Russia’s new hypersonic missile

[The Reboot]

Russia’s new hypersonic missile ‘can travel 27 times faster than the speed of sound’

Russia has deployed its first nuclear-capable missile that military officials claim can fly at 27 times the speed of sound, winning a race against the US to develop hypersonic weapons.

President Vladimir Putin boasted that the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle means Russia now leads the world in engineering an entire new class of weapons.

The intercontinental weapon, which became operational on Friday, was a technological breakthrough comparable to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite, Mr Putin said.

He claimed the missile can withstand temperatures of up to 2,000C (3,632F) resulting from a flight through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.

It is launched on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile, but unlike a regular missile warhead that follows a predictable path, it can make sharp manoeuvres in the atmosphere, making it much harder to intercept.

Mr Putin has said Russia had to develop the Avangard and other prospective weapons systems because of US efforts to develop a missile defence system. The Avangard can hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield, he claimed.

Some Western experts have questioned how advanced some of the weapons programmes are.

Earlier this week, the Russian leader stressed that Russia was the only country armed with hypersonic weapons, saying that for the first time his country was leading the world in developing a new class of weapons, unlike in the past when it was catching up with the US.

“It heads to target like a meteorite, like a fireball,” he said last year in his state-of-the-nation address.

The Russian military previously had commissioned another hypersonic weapon of a smaller range.

The US Pentagon also has been working on hypersonic weapons in recent years, and in August defense secretary Mark Esper said he believed it was a matter of “a couple of years” before the US had one.

China has already tested its own hypersonic glide vehicle, believed to be capable of travelling at least five times the speed of sound.

US officials have talked about putting a layer of sensors in space to more quickly detect enemy missiles, particularly the hypersonic weapons.

The administration also plans to study the idea of basing interceptors in space, so the US can strike incoming enemy missiles during the first minutes of flight when the booster engines are still burning.

Source

[sprintcyclist]

I read 10 X the speed of sound.

Speed of sound is 343 m/s or 1235 km/h

10 X that ....... 12,350 km/h

12,000 km/h. Is that a space rocket?

at 27 X the speed of sound ........ does it matter?

[Bogan]

Sounds like a load of crap to me. 17 times the speed of sound is over 130,000 miles per hour. The SR-71 went mach 3+ and that was with two ramjet engines that each had the energy output of the engine on the Queen Mary. Even it's successor, the SR-72 is purported to go mach 6. And the Ruskies, who could never even catch an SR-71 flying at will all over the Soviet empire, is now saying it has a missile that can fly 3 times faster than an SR-72? Bullshit.

And Putin is saying that it can "manoeuvre" at that speed? Sure it can. Nothing going over mach 3 is going to do anything but go in a straight line.

In any case, the yanks are far advanced on laser weapons, so much so that they are even leaving space on their new Ford class carriers for laser anti aircraft and anti missile defence systems. They even have one warship with a laser that is operational, right now.

[The Reboot]

Indeed. Seems more like "science fiction", cause those figures seemed ridiculous. Is Putin just trying to look tough?

[Texan]

It sounds like a bluff to me. As said, the maneuverability is the tip off for me. The forces to maneuver at that speed are astronomical. At those temperatures the missile would break apart. The missile would also have to sense the incoming defenses to avoid them in the first place.

[sprintcyclist]

It's the 3M22 .

a scramjet powered maneuvering anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile developed by Russia.[9][10]


Zircon can travel at a speed of Mach 8–Mach 9 (6,090–6,851 mph; 9,800–11,025 km/h; 2,722.3–3,062.6 m/s). Such high speeds would likely create a cloud of plasma around the missile, absorbing any radio waves and making the missile virtually invisible to radars (plasma stealth).[25][26] This has led to concerns that it could penetrate existing naval defense systems.[27] Zircon exchanges information in flight and can be controlled by commands if necessary.[28]



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M22_Zircon

[brian ross]

Plasma "stealth" does not work. It only absorbs a limited number of wavelengths and radar can and would differ from those wavelengths.