles travel at speeds up to 600 miles per hour, hypersonic weapons will be able to reach speeds of Mach 5 to Mach 10, Air Force officials said.

The new air vehicle could be used to transport sensors, equipment or weaponry in the future, depending upon how the technology develops.
Also, Pentagon officials have said that hypersonic aircraft are expected to be much less expensive than traditional turbine engines because they require fewer parts.

Recognizing the countries like China have been testing and developing hypersonic missiles, Pentagon and Air Force officials see hypersonic flight as integral to the future.

"Certainly, the U.S. is not the only country involved in developing hypersonic weapons. They are showing a lot of capability in this area. The advantage of hypersonics is not just that something goes very fast -- but that it can go great distances at those speeds," Endsley added.

She explained that hypersonic flight could speed up a five hour flight from New York to Los Angeles to about 30 minutes. That being said, the speed of acceleration required for hypersonic flight precludes the scientific possibility of humans being able to travel at that speed.

-- Kris Osborn can be reached at Kris.Osborn@military.com

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/06/01/chief-scientist-air-force-working-on-new-hypersonic-air-vehicle.html

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Nieuw Amerikaans wapen ontploft bij test

25 augustus 2014

Een nieuw ontwikkeld wapen van het Amerikaanse leger is ontploft tijdens een testlancering.

Er raakte niemand gewond, toen het zogenoemde geavanceerde hypersoon wapen weer terugviel op de grond van het lanceercomplex in Alaska. Het Amerikaanse ministerie van Defensie heeft niet verder gespecificeerd om wat voor wapen het precies gaat.

Wel is duidelijk dat het onderdeel is van een speciaal programma, waar de Verenigde Staten nog aan werken. Dat programma moet ervoor zorgen dat overal ter wereld binnen een uur een doelwit kan worden vernield, als de juiste data en toestemmingen binnen zijn.

RTL Nieuws / ANP

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Speed is the new stealth

Hypersonic weapons: Building vehicles that fly at five times the speed of sound is amazingly hard, but researchers are trying
Jun 1st 2013  |From the print edition

ON AUGUST 20th 1998 Bill Clinton ordered American warships in the Arabian Sea to fire a volley of more than 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at suspected terrorist training camps near the town of Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The missiles, flying north at about 880kph (550mph), took two hours to reach their target. Several people were killed, but the main target of the attack, Osama bin Laden, left the area shortly before the missiles struck. American spies located the al-Qaeda leader on two other occasions as he moved around Afghanistan in September 2000. But the United States had no weapons able to reach him fast enough.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, American officials decided that they needed to obtain a "prompt global strike" capability, able to deliver conventional explosives anywhere on Earth within an hour or two. One way to do this would be to take existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and replace the nuclear warheads with standard explosives. The hitch is that ballistic missiles are usually armed with nuclear warheads. A launch could therefore be misconstrued as the start of a nuclear strike, says Arun Prakash, a former Chief of the Naval Staff, the top job in India's navy.

Moreover, ICBMs carrying conventional explosives towards targets in Asia or the Middle East would at first be indistinguishable from those aimed at China or Russia, according to a paper issued by the Congressional Research Service, an American government-research body. This uncertainty might provoke a full-scale nuclear counterattack. In the years after 2001 funding for non-nuclear ballistic missiles was repeatedly cut by Congress, until military planners eventually gave up on the idea. Instead, they have now pinned their hopes on an alternative approach: superfast or "hypersonic" unmanned vehicles that can strike quickly by flying through the atmosphere, and cannot be mistaken for a nuclear missile.

These hypersonic vehicles are not rockets, as ICBMs are, but work in a fundamentally different way. Rockets carry their own fuel, which includes the oxygen needed for combustion in airless space. This fuel is heavy, making rockets practical only for short, vertical flights into space. So engineers are trying to develop lightweight, "air breathing" hypersonic vehicles that can travel at rocket-like speeds while taking oxygen from the atmosphere, as a jet engine does, rather than having to carry it in the form of fuel oxidants.

