China made the news recently for sending a potentially nuclear capable hypersonic craft around the world and then slamming it into its target, only missing by a couple dozen miles. The widely reported story made waves and spawned lots of talk of the new arms race and cold war as tensions over trade, Taiwan and COVID are at all time highs. In this episode, the focus will be the new hypersonic arms race. Aside from being really fast, you might ask what the big deal is because we've been sending things into space for a long time and nuclear weapons are no exception.
Two major reasons. The obvious one is speed. A faster object means a faster result and makes it harder to defend against. And the second reason has to do specifically with defending.
The crazy speed allows for a flatter trajectory of sorts that makes it much harder to shoot down than a conventional intercontinental ballistic missile, which has a very high arcing trajectory. And just like that, you've defeated virtually every missile defense system on the planet. If you've ever shot clay pigeons with a shotgun, you can understand this. The loftier the clay pigeon, the easier it is to shoot, but if someone throws one very horizontal, say across your body, it is much harder to hit.
It isn't a new idea. In fact, in an earlier episode called the Nazi's Secret Space Weapons, I talk about a forgotten Nazi weapon called the Silver Vogel, or Silverbird, pioneered by Eugene Sanger for the Nazi's America Bomber program. Before the war had even really begun, Hitler had his eyes set on North America, but America was simply too far for a loaded plane from Germany to strike, and not just be shot down. They considered launching more conventional designs from mid-Atlantic islands like the Azores.
The Messerschmitt, Imi 264, Falkwulf, FW300, and the Six Engine TA-400. The Junkers, JU-390, and the Heinkel HE-277 were all entered into the competition. The Silverbird was entirely different from any of those. It was much closer to something like the X-37B, DARPA's HyperSore and Falcon projects, and Virgin Galactic's spaceship too.
And now, China's mysterious new weapon system. Silverbird was a novel hybrid of a lifting body and a rocket that weighed ten tons when empty, and could carry up to 8,000 pounds of bombs. It would be launched by a rocket engine off of a rail system. After being flung into the air, its own rockets would ignite and send it into the edges of space at a max speed fought to be in excess of Mach 17.
But how do you aim and anticipate things at such high speeds and altitudes? And today, with all of our technology, we still struggle to make things moving this fast hit their targets. See the China experiment. The Nazi's thought pilots could use the stars to navigate and determine when to drop their payload, which was presented as an advantage.
Atmospheric bombers at the time could be thwarted by weather or heavy air defenses. No such obstacles existed for the Silverbird and its un-accluded view of the stars. From this altitude and speed, the Silverbird could strike anywhere on the planet in a matter of minutes. By the time it all came together, it was too late.
Nazi Germany was failing to keep pace with the raw manufacturing power of the United States and Britain, and the decision was made that the Silverbird was just too different and too risky to sink serious resources into. The Silverbird never made it past the concept or mock-up stage and a few small-scale tests of various rocket designs. It was ultimately shelled and Sanger moved on to another desperation project, the SK-14 fighter plane, which was really just a ramjet engine with a pilot laying, yes, laying on top of it. The idea wasn't completely different from the Silverbird, at least from a basic layman perspective.
The plane would be launched from the ground by rocket boosters until the ramjet engine could take over and achieve crazy speeds at untouchable altitudes for 1944 and 1945. But the SK-14 was never fully built either. After World War II, the aerospace industry would of course take massive leaps forward. Jet engines and space programs became the new pursuits, and missiles began replacing guns and bombs as the most feared weapons of war, and the USA and the USSR set off on a decades-long arms race.
Project Pluto was a US government program that sought to develop a nuclear-powered ramjet engine. The idea was that air enters the engine at the front, is heated by the reactor, expands, and is blasted out the back. The Project Pluto craft would be capable of crazy speeds and potentially staying airborne for months at a time. At least two functional nuclear ramjets were built and tested, 22A and 22C respectively.
