In the not-too-distant future, China plans to have an arsenal of weapon systems that can deliver attacks launched from its soil on U.S. in less than 15 minutes.
These hypersonic weapons, according to the South China Morning Post, will be tested in the world’s most powerful wind tunnel, now under construction in Beijing. Capable of testing speeds of up to 12km per second—or nearly 27,000 mph—any vehicle traveling at that speed from China will reach the U.S. West Coast in just 14 minutes.
The wind tunnel simulates this wind resistance by detonating a mixture of oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen so as to create an immense shockwave. Channeled through a tube toward the test aircraft, it will heat the vehicle’s surface to roughly 13,900° F—or 40 percent hotter than the surface of the sun.
The SCMP quotes Zhao Wei, deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who is a senior scientist working on China’s hypersonic weapons program. He said:
"[The wind tunnel] will boost the engineering application of hypersonic technology, mostly in military sectors, by duplicating the environment of extreme hypersonic flights, so problems can be discovered and solved on the ground."
The U.S. and Russia are already developing their own hypersonic weapons—those capable of traveling above Mach 5, or, five times the speed of sound—and have made similar wind tunnel advancements. The American wind tunnel the LENX-X facility in Buffalo, N.Y., can simulate air speeds of up to 10km per second, which is roughly Mach 30.
The only public demonstration of a hypersonic U.S. vehicle to date was in 2011, when the military’s HTV-2, reportedly capable of Mach 20, broke up after just a few seconds of flight.
Credit to Trunews
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