Raytheon, Northrop Grumman to build Air Force scramjet hypersonic missiles

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/sensors/article/14283258/hypersonic-scramjet-cruise-missiles

by hsnewman • 4 years ago

48 54 4 years ago

militaryaerospace.com

bertjk2• 4 years ago

I love the phrasing used in this press release.

hypersonic weapon designed to hold high-value targets at risk

We don't destroy targets anymore. We hold our targets at risk.

bamboozled• 4 years ago

What's wrong with the wording?

ICBM missile solo, not something you really want to blow up, but it would be cool if you could eliminate it within minutes should it start to pose a risk.

drewm1980• 4 years ago

How would the Russians react? Would they launch extra nukes just to be "safe"? Maybe we should build a weapon that ~enhances the yield of their nukes, so that they figure sending one is enough!

boc• 4 years ago

Holding targets at risk is fundamentally different from destroying targets.

Hypersonic anti-ship weapons allow China to hold US carriers off the coast of Taiwan "at risk", but it doesn't mean they have to destroy them to be effective.

I know you're trying to dunk on this press release, but it's actually a specific phrase that has real meaning in the defense world.

PradeetPatel• 4 years ago

Exactly. Words, when used precisely, can carry be used to infer a significant amount of intentions behind the text.

In this case, holding targets at risk implies a strategy of deterrence, a desire for peace and the de-escalatition of conflicts, as opposed to initiating the first strike with the intention of destruction.

bertjk2• 4 years ago

I understand deterrence. I am commenting on the doublespeak. "Holding a target at risk" here exactly means wielding a credible way to destroy said target.

I would argue that replacing the phrase:

...weapon designed to hold high-value targets at risk in contested environments from standoff distances

with:

...weapon designed to destroy high-value targets in contested environments from standoff distances

leaves the meaning of the quote and overall press release completely unchanged.

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

There's some truth to it. These missiles won't be used for bombing the Middle East. They'll be used for things like demonstrating to China that an invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait is vulnerable. If they ever have to destroy a target it will be because that primary strategy failed.

zardo• 4 years ago

These missiles won't be used for bombing the Middle East.

Maybe not out of any kind of tactical necessity. But quite possibly just to show off the new missile, depending on the commander in chief.

throwawaysleep• 4 years ago

Basically that means it is for deterrence.

walrus01• 4 years ago

This is a logical and normal term in strategic military planning, the concept of knowing that your own important thing will almost assuredly be destroyed in a retaliatory strike, should you be the one to initiate the war. See also the last 70 years of cold war era mutually assured destruction calculus.

This is one of the reasons why highly advanced anti ballistic missile systems are seen as very dangerous because they upset the parity of two nuclear ICBM armed states being in approximate equal capability with each other.

The cold war never really ended.

zer0zzz• 4 years ago

SLAM!!!

smalley• 4 years ago

I mean I don't think anybody outside of Siberia is going to try to do nuclear powered ramjets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missil... (I hope)

Arubis2• 4 years ago

Tl;dr:

- deal is for just a hair short of US$1bn

- jobs are in Tucson

- proposed delivery starts 2027

- proposed launch platform is f-15

- tech is undescribed, this is a from-scratch development, not an existing propulsion platform

toasted-subs3• 4 years ago

Seems like a project to inject cash to relatively remotely areas to help deal with the housing crisis indirectly.

Arubis2• 4 years ago

That wouldn’t be atypical, but Tucson isn’t especially remote or underfunded.

jjk1662• 4 years ago

Tucson is the headquarters of Raytheon's Missile and Defense division. Been located there for 70 years. It started out as a Hughes Aircraft Company facility relocated away from the west coast during WW2 to avoid the threat of Japanese attack.

narrator• 4 years ago

China and Russia are ahead of the U.S as far as hypersonic missile tech goes.

https://www.ft.com/content/c7139a23-1271-43ae-975b-9b6323301...

frostburg2• 4 years ago

The Pershing II and the ASM-135 ASAT did that in the '80s, actually. The Soviet Union also had a FOBS.

analognoise• 4 years ago

China maybe, but absolutely not Russia. Let's not make jokes.

nostrebored• 4 years ago

This is correct. We are substantially behind both in terms of design and infrastructure to bring those designs to life (hypersonic wind tunnels).

The U.S. believed that hypersonic tech was “not of strategic importance”.

oyashirochama• 4 years ago

And to us it really isn't. We use a different doctrine of attack and defense.Wwe are primarily air and information superiority concepts and are only now getting into hypersonic due to the risk of a near-peer carriers and reef air fields.

Covzire• 4 years ago

The US is ahead in terms of the populace thinking they have secret weapons nobody knows about.

daemoens3• 4 years ago

Hypersonic missles aren't really new or a gamechanger. When Russia and China flaunt it, there's a reason they never point to any real use cases for it. At those speeds, you can barely even communicate with the rocket.

wisemanwillhear• 4 years ago

Here's a better, more researched take that shows that the perceived advantage is more misunderstandings and misplaced media hype than an advantage.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ckrpVT5jS5Q

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

China and Russia have hypersonic glide vehicles, which work like the Space Shuttle and are 70s tech.

