Mike Wall
SPACE.com
High-tech weapons may be screaming through the skies at five times the speed of sound by the middle of the next decade, U.S. military officials say.
That's the most optimistic timeline for the battlefied debut of a superfast new strike capability, officials said, and it depends on continued research into hypersonic vehicles like the Air Force's X-51A Waverider, which completed its final test flight earlier this month.
The Air Force is "trying to get the technologies mature enough that in the 2020 timeframe we would like to be able to show the warfighter that we would be ready to start a development program of record sometime around that time," said Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate.
High-tech weapons may be screaming through the skies at five times the speed of sound by the middle of the next decade, U.S. military officials say.
That's the most optimistic timeline for the battlefied debut of a superfast new strike capability, officials said, and it depends on continued research into hypersonic vehicles like the Air Force's X-51A Waverider, which completed its final test flight earlier this month.
The Air Force is "trying to get the technologies mature enough that in the 2020 timeframe we would like to be able to show the warfighter that we would be ready to start a development program of record sometime around that time," said Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate.
Story continues here: Space.com
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