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Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
- ale 4mo ago“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
- RealLadyGaga 4mo ago[flagged]
- jMyles 4mo agoWith maturity and adult spending decisions and lasting motions to transcend warfare as a method of resource distribution, of course you can.
- superkuh 4mo ago>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic. Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem. "Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though. So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bos 4mo agoThis is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.
- protortyp 4mo agoCurious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
- piazz 4mo ago“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells. Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably. That said I enjoyed the article!
- alach11 4mo ago> The honest answer to that question, in June 2026, is that we do not know > The honest reading of those numbers is not that defense is winning on economics > The honest 2026 answer is in three parts. > The honest answer is that we do not know, because no one has tried Firstly, I appreciated the article and especially the visuals. But I had the same reaction as the GP commenter. It was hard to read. I'm sick of this punchy, repetitive, LLM-generated prose.
- chadd 4mo agoThanks for compiling this. "A 100 to 300 kW beam has perhaps one to three seconds of dwell on a hardened, ablating, plasma-shrouded glide body. That is orders of magnitude short of the joules per square centimetre needed for a thermal kill." - wondering if you can elaborate more on whether a laser energy-based device would ever be able to have enough power to stop one of these?
- bos 4mo ago
- sidewndr46 4mo agoWhat I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission. We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in the case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
- MisterTea 4mo agoSpirit is a nuke. Not really something we want to be detonating in the atmosphere.
- sidewndr46 4mo agoI think you meant to say "Sprint". In any case, if you're being attacked I think the consequence of high altitude fallout is pretty small compared to dying.
- scheme271 4mo agoDepends on what you're being attacked by. If it's just regular warheads, a nuclear interceptor is wildly inappropriate especially if the intercept happens over someone else's airspace.
- nandomrumber 4mo agoModern thermonuclear weapons don’t really have fallout.
- scheme271 4mo agoThat's better but people typically won't appreciate a thermonuclear explosion overhead in order to take out a missile armed with a few hundred kilos of explosives. That is doubly the case if the nuke is from a neighboring country intercepting a missile targeting them.
- fjrorkr9for9 4mo agoI think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).
- Rotdhizon 4mo agoI imagine the realistic answer is "we don't know", because it's never been truly tested. They are constantly improving and iterating designs, speeds, anti-intercept tech, anti-tracking. As you said as well, this is only what from is available in OSINT reporting. There are surely classified weapons from all major countries lying in wait for the most serious scenarios. A big part of hypersonic/ICBM warfare is anti-detection tech. When you have the two most military capable countries with 'hypersonic' ICBMs that can in theory reach across the planet is < 30 minutes, a massive part of that is stopping the other country from realizing you even fired a missile in the first place. That detection is usually done through satellites afaik. One of the next steps in global warfare is going to be satellite degradation and interference. It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast.
- mrguyorama 4mo ago>It's a whole different world when you detect a launch in the silo and know you have half an hour to react versus not realizing a missile is in the air until it's 5 minutes off the west coast. Missile submarines have basically made this reality for decades.
- jandrewrogers 4mo agoDetecting hypersonics is relatively easy because they are the opposite of stealthy. Even most glide vehicles have an initial ballistic trajectory that exposes it to many sensors at distance. The US field-tested a number of short range hypersonics since the 1990s that don't have a ballistic trajectory but those were all canceled. Hypersonics have two related technical challenges. They are not maneuverable, at least not in the way people imagine, due to fundamental limits of material physics. They are more "straight line" fast. This requires very fast reaction times on the part of defensive systems but the intercept is otherwise pretty trivial using the same off-the-shelf intercept terminal guidance from 20-30 years ago. The big advantage hypersonics have is they significantly reduce the amount of space an air defense system can cover due to their speed. Hypersonic air defense missiles can counter this to some extent, which the US has, but these have drawbacks related to the second point. Terminal guidance for hypersonics is an extremely difficult engineering problem because none of the physical materials you can use in terminal guidance systems can survive endoatmospheric hypersonic travel. A hypersonic missile without effective terminal guidance is an ICBM with a shorter intercept window. This isn't that useful for many targets. The US has been continuously developing and testing different hypersonic terminal guidance designs since (at least) the 1980s. The first viable design only went into production 15-20 years ago. Presumably they've improved on and generalized it since then. There isn't much evidence that any other country has effective terminal guidance for hypersonics. It is worth noting that effective precision terminal guidance was a prerequisite for US deployment of hypersonic weapons. Everyone else touting "hypersonic missiles" skipped that part.
