Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Chinese Hypersonic missile Fractional Orbit Bombardment System

 Been a lot of talk about this.  It certainly indicates that Chinese missile engineering is good.  On the other hand I am not convinced that this weapon offers a worse threat than what we face already.  Standard ICBMs are extremely difficult to stop.  The warhead comes in at nearly orbital velocity, Mach 20 or 18,000 mph.  The warhead has a tough heat shield to prevent it melting from atmospheric friction. To shoot one down probably needs nuclear warheads on the anti missile.  

  At Raytheon many years ago I worked on the anti ballistic missile system radar.  It was a massive radar, definitely a fixed installation, no way it was ever going to be mobile.  It  was a phased array radar so it could generate multiple beams to track multiple targets.  The anti missiles had to accelerate at 100 gravities to get high enough to prevent their nuclear warheads from blowing the city they were defending away. 

In short, the new Chinese missile is impressive, but I don't see it as being all that more dangerous than standard ICBMs, of which we have a lot.  

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