China Tests It's New Hypersonic Weapon

The Chinese government has recently tested a new hypersonic weapon system. This hypersonic weapon is designed to reach a speed of Mach 5. The “Starry Sky” weapon was tested on August 3rd. It is a super fast weapon which is meant to destroy the enemy’s air and missile defences. The China Aerospace Aerodynamics Research Institute announced the launch of this very weapon on its WeChat account saying that it has conducted the first domestic test of a “wave rider” hypersonic vehicle at 6:41 am on 3rd August.

According to Beijing’s state media, the rocket flew for ten minutes. The hypersonic vehicle which detached itself from the booster rocket flew for 400 seconds and reached the maximum speed of Mach 5.5 to 6 with an altitude of 100,000 feet. The People’s Liberation Army news site has described the wave rider weapon as the one that “uses the aerodynamic shape of the fuselage to generate lift, with a lift-to-drag ratio between 0.5 and 1.3. … it is mainly used for spacecraft design to re-enter the atmosphere. The wave body is used in a wide range of speeds and has a high structural strength, manoeuvrability and lift-to-drag ratio at Mach 5.23. From the appearance, the wave body looks flat.”

The Starry Night 2 appears to be a boost-glide weapon. The boost-glide weapons take the rocket to high altitudes, but they fall short of sending their payloads to the low Earth orbit. The weapon then glides down to the target at thousands of miles an hour. The advantage to having boost weapons is that they can confound the current missile defences. These weapons fly to their destinations at a trajectory which is too low for ballistic missile defence systems and too high for traditional air defence missiles. It is said that a boost-glide weapon can deliver a nuclear weapon against USA’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense ballistic missile interceptors in Alaska.