Superfast military plane hit Mach 20 before crash

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44208437/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/superfast-military-plane-hit-mach-crash/

by danberger • 15 years ago

97 99 15 years ago

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adrianwaj2• 15 years ago

That plane will render anti-ballistic missiles useless and make possible long-range targeted assassinations.

Groxx8• 15 years ago

ICBMs have been going roughly this speed for a while now, so anti-ballistic missiles either have been useless for a while, or will continue to work. The shuttle goes a good deal faster (mach 25) on re-entry. And as soon as you strip away the need to land and be re-used (the hallmarks of an "airplane"), your anti-super-fast-airplane missiles become much cheaper and faster than the plane, so even a small success rate serves as an effective deterrent in many cases.

This is a tech experiment. It may lead to advances in airplanes, but I highly doubt it is cost-effective compared to an equivalent missile that just slams home.

iwwr2• 15 years ago

ICBMs can go fast, but they follow a predictable ballistic trajectory. They can also be intercepted by anti-missile missiles. You will need another scramjet to catch a scramjet while in the atmosphere.

cleaver• 15 years ago

ICBM's fly outside of the atmosphere and they don't turn... IE. they're ballistic. I could see that something designed to hit the predictable path of a ballistic missile at mach 20 would fail to hit an aircraft which can turn at mach 20. (How well this thing can actually turn is another question.)

wisty• 15 years ago

I think it's mostly there so the Air Force can pretend it will still be relevant in 20 years time. Pilots in planes will be replaced by UAV, or cruise missiles. But they want to cling to the romance of real humans in the sky.

dantheman• 15 years ago

1. Assassinations are against US Law.

2. The US already has long-range assassination hit squads, e.g. Osama Bin Laden's Assassination

conover• 15 years ago

Solely addressing number 2, I think the factor here is time. The strike window for this weapon as I understand it is 1 hour anywhere in the world. Navy SEAL operations on the order of killing Bin Laden have lead times measured in months. Even Tomahawk missiles take time to position (warships) and fire. When it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed or killed within a hour, Mach 20 is the only way to go.

Plus its non-ballistic flight path and high degree of maneuverability probably allows it to evade most anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile defenses.

Scary stuff.

Edit: Grammar and spelling.

true_religion• 15 years ago

I wasn't aware that it was a law. I thought it was merely a prohibition put into place by an Executive Order signed by President Ford.

In either case, it seems moot in today's day and age. What's the difference between firing a missile at enemy headquarters with the intention of killing the general and senior staff, and an assassination?

It seems today that 'assassination' is simply pursuing the usual methods of war against a specific target.

Groxx8• 15 years ago

They're against the law if they're caught. It implies nothing about the existence of successful stealth-assassinations.

molecule• 15 years ago

What ordinance and yield is it designed to deliver?

iwwr2• 15 years ago

Surveillance camera, faster and less predictable than a satellite (and faster than the SR-71). Nothing can fly as fast inside the atmosphere, no way to lob a missile or artillery at it.

troels• 15 years ago

Nothing can fly as fast inside the atmosphere, no way to lob a missile or artillery at it.

Assuming it's going in a straight line (Which wouldn't be unreasonable at that speed), you just need to send something up to block its path.

Anti-Ratfish2• 15 years ago

Thought the US had enough low intensity wars on it's hands already! Special forces in 70 countries at last count. Still, bombing them will sort it all out. http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011848...

stcredzero4• 15 years ago

This is exciting, because it opens the door for space elevators that don't rendezvous with a stationary point on the ground, but with hypersonic planes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch#Hyperson...

http://www.enotes.com/topic/Tether_propulsion#HASTOL_.E2.80....

This puts the tensile strength necessary into the realm of existing high-strength polymer cables.

If we could build a robust fully-reusable space plane that can go Mach 15, and we could also find a way to rendezvous it with a rotating tether, we could free ourselves from the nastiness of the rocket equation and achieve inexpensive space access.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Would you care to talk about why anyone would ever want a space elevator? (as opposed to just rockets)

eneveu• 15 years ago

To achieve inexpensive space access. (as per the GP)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics

jfoutz• 15 years ago

One obvious example is manufacturing in zero g. parts can be thrown from operation to operation, rather than having to trundle along on a conveyor. launch would have to get pretty damn cheap to make assembling cars in space worthwile

A better example might be fancy chemicals. Rather than purchasing a "very expensive machine" to ensure a specific environment for reaction, it might be cheaper to send the materials to zero g for processing. I'm not a chemist, but watching astronauts play with bubbles and flames in space makes me think you could get a lot of precision by modeling everything as perfect spheres. So, the reactions are simper to model, easier to get accurate and precise outcomes.

patio11• 15 years ago

It's wish fulfillment for sci-fi geeks, a deus ex machine made out of unobtanium which purports to answer the question "Is there any reason to go to space other than fulfilling the fantasies of sic-fi geeks given that getting to space is so fantastically expensive as to swamp all benefit of commercial activity other than artificial communications satellites?"

njharman• 15 years ago

From my brief read and perhaps faulty understanding. This is a rocket with a more planes aloes reentry vehicle. It only goes Mach 20 cause it's falling from space.

VladRussian3• 15 years ago

>If we could build a robust fully-reusable space plane that can go Mach 15, and we could also find a way to rendezvous it with a rotating tether, we could free ourselves from the nastiness of the rocket equation and achieve inexpensive space access.

