3 ms·

Russia claims new missile is 27 times faster than sound

• salawat 7y ago
  Do keep in mind, Mach 27 is a whole slew of speeds since Mach number is dependent on ambient fluid conditions, specifically the fluid medium's local speed of sound. For instance, if you plug Mach 27 into Google, it'll happily tell you that is 9261 m/s based off the international standard sea level atmosphere where Mach 1 is 343 m/s. I.e. 9.2km/s I.e. 1.4km/s greater than the 7.8km/s orbital velocity associated with LEO altitudes. To put that into economic terms; they're blowing an orbital launch vehicle+ worth of booster per missile if these figures are taken seriously. Take it with a grain of salt. If they actually are devoting that many resources to trying to maintain a standoff weapon like that, one which suffers from an egregious issue of having a fairly easily computed trajectory to boot, then Reagan's SDI as economic warfare gambit probably worked far better than anyone could have imagined. On the other hand, if Russia starts offering or doing drastically cheaper, more frequent space launches, I might start being somewhat more concerned that we're missing out on a technological breakthrough of some sort. Otherwise, likely just a psy-OP to keep the spooks on their toes. TL:DR: Look, a new Russian propaganda outlet!