Behind the Air Force's Secret Robotic Space Plane

Move over NASA. The U.S. Air Force has spent decades on the concept: an unmanned space plane that can be used to spy, reposition satellites, possibly even bomb targets, then return to base. A successful launch next week could turn that vision into a reality.

 

When the engines of a 19-story Atlas V ignite in April at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the liftoff will look like any other for the workhorse launch vehicle. After about 4 minutes, the engines will cut off and the rocket's first stage will fall away, freeing the second stage to boost the upper section of the rocket into low Earth orbit.

Away from prying eyes, the mission will cease to be ordinary. A few seconds after the second stage fires, the fairing, a protective shroud that surrounds the cargo at the rocket's tip, will split in half, revealing the classified payload: a 29-foot-long delta-wing spacecraft called the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle. It might look like a miniature version of the space shuttle, but this spacecraft is unmanned, and instead of NASA, the U.S. Air Force is operating it. The moment the X-37B emerges from the shroud will mark the fulfillment of a dream the Department of Defense has been pursuing for nearly 50 years: the orbital flight of a military vehicle that combines an airplane's agility with a spacecraft's capacity to travel in orbit at 5 miles per second.

At the end of its maiden trip, which could last days or even weeks, the X-37B will glide to Earth under robotic control without the benefit of engines. Instead, it will rely on flight-control surfaces in the tail to steer it through a fiery re-entry, during which the nose and leading edges of the wings must resist 3000-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures. The flight will end in secrecy with a 230-mph touchdown on an isolated runway at an Air Force base in California, most likely Vandenberg.

Though based in many ways on the shuttle-the only operational orbital space plane in the world-the X-37B showcases plenty of innovation. The shuttle uses hydraulic lines to power the control surfaces on its wings and tail, but the X-37B takes advantage of small, powerful electromechanical actuators instead, eliminating the weight of fluid and hoses. In lieu of the ceramic tiles used on the shuttle, the X-37B's leading edges and nose cap are made of an easily shaped composite material that NASA developed when the space agency ran the experimental craft's development, before the military took charge of it in 2004.

The stubby 15-foot wingspan also echoes the shuttle's design, but unlike the larger craft, which has one tall vertical stabilizer, the X-37B has a V-tail with two ruddervators, a combination of a rudder and an elevator. David Hamilton, the director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, explains that the shorter V-tails are easier to package in a fairing, something that's not a concern for the shuttle. Those V-tails also help guide the X-37B through its 40-degree, nose-high re-entry, while a speed brake along the upper centerline helps it slow down as it prepares to land. Since the X-37B is unmanned, it does not need hardware to maintain a pressurized compartment for a crew and does not have to carry supplies for an extended manned mission.

 The X-37B's simplicity and small size are part of what makes it appealing to the military. "There was always this issue with the space shuttle that you were sending up this enormous truck no matter what you were launching into space," says Mark Lewis, the former chief scientist for the Air Force. "There are times you want the Mack truck and times you want the Volkswagen Beetle. Unfortunately, with the shuttle, you were forced to fly the Mack truck."

The Air Force won't say what the X-37B will do during its first trip to orbit because the program has sunk into the "black" world of classified programs. Until a couple of years ago, the spacecraft was regarded as just another experimental prototype. Today, Air Force officials are skittish to mention even the smallest details. Asked in a recent PM interview what he could say about the X-37B, Werner J.A. Dahm, the Air Force's chief scientist, replied, "Nothing very useful," before quickly changing the subject.

Most of what the Air Force will now publicly acknowledge about the vehicle is contained in an opaquely worded two-page fact sheet: Built by Boeing's secretive Phantom Works division and managed by the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle "will demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the United States Air Force." Because the program did not start as classified, many of its design details can be gleaned from documents drafted before the program went dark.

The Pentagon's X-37B program stands out at a time when there is a dearth of radical, groundbreaking government-sponsored aircraft and air transportation concepts. "We retired the SR-71," says Vincent Sabathier, a senior associate and space policy specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington, D.C., referring to the legendary Blackbird supersonic spyplane. "We will retire the space shuttle. This is something that is still exciting."

