Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?

jMyles

With maturity and adult spending decisions and lasting motions to transcend warfare as a method of resource distribution, of course you can.

superkuh

>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem. "Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though. So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.

ale

“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”

bos

This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.

sidewndr46

What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission. We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

fjrorkr9for9

I think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).

Rotdhizon

I imagine the realistic answer is "we don't know", because it's never been truly tested. They are constantly improving and iterating designs, speeds, anti-intercept tech, anti-tracking. As you said as well, this is only what from is available in OSINT reporting. There are surely classified weapons from all major countries lying in wait for the most serious scenarios. A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference. It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.

yieldcrv

too pedantic for me insightful though

weregiraffe

Yes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.

anonymousiam

Lasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

jbverschoor

Or we can just all get along

OutOfHere

The proposed Golden Dome missile defense system of the US has plans to stop hypersonic missiles and more. I have a recent well-researched NotebookLM composite video on the topic: https://youtu.be/9kdXKJbDQCs

spwa4

You know there is a pretty direct calculation to determine the theoretical best outcome. How close you can come to a maneuver-capable rocket, is the answer to a conic section that takes distance, and maximum speed of both rockets into account. The purpose of a rocket is really only for distance to drop to something like 10 meters for conventional munitions and something like 300 meters or so for nuclear, in practice this is a constant. So what matters is the maximum speed of both rockets. Make that large enough and you can get the attacking rocket to make maneuvers that (assuming they cannot be predicted), make it mathematically impossible to intercept the attacking rocket. In practice this difference is only something like 130 km/h (for nuclear). Lasers won't work until we're talking gigawatt lasers, and even then only at "medium range" (in other words, for stopping nuclear weapons, an optimal outcome can only be achieved at single-digit kilometers, in other words, it may be able to protect individual points like the president, but it will never protect a city against a fusion device). Oh and whether a laser weapon works or not will not be known until seconds before impact. I hope you have strong nerves. Note that the attacking rocket does not need tracking, it needs a good random number generator. TLDR: no, we cannot currently intercept a hypersonic controlled rocket ... and that won't change without an overwhelming technological advantage, which basically means better rocket motors. At a sufficiently high equivalent level of technology, attacking rockets cannot be stopped. That level is only slightly higher than the level the US is currently at (and we don't know. Both US and Russia may already be past that point)

dgan

What could I read in order to understand different tradeoffs between types of missiles and the interceptors? It's just curiosity, i dont need hard math, but let's say i d like to implement a somewhat realistic system for real time strategy game

burnt-resistor

Mid-course phase interception: Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), SM-3, or 300+ kW laser. Terminal phase interception (It's moot using ABMs because of MIRV and decoys): (A missile similar to Sprint (but conventional) or Sentinel) or 300+ kW laser would be required to intercept a Mach 10-30 target. ABMD (SM-2 and SM-6) and THAAD aren't fast enough. If one had a lot of 1 MW class lasers that could serially engage many targets, that could work. The other problem, as mentioned, is having radar(s) that can search and track HGVs and ballistic targets upwards of Mach 20-30 (7+ km/s).

jjk166

> Ground radar is line-of-sight. The Earth is round. Anything below the horizon is invisible. That's not true. Ground based radar can see over the horizon (hence the term Over-the-horizon radar) by taking advantage of the refractive index of air, allowing the radar waves to essentially curve along, as well as by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere. Given that this is the foundation of TFA's argument, it does not instill confidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar

LorenPechtel

What in the world is the author thinking? We have detect/analyze/slew as three separate steps that must run in order. You don't consider whether the item is a decoy until you have plenty of tracking on it?? And if slew is even a step (I am aware of no US missile in this realm that moves it's a launcher) you can likewise do that while confirming your target. And he's assigning a fixed flyout time--but flyout time is entirely a function of where your launcher is relative to the missile target. It's coming down your throat (launcher next to the target), flyout is nearly zero. Note that we saw Iron Beam successfully engage Iranian ballistic missiles. Targets aren't up in the sky, the missile has to come down into the envelope of the weaker weapons in order to actually hit something. (The original issue of targeting ICBMs didn't consider this because the warhead would salvage fuse. Useful if the payload is nuclear, basically useless otherwise.)

maxglute

Can you stop many hypersonic missiles. There's a reason strikes are weaponeer in salvos sizes with probability of kill designed to penetrate defense.