Name: How The U.S. Fell Behind In Hypersonic Technology
Uploaded: 2021-12-30T16:13:00.000Z
Duration: 12 min 38 s
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Imagine flying from New York City to London in under two hours or really anywhere in the world and just a few. Well that may seem like a far fetched travel dream, hypersonic technology is real and it's very much here.

If you are traveling at hypersonic speeds, you're going more than a mile per second.

That that's important for military applications. It could have commercial applications. It could also open up new ways of reaching space.

All over the world significant hypersonic research and development in recent years have highlighted its promising opportunity. But it's also shed light on its destructive potential.

China or Russia, possibly experimenting with hypersonic technology.

And we know China isn't building these capabilities purely for defense.

That's made it a top priority for Washington, our defense capabilities and ultimately our national security.

So what is hypersonic? Who has it and what could it do for military and commercial purposes.

Hypersonic is a measure of speed. It's anything that travels through the air above Mach five or five times the speed of sound. That's roughly 3800 miles per hour.

Any spacecraft that reenters into the atmosphere from space is traveling at hypersonic speed. So the Apollo spacecraft Mercury and Gemini before it, the Space Shuttle they were all traveling as hypersonic craft.

For reference, typical commercial airliners are subsonic traveling slower than the speed of sound, which is anything below 760 miles per hour. When you go faster than that, above Mach one, you're traveling at supersonic speeds.

There's a lot of planes right now that are in the that supersonic space. You know, lots of trainers, lots of fighters, military jets frequently fly supersonic and have since the 40s, the fastest plane of all time Lockheed Blackbird took off in 1964. And it reached cruising speeds above Mach three, that's more than 2200 miles per hour. And famously, the Concorde, commercial plane flew at supersonic speeds for nearly three decades, cutting transatlantic flights in half.

This indicator here, which tells me we're flying twice the speed of sound. And I suppose it'll be proved by the time we get to Washington in three hours every five minutes, which you can only do if you're flying this sort of speed.

And when you travel five times the speed of sound is hypersonic.

Primary difference between hypersonic and supersonic and transonic and subsonic, as as you go up in speed, and there's just more and more variables that you have to account for. When you get to hypersonic speeds, the internal characteristics of the air start to change.

When you travel at Mach Five, you get a lot hotter than when you travel at Mach two. It's not just two and a half times it's a lot hotter.

And that's why hypersonic is in a league of its own. Traveling above Mach Five literally causes air molecules to burst open, heating the flying object by the 1000s. The space shuttle is fitted with a heat shield to survive reentry. But that isn't a practical solution to long duration hypersonic flight. And that's why it's not fully off the ground yet for unmanned military use, let alone commercial use. New materials are needed special aircraft designs, even air breathing engines that cater to these extreme conditions.

It's one of the hardest aerodynamics problems out there. It's very multidisciplinary, you know requires kind of the best engineers.

Developing this technology is seen as a top priority and military modernization programs worldwide. And for good reason. hypersonic missiles could change the nature of warfare.

If I talk to you 15 years ago about hypersonic flight, and look at me like I was crazy. So much is going to change.

We're talking about a class of defense systems that could travel to hypersonic speeds, but because they're in the atmosphere, they combine the attributes of speed, but also maneuverability. And that gives you a lot of important defense capabilities, the ability to do very precise strikes, for example, ability to evade enemy air defenses.

Unlike traditional ballistic missiles that follow a set trajectory after their launch, hypersonic missiles can be controlled while in flight, leaving their path unpredictable to enemy defense. And two of Washington's biggest adversaries claimed to be ahead of the US and their development.

Well, I've seen some really alarming things going on in China, you know, alarming as well in Russia, but a little bit less so.

China's made no bones about it. I mean, they've they've actually rolled out some hypersonic weapons and some of their military grades. It kind of showed off their investments.

We are behind. We are behind the Chinese we are behind the Russians.

We took their foot off the gas, we allowed other nations to kind of in some cases surge ahead by spending a lot of money and building on our work. So over the last several years, the Department of Defense has been working rather vigorously in setting up its work in hypersonics.

Between 2015 and 2020, the US increased funding for hypersonic research by 740%. And the latest defense budget request $3.8 billion for hypersonic research. That's nearly a 20% increase from President Trump's final defense budget.

It is truly a bipartisan issue. And I've seen support on both sides of the aisle. I'd also tell you that I think within the department defense there truly is a sense of concern and that we are in a race.

While the field of hypersonics is a hot topic, it's not a new one. For decades, both the public and private sector have been investing billions into its development. And this latest DoD budget is a big win for defense contractors.

If you want to get money you put hypersonics in your proposal.

Lockheed Martin, a leader in hypersonics has been in the game for more than 30 years. Other heavy hitters include Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. While startups like Hermes, Hypersonics Launch Systems and Velontra are attracting the Pentagon's attention.

It's huge. I think having your buy in from one of our really early customers in the Air Force is absolutely critical to success being viable, viable outcome for the company.

