Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire China tests hypersonic missile

Greatly over-simplified, the B in ICBM stands for ballistic. With a normal re-entry vehicle, the rocket boosts the warhead to a high parabolic arc, the peak of which can be 1,500 miles up, and then the warhead comes down at a very steep angle. The steeper it comes in, the more accurate it can be (think dive bombing). The downside in recent years is that radars can see the warhead coming and interceptor rockets can be fired.

A hypersonic glide vehicle can be launched at a much lower trajectory, perhaps as low as 100 miles up in a partial orbit. It is thus not visible to radars until very late. And the vehicle can then fly and even maneuver to its target, evading defenses. The difficulties in designing such a "glide bomb" are related to cooling. Ballistic vehicles come in at up to 15X the speed of sound, but enter so steeply that the time of aerodynamic heating is only a few seconds. A glide bomb, even though at much slower speeds, has to endure heating for several minutes.