The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, as part of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept program, has contracted Raytheon Co., the world's largest missile manufacturer and Lockheed Martin Corp., the world's leading defense contractor , worth around 170 million dollars for the development of hypersonic weapons. The missiles, capable of reaching speeds of at least Mach 5, five times the speed of sound, could hit a target at greater distances. With a speed of 3.400 miles per hour, a missile could cover the distance between Washington and Atlanta in minutes.
In the 2013, the Pentagon performed its fourth flight test with the X-51 WaveRider. After separating the rocket from a B-52 bomber, the X-51 rose to 60.000 feet, accelerating to Mach 5.1, flying for about three minutes before running out of fuel and crashing into the Pacific ocean. The X-51 inherits the know-how acquired with the X-43 program. In the 2004 the NASA prototype reached Mach 9,7, about 6.600 miles per hour, for 10 seconds before it exploded.
The hypersonic regime
The hypersonic platforms, which will enter into service between 10 / 15 years, will rewrite the very way of conceiving an anti-missile defense. Hitting a hypersonic aircraft is not currently possible due to the time it takes for defense systems to process a response. The initial detection, the tracking and the solution of fire, however, requires time (we are always talking about seconds) which, however, could be too many considering the hypersonic regime. If a combined attack was launched between traditional ballistic and hypersonic missiles, even the best existing missile defense would not stand a chance.
Counterbalance countermeasures for conventional return reels are well-known and rely on the calculation of the trajectory of descent through the atmosphere of multiple independent heads. The problem of high return speed was circumvented in advance, with the use of interceptor missiles designed to destroy multiple independent heads before their release phase. The hypersonic speed deletes this critical phase, falling back into the high-speed plane at an approaching target with a relatively flat trajectory.
Unlike the United States and China, which focused on the development of thrust aircraft such as the Hypersonic Glide Vehicle, Russia and India are planning so-called hypersonic cruise missiles. While a Glide push aircraft must first reach an extreme altitude before re-entering the atmosphere, cruise missiles travel on an extremely low non-ballistic trajectory to evade early warning radar systems. Moscow and Delhi have already developed the supersonic BrahMos, the fastest cruise missile in the world, capable of Mach 3 speed, and continue to test the hypersonic model BrahMos-II.
(Photo: US Air Force)
