Air Force to test hypersonic aircraft

March 24, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The U.S. Air Force plans to launch an experimental aircraft today that potentially could reach speeds of 4,000 mph over the Pacific Ocean in a test flight that could give the Pentagon a new way to deliver a military strike anywhere around the globe within minutes.

Built in Southern California, the unmanned X-51 WaveRider is being developed to deliver powerful warheads at tremendously high speeds with pinpoint accuracy almost anywhere on Earth.

Military officials say the need for the technology became clear in 1998 when the U.S. military tried — and failed — to kill Osama bin Laden. While positioned in the Arabian Sea, Navy vessels lobbed cruise missiles at training camps in Afghanistan, hitting their targets — 80 minutes later. By then, bin Laden was gone.

But with a hypersonic missile, such as the one being tested on the X-51, “the attack would have been cut to just over 12 minutes,” Richard Hallion, a former Air Force senior adviser, said last year in an Air Force Association report about hypersonic technology.

Though supersonic means that an object is traveling beyond the speed of sound, or Mach 1, “hypersonic” refers to an aircraft blasting through the air at five times that speed or more.

Developing an engine that can reach and maintain those speeds hasn’t been easy. For decades, the development of the hypersonic engine has been fraught with setbacks.

But engineers at Boeing Co.’s Phantom Works research center in Huntington Beach, Calif., and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Los Angeles proved they were on the right track last May when the X-51 made its first flight from Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California.