Despite decades of work and billions of dollars, the X-37B is the Pentagon's only surviving space plane program after post-Cold War budget cuts. "I think what we had in the last decade was an interruption, or intermission, in space plane development," says Rebecca Grant, a former Air Force official and now the president of the Washington, D.C.-based IRIS Independent Research. "Hopefully now [with the X-37B launch] we're looking at the next act." 

Reusable launch vehicles (RLVs) and space planes have suffered from the promises of scientists and politicians who overestimated their utility and underestimated their complexity. The X-20 Dyna-Soar, a flat-bottom glider that used rockets to take off but made powerless landings, was touted as an unstoppable hypersonic space bomber but was canceled in 1963. Designers billed the quixotic single-stage-to-orbit X-30 as a new Orient Express, leading President Ronald Reagan to say in a 1986 speech that it would be able to "take off from Dulles Airport and accelerate [to] up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within 2 hours." But as the complexities of reusable spacecraft became clearer, the government started cutting space planes from the budget.

NASA took over the development of RLVs from the Pentagon in the 1990s, but critics soon assailed the agency for pursuing endless testbeds rather than operational spacecraft. One of the most ambitious space planes of the era was the X-33, a 69-foot-high craft that did not need a heavy rocket to reach orbit. A test craft was nearly complete in 1999 when engineers discovered cracks in the overweight vehicle's fuel tank. NASA officials canceled the program in 2001, and like nearly all previous space planes, it never flew. "The X-33 required at least one miracle," Lewis says.

In a 2001 congressional hearing, Henry Cooper, the former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, blamed both NASA and the Air Force for killing space planes: "The Air Force has not been a serious advocate for military space programs-otherwise it would not have supported transferring the reusable launch mission to NASA, an organization that has shown little responsiveness to supporting innovative military space programs."

But civilian space planes did not perform as expected, either. The space shuttle failed to reach its primary goals of making transportation to space cheaper and more efficient. The prospects for a new generation of reusable space planes went from bad to catastrophic when, on Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry. NASA's shuttle program, which was originally supposed to carry the X-37 orbital test vehicle, faced an early retirement, and the agency lost interest in RLVs and space planes.

The X-37B, though more modest than its predecessors, seemed to be on a familiar path to extinction. NASA started work on the X-37 in 1999, and soon after, agency officials developed a plan to build an approach and landing test vehicle and an orbital test vehicle. But in 2004 NASA dropped them both. The Defense Department then adopted the X-37 and placed it under the auspices of its research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

DARPA contracted Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites to conduct drop tests of the X-37 off its White Knight carrier aircraft over California. (The jet-powered White Knight gained fame as the mother ship that launched SpaceShipOne, the suborbital craft that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.)

In 2006, the X-37 again changed hands, this time going from DARPA to the Air Force, and a cloak of secrecy fell over the program. The new plan focused on building a single orbital test vehicle, rebranded as the X-37B. "I can't say a lot about it," says Lewis, the former Air Force chief scientist. "I had to actually start asking questions about what this thing is, because it was being kept so secret."

The presumption that the space plane's mission is important because it's classified might be a smokescreen, says John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org. "Maybe it's a bad idea," he says. There are reasons for a military program to go "black" that don't have to do with national security.

Secrecy also protects the X-37B and its funding. With tight budgets and skeptics alert for failure, "you put it in the black and you operate it without telling people," Sabathier says. The Air Force declines to disclose how much it's spending on the X-37B, and, because of the classified status, the figure is not otherwise available. 

One very public event may have secured the future of military space planes. On Jan. 11, 2007, China destroyed one of its obsolete weather satellites with a missile ("Battlefield Space," July 2007). Though China's test was hardly a complete surprise to the military or intelligence communities, the incident became a dramatic reminder of the vulnerability of critical satellites.

In an emergency-like a rapidly unfolding crisis or an attack on a vital U.S. satellite-a space plane could become a reconnaissance platform by scanning the Earth below or by observing other objects in orbit. The ability to launch orbital surveillance platforms quickly-what the Pentagon calls "operationally responsive space"-has been a longtime goal of the Defense Department.

