Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow Raising Claims About Advanced Space Tech
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
(The speculative SpaceX suborbital rocket thing, IMHO, is not credible evidence against my point. :) )
It is less a tech problem than a political one.
A stealth ICBM on the other hand... now that is a scary. If any other nations got wind of that we would have another nuclear arms race.
Stealth may help avoid interception during the midcourse phase, though:
https://media.nti.org/pdfs/10_5.pdf:
> Midcourse Phase – “Largest Intercept Window”
> The midcourse phase allows the largest opportunity to intercept an incoming missile. At this point the missile is no longer under power, so it follows a more predictable path. Depending on the interceptor launch location, multiple interceptors could be launched, with a delay between them to see if the first ones were successful. Since the interceptor has a longer time to engage, fewer interceptor sites are needed to defend larger areas.
> Unfortunately, a longer period in space provides an attacking missile the opportunity to deploy countermeasures against a defensive system. However the defensive system also has more time to observe and discriminate countermeasures from the warhead.
But I think you're right that it a stealth ICBM wouldn't achieve as much as one would naively assume, and boost-phase detection would still invite retaliation.
I bet that given sufficient satellite coverage and image processing, ICBMs might remain visible throughout most of their flight, making radar stealth a moot point. I hope the world will not go too far down the road of building out measures and countermeasures to update our nuclear weapons systems, but I think you'd have to add that possibility to the long list of possible countermeasures when doing your planning.
With the potential for spacelaunch to become drastically less expensive due to reusable launch vehicles, a constellation of manned hypersonic glide vehicles may become economically practical.
The Titan II GLV was a human-rated adaption of an ICBM. Conceivably you could even put people in a truck launch ICBM.
There is even tech flying today to make it relatively practical/economical now that the boosters are being reused, as we always speculated was technically feasible.
What’s the big news here? Am I missing something?
I also assume that with the SR71 being as old as it is, the USAF has to have a couple of secret hypersonics by now that can get from any A to any B in the upper atmosphere in a few hours even non-ballistically.
No organization, jumps all over the place. Very hard to get through, and my god the hype...it's everywhere.
I believe it. I remember how the Bin Laden raid was executed with stealth helicopters- low noise and radar profiles. Came out of nowhere. And wasn't there a report on how the Navy hinted at all the UFO sightings were from tech they had to make ghost jets?
The US used “stealth” helicopters in Vietnam nicknamed the quiet one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_helicopter
It allowed them to send covert missions into north Vietnam, ironically it was initially developed for commercial civilian purposes as a quiet helicopter can be used for helicopter taxis and inner city travel more easily.
The US having stealth versions of the Blackhawk has been rumored since the 90’s it was less about if they can make them but if there’s an actual budgetary justification for them.
For the bin laden raid they used what essentially was scrapped prototypes and one of them crashed on landing during the raid.
RAM, low signature composites and acoustic improvements are hardly technologies that can described as which will drastically change the aerospace field.
The scene in the movie where one of the SEALs breaks through the fuselage when walking on top of the downed helicopter to plant the demo charge was taken from the redacted after action report and interviews with the team members so it’s quite possible that a normal Blackhawk might have managed to perform a hard landing instead of a crash.
The claim the general made is without evidence, and possibly without merit. He could be wishing for things that are vaporware aspirationally, like John McAfee does, and the press gobbles it up as clickbait/chumbox fodder.