The term hypersonic technically refers to speeds faster than five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5, equivalent to around 6,200kph at sea level and 5,300kph at high altitudes (where the colder, thinner air means the speed of sound is lower). Being able to sustain flight in the atmosphere at such speeds would have many benefits. Hypersonic vehicles would not be subject to existing treaties on ballistic-missile arsenals, for one thing. It is easier to manoeuvre in air than it is in space, making it more feasible to dodge interceptors or change trajectory if a target moves. And by cutting the cost of flying into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the technology could also help reduce the expense of military and civilian access to space.

All this, however, requires a totally different design from the turbofan and turbojet engines that power airliners and fighter jets, few of which can operate beyond speeds of about Mach 2. At higher speeds the jet engines' assemblies of spinning blades can no longer slow incoming air to the subsonic velocities needed for combustion. Faster propulsion relies instead on engines without moving parts. One type, called a ramjet, slows incoming air to subsonic speeds using a carefully shaped inlet to compress and thereby slow the airstream. Ramjets power France's new, nuclear-tipped ASMPA missiles. Carried by Rafale and Mirage fighter jets, they are thought to be able to fly for about 500km at Mach 3, or around 3,700kph.

It's not rocket science

But reaching hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 and above with an air-breathing engine means getting combustion to happen in a stream of supersonic air. Engines that do this are called supersonic-combustion ramjets, or scramjets. They also use a specially shaped inlet to slow the flow of incoming air, but it does not slow down enough to become subsonic. This leaves engineers with a big problem: injecting and igniting fuel in a supersonic airstream is like "lighting a match in a hurricane and keeping it lit," says Russell Cummings, a hypersonic-propulsion expert at California Polytechnic State University.

One way to do it is to use fuel injectors that protrude, at an angle, into the supersonic airstream. They generate small shock waves that mix oxygen with fuel as soon as it is injected. This mixture can be ignited using the energy of bigger shock waves entering the combustion chamber. Another approach is being developed at the Australian Defence Force Academy. In a process known as "cascade ionisation", laser blasts lasting just a few nanoseconds rip electrons off passing molecules, creating pockets of hot plasma in the combustion chamber that serve as sparks.

Scramjet fuel must also be kept away from the wall of the combustion chamber. Otherwise, it might "pre-ignite" before mixing properly, blowing up the vehicle, says Clinton Groth, an engineer at the University of Toronto who is currently doing research at Cambridge University in England (and who has consulted for Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce, two engine-makers). To complicate matters further, scramjets move too fast for their internal temperature and air pressure to be controlled mechanically by adjusting the air intake. Instead, as scramjets accelerate, they must ascend into thinner air at a precise rate to prevent rising heat and pressure from quickening the fuel burn and blowing up the combustion chamber.

In other words, igniting a scramjet is difficult, and keeping it going without exploding is harder still. Moreover scramjets, like ramjets, cannot begin flight on their own power. Because they need to be moving quickly to compress air for combustion, scramjets must first be accelerated by piggybacking on a jet plane or rocket. There are, in short, formidable obstacles to the construction of a scramjet vehicle. Even though the idea has been around since the 1950s, it was not until the 1990s that a scramjet was successfully flight-tested by Russian researchers, working in conjunction with French and American scientists—and some experts doubt that those tests achieved fully supersonic combustion.


HyShot goes supersonic down under

The next step forward came in July 2002, when a British-designed scramjet vehicle was successfully flown in Australia by researchers at the University of Queensland. The HyShot scramjet flew at Mach 7.6 for six seconds. But this was not controlled flight of a scramjet vehicle: instead the HyShot was launched on a rocket into space, and its engine was then ignited as it fell, nose pointing downwards, at hypersonic speed back towards the ground.

More recently America's space agency, NASA, has made progress with two experimental scramjet vehicles, both of which are dropped from a carrier plane and then accelerated using a rocket booster. The unmanned, hydrogen-fuelled X-43A scramjet accelerated to a record Mach 9.68 in November 2004. This was the first fully controlled flight of a scramjet-powered vehicle, though it lasted only ten seconds.

