Wednesday - November 14, 2007

America's New Space Weapons 

With the Chinese showing the world last year that low tech means could disable high tech satellites, it was incumbent upon the U.S. to respond. 

And so it seems DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, has in spades. According the British paper, the Telegraph, a hypersonic bomber and an inexpensive satellite delivery system are in the works. So the Chinese might be able to shoot them down, but apparently the U.S. will be able send satellites back into space just as fast.

The most ambitious project in a new $459 billion (£221.5 billion) defence spending Bill is the Falcon, a reusable "hypersonic vehicle" that could fly at six times the speed of sound and deliver 12,000lb of bombs anywhere in the world within minutes.

The bombs' destructive power would be multiplied by the Earth's gravitational pull as they travelled at up to 25 times the speed of sound towards their target.

The cost of the vehicle has not been revealed, but a spokesman for the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) said a first test flight was scheduled for next year.

Loren Thompson, a leading defence analyst in Washington, said the focus of the project was attacking "time sensitive targets" in states such as North Korea and Iran, which have either developed nuclear weapons without international approval or are suspected of doing so.

"If we received intelligence that a strike was about to happen on South Korea, or on Israel, we would want to destroy that within minutes and not hours. But from most current US bases that is not feasible.

"With a hyper-sonic vehicle launching from the Middle East or Asia you could be over hostile territory within minutes," he said. "It's not just a question of can we destroy North Korean weapons, but can we get there quickly enough in the event of an imminent launch?"

Darpa is also developing a small unmanned launch vehicle that would provide "responsive and affordable" access to space, for less than $5 million per launch. The first test flight was made in March.

It would be capable of re-launching satellites that had been attacked, or acting as a fast-moving replacement for a damaged satellite with intelligence sensors of its own that could identify enemy installations.

Here is an animation of the hypersonic bomber, so far named Falcon:

Author: The Machiavellian
Technorati Tags: hypersonic bomber
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