"The weird thing to me is that they are being so coy about the types of missions they want space planes to do," says Theresa Hitchens, a space policy expert and director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. "The first thing that comes to mind is a pop-up reconnaissance vehicle for a place where you don't have satellite reconnaissance or can't move a satellite fast enough."

It can take the Air Force months to prepare a military satellite and days to move one into a new position, compared to about an hour or two to position a space plane kept on alert. Also, any nation with intelligence about U.S. satellite paths can predict when the satellites are overhead, so a space plane offers an element of surprise.

In current conflicts, military commanders have a hard time sharing orbital images because satellites controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office are often tasked to stare at another target. "All the strategic applications are still very appealing if the technology can come together," Grant says.

But if getting satellites into space cheaply is the main goal, then a reusable spacecraft like the X-37B is by no means the best option. Peter Wegner, the director of the Pentagon's Operationally Responsive Space Office, says he's watching advances in RLVs, but his focus instead remains fixed on finding ways to slash the price of expendable rockets. "I think we can hit the [launch] timelines with the expendable vehicles and still cut the cost dramatically," Wegner says.

The most daring job of a space plane, and the one least discussed, is the role of a bomber. The craft could fly over targets within an hour of launch to release cone-shaped re-entry vehicles that would both protect and guide weapons through the atmosphere. A craft the size of the X-37B could carry 1000- or 2000-pound re-entry vehicles armed with precision munitions like bunker-busting penetrators or small-diameter bombs, or simply use the explosive impact of kinetic rods cratering at hypersonic speeds to destroy targets.

However, widespread concerns about stationing weapons in space, possibly starting an orbital arms race with China, could make this option unappealing. In 2001 Boeing pitched a space bomber system to the Pentagon, but there is no evidence that the X-37B is being used to create such a weapon system.

Others in the U.S. government are also expressing interest in the space plane concept. The Pentagon recently completed a document outlining the requirements and development path for a space plane that could insert small teams of Marines anywhere in the world in 2 hours. In February NASA awarded $20 million in research funds to a private space company called Sierra Nevada Corp. to build a passenger space plane called Dream Chaser. The craft would launch on a rocket, ferry up to seven people to the International Space Station (or private space hotels) and then land like the space shuttle. The Air Force's X-37B has the clear lead on these conceptual contenders-Hamilton says the X-37B team is currently preparing for a second launch sometime in 2011.

What may differentiate the X-37B from its predecessors-and what confounds the critics trying to make sense of it-is precisely that its goals don't sound overly futuristic. "I'm more concerned about the programs that are touting themselves about all they will achieve," says Richard Hallion, a former Air Force chief historian and one-time special adviser to the Pentagon on space programs. "The ones that are quiet, the ones that maintain a more modest public posture, we often find have the potential for true greatness."

The X-37B might lack a flashy name, a made-for-the-movies mission and public hoopla, but this space plane's low profile might be just the thing that helps it beat the long odds and become a success.

Hypersonic Cruise Missile: America's New Global Strike Weapon

The mission: Attack anywhere in the world in less than an hour. But is the Pentagon's bold program a critical new weapon for hitting elusive targets, or a good way to set off a nuclear war?

Launched from a B-52, the proposed X-51 hypersonic cruise missile could travel 600 miles in 10 minutes to strike elusive, fleeting targets

A tip sets the plan in motion--a whispered warning of a North Korean nuclear launch, or of a shipment of biotoxins bound for a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon. Word races through the American intelligence network until it reaches U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, the Pentagon and, eventually, the White House. In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president's command to launch.

When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident's four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.

If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault. The plan is part of a program—in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles—called Prompt Global Strike. It will begin with modified Tridents. But eventually, Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5—roughly 3600 mph. The goal, according to the U.S. Strategic Command's deputy commander Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, is "to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes."

The question is whether such an attack can be deployed without triggering World War III: Those tungsten-armed Tridents look, and fly, exactly like the deadliest weapons in the American nuclear arsenal.