NASA is now concentrating on another test vehicle, the X-51A Waverider. In its first test, carried out in May 2010, the X-51A reached Mach 5, but not a hoped-for Mach 6, during a flight lasting roughly 200 seconds. Subsequent tests in June 2011 and August 2012 both failed. In a test flight on May 1st 2013, however, the X-51A maintained a speed of Mach 5.1 for four minutes, in the longest scramjet flight on record.

The unsheltering sky

In 2010 the head of America's Pacific Command, Admiral Robert Willard, said that a Chinese programme to convert a nuclear ballistic missile into an aircraft-carrier killer, by packing it with conventional explosives, had reached "initial operational capability". The DF-21D, as it is called, is designed to descend from space at hypersonic speed and strike ships in the Western Pacific. Even though the accuracy of the DF-21D's guidance system is unknown, the missile is already altering the balance of power within its range, says Eric McVadon, a consultant on East Asian security and a former US Navy rear-admiral.

"America is slowly losing the strategic advantage that its stealth warplanes have long provided."

Having ruled out such systems due to the "nuclear ambiguity" a launch would cause, and with powered hypersonic vehicles descended from the X-51A still years away, America has begun testing yet another approach. As part of an effort called Project Falcon, the US Air Force and DARPA, the research arm of America's armed forces, have developed hypersonic "boost-glide" vehicles that piggyback on a modified ICBM and achieve hypersonic speeds simply by falling from a high altitude, rather than using a scramjet.

The "hypersonic cruise vehicle" (pictured on previous page), is carried on an ICBM into the lower reaches of space where it separates, and, rather than following an arching ballistic trajectory, glides back to Earth at more than 20,000kph. The first vehicle, tested in April 2010, successfully separated from its ICBM, but about nine minutes later contact was lost. "They were getting good data and then the skin peeled off and it went boom," says Brian Weeden, a former air-force captain and nuclear-missile launch officer stationed in Montana. A test in 2011 also failed.

In spite of such setbacks, research into hypersonic weapons will continue. Building a vehicle capable of gliding at Mach 16 is difficult, but not impossible. America's space shuttle used to re-enter the atmosphere at Mach 25, so fast that friction heated air molecules into a layer of plasma around the craft that radio signals could not penetrate. New "ceramic matrix composites" show great heat-shielding promise, says Sankar Sambasivan, the boss of Applied Thin Films, a company in Illinois that makes parts for military aircraft.

Testing equipment is also improving. Heat and pressure sensors, and even video cameras, can be embedded in vehicles to gather data as they fly, providing "a level of detail and fidelity that we've never had before," says Ken Anderson, head of hypersonic air vehicles at Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Better wind tunnels help, too. The one at Belgium's Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics can generate short blasts of air at Mach 14. This is done by cooling the test chamber, reducing the speed of sound and thereby increasing the Mach number of air forced in with a piston.

Last year a DARPA statement noted that America is gradually losing the "strategic advantage" that its stealth warplanes have long provided, as other countries' stealth and counter-stealth capabilities continue to improve. Instead, DARPA suggested, America will need "the new stealth" of hypersonic vehicles. Similarly, Russia's deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, remarked last year that the design of hypersonic missiles had become a priority for the country. Getting anything to work at all under hypersonic conditions is extraordinarily difficult—but the effort continues even so.

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21578522-hypersonic-weapons-building-vehicles-fly-five-times-speed-sound



jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)


jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

X-51A Waverider Achieves Hypersonic Goal On Final Flight

By Guy Norris guy / Source: AWIN First

May 02, 2013

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Boeing X-51A Waverider demonstrator successfully achieved sustained, scramjet-powered, air-breathing hypersonic flight above Mach 5 in its final test flight on May 1.

Although the Air Force is not yet commenting on details of the flight, the X-51A is thought to have experienced positive acceleration to speeds in excess of Mach 5 and run for the full duration of the planned powered phase of the test. Based on targets established for the previous test attempt, this could have been as long as 300 sec., followed by an unpowered gliding descent of around 500 sec. prior to impacting the sea in the Pacific Test range west of California. If these times and speeds are confirmed, they will represent new records for sustained, air-breathing hypersonic flight.