Tori 2C was ran for five minutes on a rail car proving that the concept was valid, but unlike today, the design was considered too provocative and the Americans didn't want the Soviets imitating them and producing a similar weapon, for which there was no defense. At about the same time, the Soviet Union was working on its fractional orbital bombardment system. The idea was not that dissimilar from China's modern test. The goal was to insert a warhead at a very specific, very low orbit and very high speed that could evade detection by the US, and it was built and it would have worked, if not for the advent of early warning satellites that could detect the launches themselves.
The fractional orbital bombardment system was also viewed by the Soviets, to some extent, as a dangerous weapon that could push the arms race into unknown territory. Amid all of this, our planes like the SR-71, whose top speed is perhaps still unmatched. There was also of course the American space shuttle and the Soviet Moran, and very likely an SR-72 in the works at Lockheed, then missiles like the Russian S-400 that can exceed Mach 5 and outrun virtually anything else that we know of. Well, almost anything.
In the 2000s, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, began studying something called the hypersaur, which in concept is strikingly similar to the Nazi Silverbird, a manned craft that would skip along the outer edge of the atmosphere and in theory achieves speeds up to Mach 12 and be anywhere in the world in a little over an hour delivering people, or payload. Pics and links of all this stuff will be at lorenlegends.net, by the way. Hypersaur ultimately ended up inside DARPA's Falcon Project, Falcon being a hypersonic craft initially launched via rocket before kicking off its own engines. It has flown at least twice, with each flight ending intentionally in the ocean.
Part of the Falcon Project includes a secret craft referred to as the X-41, and another called the HTV-3X Black Swift. One also must wonder what the Space Force is doing with the X-37B, a miniature-looking space shuttle that is capable of long-duration orbits and carrying payload. It's easy to forget how fast things move in space. Boeing manufactured and tested the X-51 Hypersonic Missile in 2010.
Lockheed and Raytheon have their own in the works as well. Now, if you ask me, the SR-72 is the American endgame here. All indications are that something like it is being built, and may be very near flight-ready, something that can take off from a runway, or at least have a ground-based origin, fly around the world at ridiculous speeds and wreak havoc. According to Lockheed, it will be flying around sometime between 2023 and 2025.
And that leads us back to the China story. For decades, America has been the top superpower, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. And while America has obviously tested a variety of super-fast weapon and transport systems, we certainly haven't done so very publicly. So when reports came out that in August 2021, China had successfully tested such a vehicle, there was a sense of panic in the American defense industry.
And with all that happening in the world today, maybe rightly so. China denies that that test had anything to do with weapons testing, but was rather a test of a new space vehicle that is in development. Could the American military-industrial complex be making a relative non-story into a story? After all, China only spends about half of what we do on defense.
What triggered the alarm more than anything was that this new Chinese vehicle seems to have been able to maneuver itself on re-entry in ways we haven't quite achieved, and clearly they now have the manufacturing capability to match our once-leading edge. Remember for a minute that the Russian fractional orbital bombardment system became less relevant when satellites could track them? Well, satellites have a much harder time tracking vehicles like these. But it's not quite a sputnik moment some alarmists have made it out to be.
At least according to Robert Bekos, co-owner of Inavirring, a hypersonic vehicle propulsion company, as stated in Space News, an article titled China's Hypersonic Vehicle Test, a significant demonstration of space technology published October 22, 2021. And his main reasoning is that China's nuclear threat to the US is nothing new. China is also capable of putting satellites, people, and whole space stations into orbit now as well. America's time alone, at the top, is over.
One way or another. So what do you think? Did China launch a new weapon to rival those of the Americans? Or is the American military-industrial complex just holding its hands out for more money?
Maybe both? If history is any indicator, we may be on the cusp of a host of new conspiracies that are centered around black projects and amazing new technologies that people have never seen. Let's just hope that peace prevails. Well, that's all for this episode.
Be sure to check out the link in the description for references to all the cool things mentioned in this episode and some pictures of the crafted question. See you next time.