Hypersonic sled travels at 6,599 mph (Mach 8.6) at Holloman Air Force Base

I've never seen this before, had an uncle who would have described this as chitting and getting it

Hypersonic sled travels at 6,599 mph (Mach 8.6) at Holloman Air Force Base
Holloman Air Force Base is home to the High-Speed Test Track. This was a hypersonic test that traveled Mach 8.6, which is 6,599 mph which is over one mile a second.
The test track is just short of 10 miles long. It's quite impressive they reached mach 8.6 in that distance. If this were done at high altitude I have no doubt mach 10 would have been easily reached.

The future of public transportation right there.. looks fun

I played the video in x2 so I could see what Mach 17 looks like..

a reply to: putnam6

That's quite terrifying. Makes me think the hypersonic cruise missiles would be too fast to be afraid of before they hit you lol.

a reply to: Spacespider

Train derailment at 6,000 mph dumps tonnes of toxic waste on entire USA.

a reply to: putnam6

Wow! That’s super fast!

a reply to: lostbook

Wow! That’s super fast!

yes that's seriously haulin ass

originally posted by: chris_stibrany
a reply to: putnam6

That's quite terrifying. Makes me think the hypersonic cruise missiles would be too fast to be afraid of before they hit you lol.

The kinetic energy alone...

just watched another video of a micrometeor hitting the moon it was visible through an amateur astronomer's telescope. you can see the bright flash on the moon's surface they estimate it was about the size of a ping pong ball and left possibly a 19-meter crater

Santa made redundant. Reindeer and elves for sale.

DARPA and DOD are on it

Good research material to make the world an open prison camp. BLAMMO

a reply to: putnam6

a reply to: putnam6

Um sir, I blinked all 3 times...
Sheeyet!

I couldn't begin to comprehend the grip a bug would have on that thing.

You just know his buddies heard him screaming obscenities blowing by.

Yeah, by the time you blink you’re done…!

A few things I'd like to know. What was the propellant? How long did it take to get to maximum speed? How did they stop it? And the biggie, what did the "craft" look like?

a reply to: Spacespider

I can't stop laughing at this. Just imagining this being implemented in public transportation. hahaha

Not bad, but also not very impressive.

One of the biggest issues of objects with hypersonic speed are aerodynamic heating and control. None of these are put to a test here. As such, yeah, nice eye candy and good to skim off some more money, but not a breakthrough by any means.

They could not find the pilot!
just a brown and red splat on the back of the seat.

pulling 50Gs ?

originally posted by: Torlin
Not bad, but also not very impressive.

One of the biggest issues of objects with hypersonic speed are aerodynamic heating and control. None of these are put to a test here. As such, yeah, nice eye candy and good to skim off some more money, but not a breakthrough by any means.

I thought both Russia and China were ahead with their hypersonic glide missiles. The BBC says Russia used one last March in Ukraine CNN agrees. So we have proof of concept and now all the matters is how many did they make?

www.bbc.com...

www.cnn.com...

US officials confirmed to CNN that Russia launched hypersonic missiles against Ukraine last week, the first known use of such missiles in combat. The US was able to track the launches in real time, the sources said.

thehill.com...

The United States is opening the throttle in its push to develop and procure hypersonic missiles after falling behind key foreign adversaries China and Russia in the race to field a potentially game-changing defense system.

The U.S. is pushing to procure at least 24 hypersonic missiles in the near future, according to the fiscal year 2024 budget proposal for the Pentagon released Monday. And earlier this month, the Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act to boost the defense industrial base to “meet the hypersonic warfighting mission.”

While hypersonics have been well-developed and prototyped, the Defense Department has not fielded the weapons yet, and there remain challenges in the industrial production base and with testing infrastructure.

George Nacouzi, at the RAND Corporation, said the U.S. is now in a stage where it will soon transition to initial production.

“One of the limits [now] is how fast we can develop and how fast we can test them,” Nacouzi said. “But those are going to be increasing and they are increasing, so I expect to see more deployment of a larger number of these in the future.”

www.strategypage.com...

The secretive Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle project was something that began during the Cold War but never got into service. Suspicions that Russia had changed its mind may have been a side-effect of China revealed in early 2016 that they had perfected the technology for a maneuverable ballistic missile warhead. This came a little after it was revealed that since 2014 China had conducted six tests of a maneuverable gliding warhead for ballistic missiles. Five of the six tests were successful and this hypersonic glide vehicle was officially known as the DF-ZF.