The X-51A is intended to prove the viability of a free-flying, scramjet-powered vehicle and is considered an essential building block toward the long-anticipated development of hypersonic weapons and other high-speed platforms. However, despite the partial success of the first flight, which reached Mach 4.88 under scramjet power in May 2010, that mission ended prematurely after a malfunction, as did the second flight in March 2011 and third in August 2012.

Coming in the wake of these disappointing prior tests, the success of the May 1 flight could therefore be pivotal in helping drive further research and development to meet the Air Force's long-term goal of hypersonic capability. The test involved the last of the four vehicles to be built by Boeing and configured with a Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne SJX61 dual-mode ramjet/scramjet engine, and incorporated improvements and lessons learned from the three former flights.

These included better sealing between interfaces in the engine flow-path that are thought to have suffered "burn-through" on the first flight, allowing hot gases to penetrate the vehicle's interior and prematurely ending the flight. Additionally, it incorporated hardware and software changes to counter issues that brought the second flight to a premature end after only 9.5 sec. of powered flight at around Mach 5. On this flight, the vehicle experienced an inlet un-start during the switch to hydrocarbon fuel, effectively blocking flow through the engine and shutting it down. Finally, the mission also included changes to the hypersonic cruiser's control fins, one of which failed on the third mission, causing it to go out of control only 16 sec. into the test while still under boost.

For the final test, as with previous missions, the X-51A, attached to a modified Atacms missile booster, was launched from a B-52H mother ship over the Pacific. The stack separated from the B-52 and the booster fired as planned before the Atacms burned out and detached, and the scramjet ignited.

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx_05_02_2013_p0-575769.xml

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Citaat van: Tanker op 16/08/2012 | 11:33 uur
Jammer, een veelbelovend project lijkt me.....

Op naar het volgende testmoment.

Tanker

Jammer, een veelbelovend project lijkt me.....

Lex

Supersonisch straalvliegtuig verongelukt

LOS ANGELES - Een Amerikaanse test met een nieuw supersonisch straalvliegtuig is mislukt.

Een halve minuut na vertrek viel de X-51A Waverider in de lucht in stukken uiteen. De brokstukken zijn ten westen van Los Angeles in de Grote Oceaan gestort.

Dat heeft de luchtmacht van de Verenigde Staten woensdag bevestigd.

Het onbemande en vleugelloze straalvliegtuig is ontworpen om zes keer zo snel als het geluid te vliegen. Een vlucht van New York naar Londen zou zo ongeveer een uur duren. Ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA en het Pentagon hopen door het project snellere raketten te kunnen ontwikkelen, zodat ze elk doel in de wereld buitengewoon snel kunnen bereiken.

ANP 
15 augustus 2012 21:28

Ace1

Citaat van: fly3rguy op 14/08/2012 | 19:55 uur
Ik las eerst x-15, "hebben ze dat ding weer omhoog gestuurd"!?
;D

Men stuurt de X-51 Waverider op dezelfde manier in de lucht als de X15 en ook de X-43A scramjet  gebruikt de B52 als lanceer platform.
Je zou ook kunnen zeggen oude wijn in nieuwe wijnzakken?






Flyguy

Ik las eerst x-15, "hebben ze dat ding weer omhoog gestuurd"!?
;D

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

VS test supersnel vliegtuig

Chad Bellay / United States Air Force Toegevoegd: dinsdag 14 aug 2012, 16:29

De Amerikaanse luchtmacht test vandaag een experimenteel vliegtuig, dat zesmaal de snelheid van het geluid moet halen. Het toestel is ontworpen om binnen korte tijd overal ter wereld doelen te kunnen aanvallen.

De krant Los Angeles Times meldt dat het toestel, de X-51 WaveRider, omhoog gebracht wordt onder een B-52 bommenwerper en voor de kust van Californië wordt losgelaten. De X-51 is uitgerust met een raket om snelheid te maken.

De topsnelheid wordt volgens deskundigen gedurende vijf minuten volgehouden.

De vorige test met de X-51 mislukte. Het toestel stortte toen in zee.

Bron: NOS