Is China Ahead Of The U.S. In Developing Hypersonic Weapons?

Lockheed's hypersonic missile concept. Lockheed Martin

Scout Warrior: US vs China: Is China In Front of the US in Developing Hypersonic Weapons?

The US wants to say in front of China with hypersonic weapons able to travel at five-times the speed of sound and destroy targets with a "kinetic energy" warhead.

The Air Force will likely have high-speed, long-range and deadly hypersonic weapons by the 2020s, providing kinetic energy destructive power able to travel thousands of miles toward enemy targets at five-times the speed of sound.

“Air speed makes them much more survivable and hard to shoot down. If you can put enough fuel in them that gets them a good long range. You are going roughly a mile a second so if you put in 1,000 seconds of fuel you can go 1,000 miles - so that gives you lots of standoff capability,” Air Force Chief Scientist Greg Zacharias told Scout Warrior in an interview.

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Update: The Future of Hypersonic Weapons (Daniel Norton, Cipher Brief)

WNU Editor: The Chinese and the Americans are not the only ones who are trying to develop hypersonic weapons .... Russia has made progress on materials for hypersonic planes that could launch nuclear attacks from SPACE (Daily Mail).