In effect, this Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle is a warhead that can glide rather than simply plunge back to earth, and is maneuverable enough to hit small moving targets in space or down on the surface. The DF-ZF was initially developed as China sought to perfect a version of the DF-21 ballistic missile that could hit moving warships at sea. DF-21 is a 15 ton, two-stage, solid fuel missile. The DF-21D (the carrier killer version) missile using the DF-ZF warhead is also more difficult for anti-missile missiles to hit.This is what the Russian hypersonic glide vehicle is designed for.

Russia and the United States had developed this technology much earlier but neither has deployed it in the form the Chinese appear to favor. The original work in this area was by the Germans during World War II. The U.S. and Russia both investigated the concept more during the Cold War but never felt it worth building. In the 1990s the United States proposed reviving work on hypersonic glide vehicles for its Prompt Global Strike system. This would put hypersonic glide vehicle warheads, using high-explosive and not nuclear explosives, on ICBMs. This meant a very expensive weapon that could hit a target anywhere on earth in less than an hour of the order being given. In any event, the United States successfully tested its version of the hypersonic glide vehicle in 2011 but with the defense budget shrinking the project was halted. This was encouraged when a 2014 hypersonic glide vehicle test failed. Now, this effort has been revived, sort of.

The United States moved ahead with reviving its Cold War era hypersonic glide vehicle ballistic missile warheads. In late 2017 the U.S. revealed several active research projects like TBG (Tactical Boost Glide) and HAWC (Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon) which are similar in size and shape to the cruise missiles carried by bombers, and launched from high altitudes into orbit or remain in the atmosphere, but moving at hyper speeds (over 5,000 kilometers an hour). This is similar to the X-51A Waverider project that was halted in 2013 but not forgotten. The problem with the X-51A was that it could not be made reliable enough. A 2010 flight test had the 8 meter (36 foot) long, cruise missile-like X-51 aircraft boosted to 3,300 kilometers an hour, using a solid fuel rocket, at which point the scramjet engine took over, and successfully operated for over two minutes, achieving speeds of nearly 6,000 kilometers an hour. This was the longest a scramjet had ever operated (the previous best was ten seconds). By 2013 the 4th test got the liquid fuel engine going for five minutes.

What makes scramjets work is the compression of incoming air without the use of a fan system (as in conventional jet engines). But while scramjets have been in development for half a century, the lack of adequate materials (that can handle the high heat and pressure), and adequate design tools, frustrated attempts to build workable and reliable scramjets. Scramjets have few moving parts but must cope with very extreme conditions and the design challenges have proved very frustrating. The recent X-51 tests, like all previous ones, ended with the aircraft crashing. The next step was to get longer hypersonic engine use, de-acceleration, and landing via parachute (and eventually an auxiliary engine.) Going beyond the 2013 test proved too expensive and time consuming to continue when there were cheaper alternatives available and these depended more on getting into orbit and letting gravity provide and maintain the high speed. It was definitely easier to achieve those high speeds with orbital technologies like TBG and HAWC. Or the new Chinese systems like DF-ZF.

a reply to: putnam6

The recent X-51 tests, like all previous ones, ended with the aircraft crashing.

The X-51 was designed to crash. It wasn't meant to be recovered like a conventional aircraft, it was meant to crash into the ocean and if anything was left, recovered.

a reply to: crayzeed

It wasn't a "craft", it was simply the sled being propelled to hypersonic speeds. It uses a Super Roadrunner rocket motor that produces 228,000 pounds of thrust for 1.4 seconds. It's a four stage sled, with the last two stages using SSR motors. The sled is propelled into a target to simulate a kinetic kill vehicle hitting an incoming missile. The sled accelerates at over 157Gs.

a reply to: Zaphod58

OMG. Fascinating!

Thank-you for describing what we witnessed in the video Zaphod58.

How was it possible that we heard the initial ignition blast at the beginning, when we were downrange like that?
That sled was going 8.8 times the speed of sound when it passed us. Even if it was the breaking of the sound barrier when it hit 1G, the sound would be way behind the sled approaching us.

All I am thinking is they edited that in for effect.

or speed of sound in solid is 6000 meters per second, in air 346 meters per second so 17.241 times faster, so hearing the sound at initial firing through solid ground could be the answer....