Posted on 07/09/2002 12:47:23 PM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Cruise missiles fly at a relatively leisurely speed of about 550 mph. That's slow enough to be shot down by advanced air-defense systems. But a new breed of hypersonic cruise missile is meant to zip past any foreseeable defense and smack transient targets almost instantly from hundreds of miles away.The engine for these futuristic speed demons was developed by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. It was ground-tested by NASA on May 30 and performed flawlessly under simulated conditions at 90,000 feet and a speed of Mach 6.5. That's 6.5 times the speed of sound, or roughly 4,250 mph. Thus, even a target at the missile's maximum range of 700 miles can be reached in only 10 minutes.
The new powerplant is a so-called ramjet. Unlike ordinary jet engines, ramjets don't have a turbofan to suck in air. Instead, they rely on hypersonic speed to force air into special intake scoops. A rocket would launch the missile, and the ramjet would kick in at Mach 3.5. The new engine is next slated to begin a series of flight tests that will run until 2005. APL's two industrial partners--Boeing and GenCorp's Aerojet unit, which built the engine--are handling this phase of the HyFly program.
We have had the capability of building super/hypersonic Tomahawks for a long time. The ABM treaty disallowed it.
Never should have signed the thing in the first place.
Zoom-zoom-ka-boom bump.
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