The Air Force invested $60 million in this Atlanta based startup whose ultimate goal is in commercial travel. While the Air Force is focused on potential military uses as it races to fast track production on a hypersonic missile by September 2022.

The main goals are really to ground and flight test this this Mach Five engine that we're building alongside the the aircraft we're building to test it. The key kind of takeaways that, you know, we're expecting our Air Force customer to pull away is really the the data that's coming out of those ground of flight test operations.

The DoD is gathering data across multiple agencies, industry leaders and academia as it races to build as hypersonic warfighting capabilities. And the department's invested about 250 million to lead that coordination. In October 2020, the department created the joint hypersonics transition office and the university Consortium for Applied hypersonics.

This is something really new and exciting for the hypersonics community and I think it's also a new way of interacting with universities within DOD.

This joint effort comes at a time China, Russia now North Korea claim they've successfully fired hypersonic missile tests and the fears there nucular aspirations.

Are you concerned about tiny hypersonic missiles? Yes.

One of the biggest challenges of hypersonic flight for both missiles and planes is the heat. And this applies to anything flying at those speeds. Simply put, it's a physics problem that's yet to be solved.

The equations get very, very complicated. And so you can't just write out a simple you know, an equation like you could for some most speeds or even in supersonic problems.

As a general rule, the power that is the rate at which energy is delivered to a vehicle is proportional to the cube, the third power of velocity. That means you double the speed, you increase the power by a factor of eight.

The aircraft's design also needs to be altered based on the lift, drag and velocity experienced during hypersonic conditions- For one, smaller wings.

That's where a lot of the effort goes in on the really does the design of the aircraft here at Hermes is really, we're not just building that hypersonic aircraft, but we're building an aircraft that can take off and land, you know, accelerate up to that Mach one, you know, the speed of sound, going past that into supersonic, and then all the way to Mach Five.

You need an engine that can propel you at those speeds. Now, rockets can get you those speeds, but rockets aren't particularly good for sustained flight for long periods of time in the atmosphere. So one of the keys that technology that we've envisioned was the development of cynic called a supersonic combustion ramjet engine. It's a type of jet engine that works in the atmosphere at very high speeds.

The beauty of a scramjet you're going so fast through the atmosphere that you no longer have to run a compressor to compress the air and then ignited. The air is being compressed by the mere speed of the vehicle itself and it becomes self sustaining.

The act of testing itself presents another challenge. Real life flight tests are costly, so researchers have to use alternative methods on the ground, like the hypersonic wind and shock tunnels designed at NASA or Purdue University, and computer simulation programs like MIT's but the experts argue the data doesn't compare to real life.

You can't solve any of these problems in a vacuum you have to have a full blown simulations with some variables taken out and high power computers. And then also means if you want to test something, there's no wind tunnel that can give you the combination of the speeds, atmospheric conditions, chemistry and duration that you need to understand everything so and then hypersonics you kind of do a lot of piecemeal testing the only thing that is not 100% right is flight testing.

The Defense Department views hypersonic weapons as one of its highest priorities and says it'll have warfighting capabilities within the next few years. Three military branches and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have their own missile programs well underway, and based on the latest defense bill, they're expecting to be deployed between 2022 and 2025.

I would say over the next five years, we expect to see several systems deployed in kind of limited operational capabilities. So these are leave behind prototypes. So things like intermediate range boost glide vehicles, so like long range hypersonic weapons.

Starting with the Air Force, they hope to deploy an early operational version of their air launch rapid response weapon in 2022. The Army's aiming to launch their long range hypersonic weapon in 2024, followed by the Navy's conventional prop strike in 2025. But these timelines will be fluid as real life testing ramps up.

And I'm very proud of the fact that department defense is not talking about catchup, leapfrogging other competitors, it's talking about, you know, going beyond matching, we don't want to just match them missile for missile, but introduce new capabilities of transportation capabilities, sensor capabilities, and I'm seeing that play out

Like ultra fast commercial travel which could be here within the decade. Recent interest in hypersonic technology has reignited the appeal of supersonic flight, which has been achieved before. Boom supersonic the Concorde style startup says it's supersonic aircraft Overture will be ready to carry passengers by 2029. United Airlines already purchased 15 aircrafts, the first US airline to do so. And Hermes, whose ultimate goal is passenger travel, just unveiled a full scale prototype of its hypersonic aircraft quarterhorse. It plans to start flight tests by the end of 2022.

Hermes is anticipating within the next eight to 10 years, we have, you know, a transport aircraft that you know, is able to fly and is certified and air worthy. But you know, it's certainly going to be a challenge. There's there's a lot of hurdles that we're going to, you know, have to cross to get there. It's definitely an exciting time to be working on these problems.

I'm pretty hopeful that, at least in my lifetime, you know, in the next 15 years, we'll start to see some of those systems being being realized.

When the United States puts its mind to something like this and issue like this when we realize how important it is, we have proven time and time again that we can catch up. And in fact, leapfrog.

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How The U.S. Fell Behind In Hypersonic Technology

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