Развитие морского оружия [3]

The Air Force, in collaboration with DARPA, NASA, and the Navy, is developing scramjet—
supersonic combustion ramjet—technologies that may contribute to the long-range strike mission
in the future. In this type of vehicle, the engine gets the oxygen it needs for combustion from the atmosphere passing through the vehicle, instead of from a tank onboard. This eliminates the need for heavy reservoir oxygen tanks, and makes the vehicle far smaller, lighter, and faster than a conventional rocket. According to NASA, a scramjet could, theoretically, travel at 15 times the speed of sound.105 The scramjet would destroy targets by crashing into them at hypersonic speeds.
However, the Air Force may also use the technology to create a payload delivery vehicle that
might carry conventional munitions and be launched on a long-range missile. The Air Force has designed an experimental scramjet, the X-51 WaveRider, that it can release from an Air Force bomber. It conducted a flight test of this vehicle on May 26, 2010. In this test, the vehicle was released at an altitude of 50,000 feet, from under the wing of a B-52 bomber. An Army Tactical Missile solid rocket booster accelerated the X-51 to a speed of approximately
Mach 4.8, the speed required for the engine to ignite. The Air Force had intended for the scramjet to fly 300 seconds and reach speeds of 4,500 miles per hour, or six times the speed of sound. However, the vehicle did not reach either of those thresholds before it began to slow down.

R41464.pdf