QUICK HIT

The military is convinced that in the coming years it will need to act with this kind of speed against threats—terrorist leaders, smuggled nuclear or chemical arms—that emerge and disappear in a flash. There may be only hours, or minutes, to respond. "We know how to strike precisely. We know how to strike at long distances," says Kehler, whose office is in charge of the Defense Department's Global Strike mission. "What's different now is this sense of time."

The leading candidates to deliver Prompt Global
Strike's swift knockout punch are the sub-launched
Trident II missile and the X-51, a cruise missile
launched froma B-52 and boosted to
supersonic speed by a rocket.
A scramjet takes it hypersonic.

Every strategist remembers Aug. 20, 1998, when the USS Abraham Lincoln Battle Group, stationed in the Arabian Sea, launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in eastern Afghanistan, hoping to take out Osama Bin Laden. With a top speed of 550 mph, the Tomahawks made the 1100-mile trip in 2 hours. By then, Bin Laden was gone—missed by less than an hour, according to Richard A. Clarke, former head of U.S. counterterrorism.

The American military already has weapons that can destroy just about anything in a matter of minutes: nuclear missiles. That terrifying capability was designed to contain Soviet adversaries. But as the Cold War recedes into memory, U.S. strategists worry that our nuclear threat is no longer credible—that we are too muscle-bound for our own good. Are we really prepared to wipe out Tehran in retribution for a single terrorist attack? Kill millions of Chinese for invading Taiwan? The answer is no.

Paradoxically, the weaker our enemies have grown, the less ominous our arsenal has become. Military theorists call it self-deterrence. "In today's environment, we've got zeros and ones. You can decide to engage with nuclear weapons—or not," says Capt. Terry J. Benedict, who runs the Navy's conventional Trident program from a nondescript office a few miles from the Pentagon. "The nation's leadership needs an intermediate step-to take the action required, without crossing to the one."

In 2001, Defense Department planners began searching for something that could hit a foe almost instantly without risking a nuclear holocaust. Most of the solutions—unmanned bombers, faster cruise missiles, hypersonic "glide vehicles" coasting in from space—required a decade or more of development. The Navy, however, had been testing conventionally armed Trident II missiles since 1993. With a few hundred million dollars, strategists said, the first Prompt Global Strike submarines could be ready to go in just two years.

The $60 million conventional missile needs to be far more accurate than the nuclear version. But the multiple warheads can lock onto GPS coordinates while streaking through space. Upon entering the atmosphere, the warheads use flaps to steer to a target. With the Trident II's range of 6000 nautical miles, subs armed with the missiles could threaten a whole continent's worth of enemy positions. "Now," says Benedict, who leads the Trident conversion effort, "we've got the capability to hold all of these targets in all these hot spots at risk at one time."

In 1988, Lockheed Martin's Trident II D5 nuclear ballistic missile entered service on Ohio class submarines. In the Prompt Global Strike program, each sub would be armed with 22 nuclear Tridents, along with two retrofitted Tridents, each with four independently target able warheads. here's how a conventional Trident II would work.

1 Gas pressure ejects the Trident II from a patrolling submarine. Once the missile clears the water, the first-stage engine ignites and the aerospike at the nose extends to improve aerodynamics. Stage 1 burns for approximately 65 seconds. When the Trident is locked onto targets at its maximum range (roughly 6000 nautical miles), this burn carries the missile a few hundred miles downrange at a 45-degree angle. Because all propellant must be used, the missile corkscrews to burn off excess fuel for closer targets.

2 As stage 1 falls away from the missile, the second-stage engine ignites for another 65-second burn that carries the Trident an additional 500 to 800 miles downrange. The nose cone fairing (blue) is ejected to shed weight.

3 After separation from stage 2, the third stage engine burns for approximately 40 seconds, concluding the boost phase and lofting the Trident II up to 600 miles above the Earth—the altitude of some weather satellites.

4 At the apogee of the Trident's trajectory, the third stage falls away, leaving the post-boost vehicle, or bus (red). It receives navigational updates and deploys the four individually targeted warheads (green). Traveling at 13,000 mph and accurate to 30 ft., the warheads are GPS-guided on descent by means of tiny flaps. Two types of warheads are under consideration: the fragmentation version, which shatters tungsten rods just above a target, and a bunker-busting metal "shock impactor" that relies on kinetic energy for its destructive power.

