Stratolaunch Successfully Completes Reusable Hypersonic Flight and Recovery
stratolaunch.com63 points by speckx 9 days ago
63 points by speckx 9 days ago
It's important to distinguish between lift generating and air breathing hypersonic craft and simple conical rockets without shockwave impingement sites on the craft body. The former are what are what people talk about when they talk about hypersonic capabilities. But with this Stratolaunch case, and with other militarys' recent "hypersonic" implementations, there are actually no real capability differences from a ballistic missile except trajectory. These are jobs programs for keeping aerospace talent alive at best and get most use as paper dragons. Or maybe it's just a way to normalize using ballistic missiles, because they look slightly different and have a different name, without everyone freaking out?
I'm not saying a pointy fast rocket testbed isn't cool or even useful to try to develop ways of avoiding shockwave impingement during air breathing or lift generation. But this isn't doing the thing.
> there are actually no real capability differences from a ballistic missile except trajectory
Which is all that matters for military purpose. Air breathing hypersonic is useful because it offers even more flexibility in trajectories, but that doesn't mean that hypersonic gliders aren't useful.
> just a way to normalize using ballistic missiles, because they look slightly different and have a different name, without everyone freaking out?
Ballistic missiles have never been “not normalized”, they have been used routinely in pretty much every recent conflicts by at least one of the belligerent (usually the non-US side, since ballistic missiles are a way around the lack of airborn capabilities, but the US has its own arsenal: ATACMS are ballistic missiles).
I mostly agree, but the military distinguishes between hypersonic glide vehicles that are launched from a rocket and then glide at hypersonic speeds towards the target while being able to do evasive maneuvers and hypersonic ballistic missiles (which all 40 year old ICBMs are).
The Oreshnik was famously falsely classified as an HGV in the first weeks by alternative media.
There is so much hype about "hypersonic" that I'm not sure if a true HGV even exists today. The gadget from the article looks like an attempt at it though.
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I'm guilty of both (and possibly more) and can read the article fine, FWIW.
Yay? I'm not sure what I'm missing here. In startup parlance this feels more like a feature than a product (like maybe a division of Lockheed or Boeing).
It was a Scaled Composites project (or at least a lot of Scaled people were working on it! I used to work with an ex-SC guy, they had some nifty codename for it), with Paul Allen bankrolling it. They built and started testing, then Paul died and they shuttered. The project was bought by a private equity firm, and now they're back doing this.
Hypersonic technology has a lot of strategic military importance.
This is a public signal of “we got something to Mach 5 and landed it in one piece - twice”.
That’s a pretty good indicator to people who want to get in on hypersonic technology development (I.e. defense contractors) that Stratolaunch is open for business.
It is a milestone. "First build succeeded with an artifact exiting(0) with only warnings" is an achievement of its own in heavy industries.