Russia Today..New hypersonic missile to be 'uninerceptable'

[Joanne98]

A joint Russian-Indian company has started the development of a cruise missile capable of flying at Mach 5, which will make it 'impossible to intercept'. BrahMos-2 will be the next generation of the highly successful the BrahMos missile already used by Indian military.

The news came from the head of BrahMos company, Sivathanu Pillai during the visit of Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdiukov.

The BrahMos missile (the acronym stands for Brahmaputra-Moscow) has been in development since 1998 and had its first successful test launch in 2001.

Russia provided the design of its P-800 Oniks missile as the basis of the project while India developed its guidance system. It has a maximum speed of Mach 2.8, making it is the world's fastest cruise missile.

The BrahMos-2 is expected to have twice the speed of the current version, which, the developers say, will make it practically immune to all existing missile defence systems.

http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/31123

[cobalt1999]

1. Still slow compared to lasers

Even Mach 5 is a snails crawl to light and computers can work out trajectories so fast that Mach 5 is far from un-interceptable.

[Joanne98]

3. Good point.

[NickB79]

5. But the current ABM system (which we've already sunk billions into) isn't based on lasers

We've spent the past decade trying to design an anti-missile system based on the theory we could shoot down one missile with another. It's cost us many billions of dollars and is still far from reliable.

How many more years, and how much more money, will it take to develop an anti-missile system based on lasers shooting down missiles? I'm aware of the 747-based anti-missile laser system they've had since the Star Wars Program, but that's pretty much stalled out developmentally.

[Warpy]

7. However, we don't have lasers that will deliver enough of a punch yet

This is what is wrong with the arms race. We come up with something, they come up with something to counteract it and it just never ends.

Between servicing the GOP debt and bloating our military, we have impoverished this country. Our infrastructure is crumbling, we're getting sicker as a people, our education system has been dumbed down and gutted and we get poorer every year. All we've been exporting is raw materials and our debt. It has to stop.

Every empire falls into this trap of concentrating on military matters and ultimately rotting and collapsing from within. There have been no exceptions.

[patrice]

2. un-interceptable?

[Winterblues]

4. Well we better spend another ten billion on Star Wars Defense then..

Is it that people just can not fathom that whatever they build will be countered in short order? Why not spend resources on Diplomacy which could make all the Military investment moot.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. Minor quibble: It's a contraction, not an acronym.