If we could build a robust fully-reusable space plane that can go Mach 15 free from the nastiness of the rocket equation then we already practically achieved inexpensive space access :). If you look at the rocket equation - it is the first 15 Mach that require to burn almost all this mass of fuel through all these big engines pumped from all these big tanks. Once you're going 15 Mach - to get to the 30 Mach for the payload of N kg, you'd need to burn only ~N kg of LH2+LOX (4.5km/s nozzle speed) - so not much gain would come by replacing rocket propulsion with anything else on the second half of the acceleration. The first half is the problem.

stcredzero4• 15 years ago

By not requiring full orbital velocity, we are freeing ourselves from the particular nastiness of the rocket equation on the surface of our planet. Our gravity well is just deep enough, that SSTO is just beyond the edge of what we can achieve with chemical rockets. I proposed Mach 15 because it's significantly less than the Mach 20 result, but in this case it's clear that I still chose a number too high.

bluesmoon• 15 years ago

Wait. 3 minutes at Mach 20 will get you from SFO to PDX easily, though I suppose it will take longer than that to take off and land.

jchrisa• 15 years ago

It looks like the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

SO the worlds highest-bandwidth network protocol just went from a 747 full of thumb drives, to this scramjet full of thumb drives!

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

Latency and reliability aren't so good though.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

This scramjet is not particularly large. A 747 on the other hand, while traveling 20-40x slower, could fit petabytes of data.

Groxx8• 15 years ago

Given that, I'd bet a decent-sized freight train, or tanker, would be able to vastly out-do a 747. With worse ping time, but for sheer bandwidth...

prawn2• 15 years ago

I know they're very different beasts and in completely different situations, but it's still interesting to remember that Voyager 1, using 30+ yo technology, is currently going about three times as fast as this plane.

Anti-Ratfish2• 15 years ago

Not a lot of drag on that one though

dredmorbius3• 15 years ago

30 year old technology... and a few gravity assists.

prawn2• 15 years ago

Even older 'technology'...

jasonwatkinspdx3• 15 years ago

The most significant difference between this prototype and existing ICBM technology is that the reentry vehicle has more lift and less drag.

It's counterintuitive, but re-entry vehicles are typically bluntly shaped because it reduces the heat load on the nose cone by pushing the bow shock further out in front of the craft. The downside of this is higher drag and less lift, so ICBM warheads fall more than they glide.

blackguardx• 15 years ago

I think this is why they are called "ballistic missiles." They fall to earth as if they were an artillery round.

dredmorbius3• 15 years ago

That and the fact that most of the flight is in an unpowered, "ballistic" mode, rather than powered for the full duration.

jasonwatkinspdx3• 15 years ago

True, but there are things we could call ballistic that are low drag (they also are likely low lift). A typical pointy artillery shell being a great example.

andrewcooke• 15 years ago

does anyone know if they had telemetry to the thing (which is difficult because of the plasma, but used to be possible at least at shuttle speeds from the tail)? or are they hoping some kind of black box survived? and if they had no telemetry is this report inferred from observations of the flight (only)?

[related - does the telemetry problem mean that if something like this ever went into production, it would be largely autonomous?]

Cushman4• 15 years ago

I'm out of my depth, but there was that idea that used the plasma itself as an antenna, right? What happened with that?

toyg• 15 years ago

The reports I've seensay they had a live datalink (I guess one-way only) which lasted nine minutes. They said they're happy with the data anyway, even though they don't know where it crashed (technically they don't even know it crashed, only that it stopped sending data), so they're clearly not relying on a black-box.

vl5• 15 years ago

>The HTV-2 is part of an advanced weapons program called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, which is working to develop systems to reach an enemy target anywhere in the world within one hour.

Wait, but don't ICBMs have like 40 min strike time for any target in the world since, like, sixties? (Ok, in the sixties they couldn't aim this fast).

icarus_drowning• 15 years ago

Yes, but launching an ICBM has the rather unfortunately consequence of telegraphing the message that you are about to nuke someone. Hence the program is a non-ballistic one that seeks an alternative means of delivering a payload as quickly. As a bonus, I gather that the HTV program promises to be more accurate.

burgerbrain5• 15 years ago

It's my impression that the rocket used to launch this thing would likely still set off early warning launch detection systems.

vl5• 15 years ago

I'm with burgerbrain on this one - how this launch is going to be distinguishable from Minuteman III launch?

edge17• 15 years ago

I thought they couldn't find the plane after it was lost? Did they find where it came down?

runjake• 15 years ago

Telemetry data was logged during the flight. They don't need to recover the aircraft for telemetry.

wbhart• 15 years ago

Some months ago I observed an object crossing the sky at night from Coventry UK. It crossed the entire extent of the sky in about 2 seconds. It was very high up and had a red glow like that of a jet afterburner. It didn't fade out or change brightness as you might expect of a meteor and wasn't white as you'd expect of a satellite. I wondered at the time if someone was testing a very fast military vehicle. It would be interesting to know what various nations are working on.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that this vehicle was just for collecting data, a conventional rocket did the work to accelerate it to mach 20. There's nothing the HTV-2 can do other than decelerate and maneuver.

Superfast military plane hit Mach 20 before crash

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