Free Republic

THIS is the dramatic moment Russia's £300m stealth warship that was designed to carry hypersonic missiles went up in flames in a humiliating blow for Vladimir Putin. New footage shows devastating fire damage to the new £307 million warship intended to carry Putin’s lethal Mach-9 hypersonic missiles.... ...The scale of the blaze, which started on Friday in St Petersburg, has been viewed as a massive set back to the Kremlin’s naval modernisation programme. Huge flames and thick smoke were seen rising from the corvette Provornyy at Severnaya Verf shipyard where it was being built. The battleship was almost completely destroyed...

Alexander Kuranov is suspected of passing secret information to a foreign citizen Russia has reportedly detained the head of a hypersonic technology research facility on suspicion of treason in the latest high-profile arrest targeting a senior scientist for allegedly selling state secrets. Alexander Kuranov, 73, the general director of the St Petersburg-based Hypersonic System Research Institute (HSRI), was arrested in Moscow on Thursday. A Moscow court ruled he be held for two months in pre-trial detention. Kuranov is an expert in hypersonic technology and oversaw work on a hypersonic aircraft concept called Ajax (or Ayaks), according to the facility’s website.......

Russia has launched five successful flights of a hypersonic jet that is capable of destroying an aircraft carrier with a single impact, according to a new report. The Zircon cruise missile travels between 3,800mph and 4,600mph - five to six times the speed of sound - and puts Russia 'half a decade' ahead of the US', the report says. This makes it faster than any anti-missile system, including those that are expected to appear in the next two decades.

NASA?s hypersonic program may have a chance of taking off again, despite a gloomy budget picture. HAMPTON -- A high-speed aeronautics technology called hypersonics, once thought dead at NASA Langley Research Center after two record-breaking flights in recent years, may face a brighter future than expected.

Overhyping Hypersonics? By Rand Simberg Published 03/31/2004 After years of failed attempts, NASA successfully flew their Hyper-X X-43A vehicle on Saturday. It's no doubt a noteworthy milestone in flight, and with its revolutionary scramjet propulsion system, it broke all previous speed records for airbreathing aircraft. Unfortunately, like the old magic trick in which the Looneytunes character quaffs gasoline and ingests dynamite with a match chaser, it could only be done once -- at least with that vehicle. As planned, it plunged unrecoverably into the Pacific at the end of its flight. The scramjet, of course, was the point of the...