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China The Military

China Successfully Tests Hypersonic Aircraft, Maybe At Mach 12 (theregister.com) 158

Posted by BeauHD from the full-of-feats dept.
China's Northwestern Polytechnical University successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft called Feitian-2, claiming it reached Mach 12 and achieved a world-first by autonomously switching between rocket and ramjet propulsion mid-flight. The Register reports: The University named the craft "Feitian-2" and according to Chinese media the test flight saw it reach Mach 12 (14,800 km/h or 9,200 mph) -- handily faster than the Mach 5 speeds considered to represent hypersonic flight. Chinese media have not detailed the size of Feitian-2, or its capabilities other than to repeat the University's claim that it combined a rocket and a ramjet into a single unit. [...] The University and Chinese media claim the Feitian-2 flew autonomously while changing from rocket to ramjet while handling the hellish stresses that come with high speed flight.

This test matters because, as the US Congressional Budget Office found in 2023, hypothetical hypersonic missiles "have the potential to create uncertainty about what their ultimate target is. Their low flight profile puts them below the horizon for long-range radar and makes them difficult to track, and their ability to maneuver while gliding makes their path unpredictable." "Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target, making it harder to track and intercept them," the Office found.

Washington is so worried about Beijing developing hypersonic weapons that the Trump administration cited the possibility as one reason for banning another 27 Chinese organizations from doing business with US suppliers of AI and advanced computing tech. The flight of Feitian-2 was therefore a further demonstration of China's ability to develop advanced technologies despite US bans.
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China Successfully Tests Hypersonic Aircraft, Maybe At Mach 12 More

China Successfully Tests Hypersonic Aircraft, Maybe At Mach 12

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  • Autonomous Switching (Score:4, Funny)

    by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @08:17AM (#65490808)

    by autonomously switching between rocket and ramjet propulsion mid-flight

    That's nothing. My electric kettle autonomously switches from 'ON' to 'OFF' mid-boil!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      my spit uses autonomous switching to from accelerating away from earth to accelerating towards earth.

  • Time for laser guns (Score:3)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @08:39AM (#65490840) Homepage

    "Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target"

    They can't beat the speed of light so perhaps its time to invest more into laser and microwave weapons rather than the half hearted attempts so far.

    • ... into laser ...

      Space-age weapons such as hyper-sonic bullets, instant-fry LASERs and microwave emitters require massive amounts of energy. In addition, light is easily damaged by the atmosphere, making it a short range weapon. It's why the US DoD has abandoned these technologies over the last few years: Nuclear bombs and cruise missiles cover the no-boots-on-the-ground gamut from genocide to sneak attacks. Space-age technology lacks the efficiency and effectiveness to provide the theoretically-possible 'instantaneous'

    • Hypersonic weapons are unlikely to really be maneuverable. The SR-71 which was about Mach 5 had a turning circle of 500 miles. They are also unlikely to be very accurate. Fine for attacking a target like a city, but not so much for something smaller and they are still slower than an ICBM.

    • Re:Time for laser guns (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phoenix321 ( 734987 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @09:45AM (#65490996)

      Pin-pointing a laser onto a moving target is getting progressively more difficult the faster the target is. Targeting optics need to be progressively faster and more precise to hit the object for the time needed to have the intended effect. And all the effect the laser it has is proportional to the energy it deposits per square centimeter onto the target. With more air passing by the object, even more energy is dissipated and with the faster speed, the total flight time in range of the laser is progressively shorter.

      That's what makes hypersonic weapons so dangerous. They're too fast for defensive missiles to counter. There's less time for detection and identification overall, less time for a friend-or-foe decision, less time to align the laser spot on the target, the laser will be less accurate on the target, depositing less energy per square centimeter and second, the while the projectile dissipates more energy per second to the air around it and the laser system will have far less time anyway to destroy the incoming projectile before it impacts the thing it was supposed to defend.

      Look at the few leaked videos of hypersonic missile impacts. These missiles are so fast that there's barely a 1 or 2 seconds between the missile appearing and impacting. Current lasers have AT BEST a 10km engagement distance and that doesn't include the plasma shield that air forms around the HGV due to air friction at that speeds. At Mach 12 and ideal conditions, the laser will have less than 2 seconds time to deliver all its energy, through all atmospheric distortions, follow the HGV's potentially unpredicable flight path without instantly and permanently blinding all humans near and around the defended area.