- yieldcrv 4mo agotoo pedantic for me insightful though
- advisedwang 4mo agoSometimes pedantic is needed to deflate over-enthusiastic headlines.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- weregiraffe 4mo agoYes. Israel and USA stopped a lot of hypersonic missiles recently.
- computerdork 4mo agoThink you need to read the article:)
- chris_money202 4mo agoThey have stopped a lot of supersonic missiles, some probably being sub-sonic. Hypersonic is 5-10x supersonic speeds and can maneuver at that speed and not many countries have these types of missiles.
- eightysixfour 4mo agoThe article itself takes on this claim. Did you read it?
- anonymousiam 4mo agoLasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
- eightysixfour 4mo agoWhat is the math on how much additional heat a laser would deliver to a warhead which is presumably designed with some kind of ablative shielding that is pushing through air compressed into a plasma? It seems like the damage from a laser pointed from miles away through atmosphere wouldn't be enough to change anything.
- echoangle 4mo agoThe linked plane was supposed to destroy missiles directly after launch (presumably by destroying the less-protected missile body instead of the entry vehicle).
- adrian_b 4mo agoThis is mentioned in TFA. The current lasers are not powerful enough for this purpose, they may be efficient only against drones or other slower targets.
- jandrewrogers 4mo agoA practical laser is unlikely to cut through ablative shielding. There are a couple of caveats to this though. First, asymmetric ablation can destroy hypersonic vehicles extremely quickly. It is a major cause of failure in hypersonic vehicles even when no one is shooting lasers at it. A laser just needs to induce the ablation asymmetry; the physics of hypersonic vehicles will do the rest of the work. Second, precision terminal guidance systems can't function behind ablative shielding. The terminal guidance system has no protection from high-power lasers.
- dylan604 4mo agoThere was also the Adaptive Optics where the beam was shaped by lot of individual articulated mirrors that could be used to correct the beam from not only the atmospheric distortion but how the heat of the beam itself would then change the atmospheric distortion. Supposedly, that tech became DLP.
- jbverschoor 4mo agoOr we can just all get along
- the_real_cher 4mo agoDoesnt seem like our species is very good at that.
- OutOfHere 4mo agoThe proposed Golden Dome missile defense system of the US has plans to stop hypersonic missiles and more. I have a recent well-researched NotebookLM composite video on the topic: https://youtu.be/9kdXKJbDQCs https://youtu.be/9kdXKJbDQCs
- mbonnet 4mo agoGolden Dome is tens of billions of dollars for extremely limited small-salvo ballistic missile interception. It will get canceled next administration, and for good reason.
- OutOfHere 4mo agoIts cost is not tens of billions; it will cost well over a trillion dollars. It is for all types of missiles. The US needs it to combat worsening threats from Iran and North Korea.
