Are Hypersonic Missiles invulnerable?
Are Hypersonic Missiles Impossible to Shoot down?
This is the Russian 3M22 Zircon. It has a ridiculous top speed of Mach 9 or 11000 km/h. That's almost 3 times faster than a SR-71 Blackbird.
But this insane speed doesn’t just make it hard to shoot down but also produces heat, like a lot of heat, in fact the air around the missile turns from a gas to plasma. So what you may ask? Well this plasma interferes with and absorbs EM waves like radar basically making it invisible
But it gets worse because a normal missile has a parabolic flight path like this, so if you can see its launch, you know roughly where it’s going to land and where to intercept it. Hypersonic Missiles purposefully fly like a kid on sugar, darting around in all directions, masking its target location. On top of this they also fly at low altitudes, making them even hard to see.
These Zircon missiles have been tested multiple times, may have been battle tested in Ukraine and can house a nuclear warhead.
There is no current technology that has a reasonable chance to get around all these tracking and speed issues. It’s thought that our best chances of shooting it down is by using 1 Megawatt laser that could be housed on the likes of the USS Gerald R Ford. But this technology is likely at least 5 years away.
Are Hypersonic Missiles Impossible to Shoot down?
This is the Russian 3M22 Zircon. It has a ridiculous top speed of Mach 9 or 11000 km/h. That’s almost 3 times faster than a SR-71 Blackbird.
But this insane speed doesn’t just make it hard to shoot down but also produces heat, like a lot of heat, in fact the air around the missile turns from a gas to plasma. So what you may ask? Well this plasma interferes with and absorbs EM waves like radar basically making it invisible
But it gets worse because a normal missile has a parabolic flight path like this, so if you can see its launch, you know roughly where it’s going to land and where to intercept it. Hypersonic Missiles purposefully fly like a kid on sugar, darting around in all directions, masking its target location. On top of this they also fly at low altitudes, making them even hard to see.
These Zircon missiles have been tested multiple times, may have been battle tested in Ukraine and can house a nuclear warhead.
There is no current technology that has a reasonable chance to get around all these tracking and speed issues. It’s thought that our best chances of shooting it down is by using 1 Megawatt laser that could be housed on the likes of the USS Gerald R Ford. But this technology is likely at least 5 years away.