They don't have scramjets, which is the headline.

dirtyid6• 4 years ago

PRC's first scramjet test was in 2011. Lot's of development since, but no formal weapon systems adopted AFAIK.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

How far away are we from making airplanes or rocket boosters with this technology?

pfdietz• 4 years ago

Scramjets are not terribly useful for boosters. They are more suited to cruise missions rather than acceleration missions.

jakzurr• 4 years ago

That really is the problem with scramjets - apparently the longest test flights have been only a few minutes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet#Progress_in_the_201...

AFAIK, every existing hypersonic weapon out there (from any nation) uses rocket propulsion.

techdragon• 4 years ago

Thing is, if you’re able to hit your target in a few minutes, your engine, your avionics or even your software stack only needs to last a few minutes.

I can’t find a Google reference right now on my mobile, but there’s a relatively well known example of a mission having some sort of loop related overflow in the guidance software that wasn’t fixed because by the time it could possibly happen, the rocket has burned out and the missile has done its job, it’s either exploded or is falling out of the sky and the software bug was irrelevant.

jjk1662• 4 years ago

Well when you are moving at about a mile per second, a few minutes is a long flight.

The issue with scramjets is they operate under extreme conditions which are both unforgiving (small errors are catastrophic) and difficult to model (experimental data is limited and expensive to gain). The only path to development is to produce lots of full scale, fully functional prototypes with the understanding most will be destroyed in seconds and there will be little if anything recoverable afterwards to study to determine what went wrong.

honkler• 4 years ago

never happening. I don't think the US can do it anymore.

credit_guy5• 4 years ago

Here's one way how to think about this missile.

You start from the report to Congress [1]. On page 8:

  In FY2022, the Air Force launched the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) program to develop a hypersonic cruise missile that integrates Air Force and DARPA technologies. Some reports indicate that HACM is intended to be launched from both bombers and fighter aircraft, with a senior Air Force official noting that a B-52 could potentially carry 20 HACMs or more.

B-52 can carry 32 tons of munitions. So 20 of these missiles "or more" may mean that each missile is about 1500 kg. That's in line with the current AGM-86 long range air launched cruise missile [2], [3]. Of course, AGM-86 is subsonic, while HACM will be supersonic. AGM-86 has a range, depending on configuration, between 950 km and 2500 km (maybe even more, this is the non-classified range). I guess HACM will have a similar range. Being hypersonic means it's easier to carry out a saturation attack (you send more missiles than the enemy can defend against simultaneously).

That means, the US Air Force will be able to carry deterrence patrols with their B-52s in order to prevent China from sending a naval landing force to Taiwan. Without this weapon, the main deterrence was supposed to be provided by the US Navy and their carrier strike groups. With this weapon, the US Air Force may be able to provide a cost effective alternative.

[1] https://news.usni.org/2022/07/22/report-to-congress-on-hyper...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-86_ALCM

[3] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1046...

sofixa• 4 years ago

B-52 can carry 32 tons of munitions. So 20 of these missiles "or more" may mean that each missile is about 1500 kg

Not necessarily. US bombers, especially old ones such as the B-52 were designed for bomb loads stored inside and dropped when the doors open. Carrying missiles was added later on, and since those have to be outside, usually on the wings, the main limitations is space, not weight. If it cannot fit more than 20 missiles due to only 10 launchers with 2 missiles each (for instance) being able to physically fit on the aircraft's fuselage/wings, it doesn't matter how many more it could carry inside.

Also, has tech advanced so much to have a similarly weighing scramjet hypersonic missile have a similar range to a supposedly more optimal subsonic one?

credit_guy5• 4 years ago

Also, has tech advanced so much to have a similarly weighing scramjet hypersonic missile have a similar range to a supposedly more optimal subsonic one?

According to wikipedia [1], the Russian Kinzhal has a mass of about 2000 kg and a range of 3000 km if launched from a strategic bomber. Of course, wikipedia just repeats the Russian claims, we can't know for sure if these numbers are accurate, but if they are off, they are not off by a factor of 10.

Can the US make something similar? It's quite possible, the US military budget is more than 10 times higher.

Separately, hypersonic missiles are thought to travel at an altitude of 100km, where the air density is about one million times lower than at ground level [2]. Even if the air friction is ten 1000 times higher than for a subsonic missile (if drag is proportional to v^3 and v goes up by a factor of 10), in the end the total drag could be lower. I personally expect hypersonic missiles like this one come with increased range rather than decreased range compared to their subsonic cousins.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal

[2] http://www.braeunig.us/space/atmos.htm

Raytheon, Northrop Grumman to build Air Force scramjet hypersonic missiles

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