NUCLEAR AMBIGUITY

Almost immediately, congressional critics and outside analysts attacked the missile plan. Everyone seemed satisfied that, technically, modified Tridents could meet Global Strike's requirements. But the Pentagon can't explain how the weapon will be deployed and who will be its intended target. "I just don't think they've got a plan for using these things," says a frustrated senior congressional aide.

First, there's the matter of intelligence. If a president is going to launch the first intercontinental ballistic missile attack in history, he'll need overwhelming evidence. Our ability to nail down that kind of quality information is patchy, at best. On March 19, 2003, the United States launched 40 cruise missiles at three locations outside Baghdad in hopes of killing Saddam Hussein and other senior military officials. It turned out the former Iraqi leader wasn't in any of the locations; the strikes killed at least a dozen people, although it's not clear if they were civilians or leadership targets.

The mission failed even though friendly forces controlled the area. At the heart of Prompt Global Strike is a much darker scenario: American troops are far from their intended target—or the enemy's air defenses are too tough to penetrate. "So let me get this straight," says Jeffrey Lewis, a Harvard University nuclear energy and weapons analyst. "We've got exquisite, fleeting intelligence in an area of immediate concern, but no forces nearby and, miraculously, a sub in just the right spot to attack. I suppose there's some chance of that. But it's pretty small."
 

More difficult to explain is how a conventional Trident could be launched without provoking a crisis even bigger than the one that it was meant to solve. The Navy's plan calls for arming Ohio class subs with two conventional and 22 nuclear Trident II missiles. (The Navy intends to cut its Ohio class fleet from 18 to 14 subs, with 12 in the water at any one time.) To outside observers, the subs' conventional and nuclear weapons would appear identical—the same size, the same speed, shooting from the same location.

Traditionally, the U.S. strategy is to shoot missiles over the North Pole. But the current, most likely Prompt Global Strike targets, North Korea and Iran, lie south of China and Russia—which would put those countries right under a pole-launched flight path. "For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations," a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. "The launch of such a missile," Russian president Vladimir Putin said in his 2006 state of the nation address, "could provoke an inappropriate response from one of the nuclear powers, could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.

The Navy and Strategic Command have proposed all kinds of fixes to address what a Senate Armed Services committee described as Prompt Global Strike's "nuclear ambiguity issues." The subs could be positioned in different locations for a conventional attack than for a nuclear one, military leaders argue. (But that could put the boats out of position for an instant strike.) Hotlines to Moscow and Beijing could warn leaders in those capitals of conventional missile attacks. That is, if those leaders take us at our word—and don't warn their allies in Pyongyang or Tehran to get out of the missile's way.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a press conference, didn't seem that concerned. "Everyone in the world would know that [the missile] was conventional," he said, "after it hit within 30 minutes."

Congress is decidedly less blasé. The House and Senate have ordered the Pentagon to come up with something more certain before they'll provide the $127 million requested in this year's budget for conventional Trident modification.

While Trident II missiles with conventional warheads could be deployed in a few years, it may take a decade or more to develop the X-51 WaveRider. The WaveRider destroys targets by simply crashing into them at hypersonic speeds. But the technology in this remarkable missile may have wider applications, including ultrafast planes and new space vehicles. Designed by Boeing and Pratt & Whitney for the Air Force Research Laboratory, the X-51 uses just one moving part—the fuel pump—to hit Mach 5, or 3600 mph.

 

Rocket booster The X-51 is carried to 45,000 ft. by a B-52 bomber or a fighter jet, then released. A rear-mounted Army Tactical Missile Systems rocket kicks in to propel the 1600-pound missile to Mach 4.5 and 100,000 ft. The rocket then drops away and the X-51's engine takes over.

Internal inlet The missile's sharp nose funnels shock waves produced at hypersonic speeds into a rectangular opening on the craft's belly. The shock waves compress the air, eliminating mechanical parts that normally do this.