      Atmospheric dust and smoke will quickly render that even more impossible than it already is. So even if the first few defense shots MIGHT be effective, every subsequent shot will become harder and harder because there will be more and more dust and smoke in the air around the laser. If lasers become too effective in the future, then you will see the attackers firing whatever they can find to increase smoke and dust in the atmosphere around the laser or reengineer their HGVs to release insane amounts of smoke when targeted or destroyed so you can at best destroy the first few of them until there's far too much smoke around to do anything with lasers against the next wave. Or they wait with their attack until there's fog or dense clouds over the target, forcing the defense to use MASER or similar things that could penetrate clouds more easily, but who knows what disadvantages that brings. And the Chinese leveraging their most prominent strengths, you can be absolutely sure their HGVs will be mass-produced in ridiculous numbers and through economies of scale become ridiculously cheap as well. They will then simply spam them over the target so that no amount of laser technology will be able to counter them, because you can't reasonably concentrate the amount of energy needed to defend against all of them. Even if you had 100 or 10000 lasers of the required intensity (1MW or more), there simply won't be enough Watts / Joules around to feed them all.

      There is very little defense against mass-produced, reasonably cheap gliders at speeds above Mach 4. The attackers can distribute production and stockpiles of gliders over their entire country and produce and stockpile for years, and mass them on any single target. The Joules needed to produce them can easily be transported to the factories, because there's enough time to do so. The defenders would have to place enough lasers near all potential targets to counter a massed attack on any of them. The Joules needed to fire the defense lasers would need to be transported immediately from everywhere to any one target area or stored everywhere in a way that's currently totally unfathomable to us. And even if we managed to do that, HGV production would profit from these advancements as well, bringing more and cheaper HGVs down on the target, immediately nullifying that advan

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        I never said they'd be a replacement for missle defense, but they could be an addition to it. As for the enemy sending loads of the things - sure, thats exactly what russia is doing right now with drones in ukraine but you don't see the ukrainians sitting around saying "Meh, why bother". They shoot down as many as possible even though some get through because lives matter.

    • The "aeroballistic" hyperbolic Cringe-all* missiles that the ruzzkies are so proud of are "maneuvering unpredictably" in the "aero" phase of flight, where they are slow and fly like cruise missiles, but in the hypersonic ballistic phase they just fall along a ballistic curve.

      Which has allowed the Ukrainian air defenses to shoot quite a lot of them down successfully.

      * Or maybe it was "Kinzhal", I forget...

    • They are working on it:
      https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/defense/us-air-force-successfully-tests-anti-missile-laser-defence-system.html#prettyPhoto

    • They can't beat the speed of light so perhaps its time to invest more into laser and microwave weapons rather than the half hearted attempts so far.

      You are yaddeyaddering a lot of physics with that comment. We have invested in lasers and microwave weapons. They share two things in common: a) they are insanely large and impractical, and b) they cost orders of magnitude more than simply rebuilding what that missile hit. Neither of those are because the attempts have been half hearted.

    • Lasers have inherent limitations no matter how powerful you make them due to divergence. The most powerful 300kW laser that has been made has a limitation of a few 10s of kilometers. A distance the hypersonic vehicle will cross in about 5 seconds. Put reflective and sacrificial armor on it and you've circumvented the only thing that could hope to stop it aside from a nuclear detonation on yourself.

  • Yep, lots of that goes on there.

  • "Hypersonic weapons can also maneuver unpredictably at high speeds to counter short-range defenses near a target, making it harder to track and intercept them," the Office found."

    The Office "found" what the US has known since the 1950s, and was built in MARV form in the 1959 Alpha Draco project from 1957's WS-199 effort.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    All that is old is new again... and forgotten so we can claim its new *and bad*.

  • Oops.. (Score:3)

    by BytePusher ( 209961 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2025 @10:32AM (#65491170) Homepage
    Antagonize, mock, and threaten 1 billion people who are kicking your ass in academics, because you're scared they'll pull ahead of you, instead of working together so you both advance, and then you find out what happens... oops.
    • We've been trying to work together for the last 50 years. China doesn't want to work together. China doesn't have that world view, they've been taking a zero-sum approach.
      • Man, the U.S. has been antagonistic to China, always. The only kind of "work together" the U.S. wanted was "work for us for free."

  • If, as I suspect, the rocket motor is what allowed them to reach such a high speed, that speed would only be able to be sustained for a few minutes.

  • Banning sharing AI reminds me of when they tried to ban strong encryption. It didn't work and there were many workarounds including printing it on paper. Sorry, but you can't contain knowledge.

  • I'm guessing that China is trying to make the US overspend on defence R&D so as to cripple its budget elsewhere. Claim to have mach 12 missiles, even when you don't, and the US then has to spend many millions researching defences against mach 12 missiles. Rinse lather and repeat for many other areas, and the US spending massively dwarfs the cost of fabricated claims of progress.

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