- spwa4 4mo agoYou know there is a pretty direct calculation to determine the theoretical best outcome. How close you can come to a maneuver-capable rocket, is the answer to a conic section that takes distance, and maximum speed of both rockets into account. The purpose of a rocket is really only for distance to drop to something like 10 meters for conventional munitions and something like 300 meters or so for nuclear, in practice this is a constant. So what matters is the maximum speed of both rockets. Make that large enough and you can get the attacking rocket to make maneuvers that (assuming they cannot be predicted), make it mathematically impossible to intercept the attacking rocket. In practice this difference is only something like 130 km/h (for nuclear). Lasers won't work until we're talking gigawatt lasers, and even then only at "medium range" (in other words, for stopping nuclear weapons, an optimal outcome can only be achieved at single-digit kilometers, in other words, it may be able to protect individual points like the president, but it will never protect a city against a fusion device). Oh and whether a laser weapon works or not will not be known until seconds before impact. I hope you have strong nerves. Note that the attacking rocket does not need tracking, it needs a good random number generator. TLDR: no, we cannot currently intercept a hypersonic controlled rocket ... and that won't change without an overwhelming technological advantage, which basically means better rocket motors. At a sufficiently high equivalent level of technology, attacking rockets cannot be stopped. That level is only slightly higher than the level the US is currently at (and we don't know. Both US and Russia may already be past that point)
- dgan 4mo agoWhat could I read in order to understand different tradeoffs between types of missiles and the interceptors? It's just curiosity, i dont need hard math, but let's say i d like to implement a somewhat realistic system for real time strategy game
- burnt-resistor 4mo agoMid-course phase interception: Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI), SM-3, or 300+ kW laser. Terminal phase interception (It's moot using ABMs because of MIRV and decoys): (A missile similar to Sprint (but conventional) or Sentinel) or 300+ kW laser would be required to intercept a Mach 10-30 target. ABMD (SM-2 and SM-6) and THAAD aren't fast enough. If one had a lot of 1 MW class lasers that could serially engage many targets, that could work. The other problem, as mentioned, is having radar(s) that can search and track HGVs and ballistic targets upwards of Mach 20-30 (7+ km/s).
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- jjk166 4mo ago> Ground radar is line-of-sight. The Earth is round. Anything below the horizon is invisible. That's not true. Ground based radar can see over the horizon (hence the term Over-the-horizon radar) by taking advantage of the refractive index of air, allowing the radar waves to essentially curve along, as well as by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere. Given that this is the foundation of TFA's argument, it does not instill confidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-horizon_radar
- echoangle 4mo agoOn the other hand, those only really tell you that something is coming somewhere in that direction, OTH radars don't have the resolution for targeting afaik.
- jjk166 4mo agoKnowing that it's coming and the general direction is what you need for command and control, the actual interceptor is going to be much more limited in range than the targeting radar.
- protortyp 4mo agoExactly. In an earlier draft I went deeper into this, but cut that section among others for brevity.
- adrian_b 4mo agoOver-the-horizon radars have very poor resolution, so they are useful only for early warning, not for guiding an interceptor. For targeting at distance, you need antennas mounted on high masts or airborne radars.
- jjk166 4mo agoYou don't need to target at distance, you are limited by the range of your interceptor. OTH tells you which interceptor battery needs to be looking where.
- LorenPechtel 4mo agoWhat in the world is the author thinking? We have detect/analyze/slew as three separate steps that must run in order. You don't consider whether the item is a decoy until you have plenty of tracking on it?? And if slew is even a step (I am aware of no US missile in this realm that moves it's a launcher) you can likewise do that while confirming your target. And he's assigning a fixed flyout time--but flyout time is entirely a function of where your launcher is relative to the missile target. It's coming down your throat (launcher next to the target), flyout is nearly zero. Note that we saw Iron Beam successfully engage Iranian ballistic missiles. Targets aren't up in the sky, the missile has to come down into the envelope of the weaker weapons in order to actually hit something. (The original issue of targeting ICBMs didn't consider this because the warhead would salvage fuse. Useful if the payload is nuclear, basically useless otherwise.)
- maxglute 4mo agoCan you stop many hypersonic missiles. There's a reason strikes are weaponeer in salvos sizes with probability of kill designed to penetrate defense.
- mark336 4mo agoMaybe, but USAF couldnt stop Itan from shooting down an F16 Strike fighter with a missle