Isolator This component adjusts airflow—which can reach 2500 pounds per square foot—to a stable pressure for the combustor. Slowing airflow increases drag on the vehicle, but allows for more complete combustion.

Combustor Thrust is created when the compressed air mixes with a mist of JP-7 jet fuel and is ignited. Because hypersonic speeds generate sustained temperatures of up to 4500 degrees, the propellant also acts as a coolant—and prevents the X-51's engine walls from melting.

Airflow PM consulted NASA to estimate the fluid dynamics for external airflow around the nose, engine, stabilizers and tail of an X-51 traveling at Mach 5. The rear contour illustrates the engine exhaust plume shape.

The USS Tennessee and other Ohio class subs carry 24 Trident II ballistic missiles in midship tubes. The 65-ton weapons are about 44 ft. long and 7 ft. wide. (Photograph by Yogi Inc / Corbis)

 WAVE-RIDING WEAPON

 
Some officials in the Defense Department want to answer concerns about the Tridents with more radical solutions: exotic, high-tech devices capable of outracing any machine in their class to catch fleeting foes. If these weapons work as planned—and that's a big if—they could let the Pentagon launch lightning-quick attacks without risking a worldwide nuclear storm.

On the coffee table in his cavernous office in the Pentagon's E Ring, Air Force chief scientist Mark J. Lewis has a model of such a machine, a 14-ft.-long missile called the X-51 WaveRider. With an angled nose, flaps in the middle and an inlet on the underbelly, the device looks like a cross between a spaceship and a futuristic cruise missile. It's designed to go nearly seven times faster than a Tomahawk—a flight from the Arabian Sea to eastern Afghanistan would take 20 minutes—and destroy targets with its own kinetic energy. Test flights are scheduled for 2008.

The pressure, drag and high temperatures associated with hypersonic speeds (typically, greater than Mach 5, or 3600 mph) used to be considered too extreme for an aircraft to handle in a controlled way. Only ballistic missiles and spacecraft burning rocket fuel, shooting into space and roaring back to Earth, could go that fast.

What the X-51 does is to turn some of the most brutal effects of hypersonic flight to its advantage. Take shock waves, for example. Bursting through the air at a hypersonic rate produces a train of waves, one after the other, which can drag down an aircraft. But the X-51 is a "wave rider," with a sharp nose shaped to make the waves break at precisely the right angle. All of the pressure is directed beneath the missile, lifting it up. The shock waves also compress the air to help fuel the X-51's combustion process.

The craft is the same size and shape as a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, so it can be attached to a B-52 or fighter jet. It runs on standard JP-7 jet fuel, not on rocket fuel, so it fits in neatly with the military's existing logistical chain. The X-51 is made from a fairly standard nickel alloy, not from exotic materials. And the advanced engine technology is very real. In 2004, NASA broke speed records while testing its X-43A, a precursor to the X-51 (see "Breakthrough Awards 2005," Nov. 2005). In a final test flight, the 12-ft.-long aircraft hit 7000 mph—nearly Mach 10. In other words, the X-51 is not just some lab experiment; it's being designed from the start to deploy. "I've got tremendous confidence in it working," the Air Force's Mark J. Lewis says.

That doesn't mean the X-51 will be in competition with a conventional Trident. It will have a range of only 600 nautical miles. And it first needs to be lifted into the air by a plane, then accelerated by a rocket-fueled booster before its hypersonic engine kicks in. But if the 2008 test flight is a success, the X-51 will be the first weapon other than a ballistic missile to fly at hypersonic speeds.

NO CONFUSION

The Trident II iteration of Prompt Global Strike foresaw a pushbutton war, fought from the White House. It assumed that the United States would have few allies or bases abroad from which to attack. Local commanders would be largely circumvented.

But alternate scenarios being drawn up let U.S. forces act much as they do today, only faster. Hypersonic weapons could make that happen. Put an X-51-equipped plane in the air, and it could enable commanders to hit targets for hundreds of miles around in minutes. Tips could be acted on instantly; subs wouldn't have to be in a perfect position in order to strike. Intelligence wouldn't have to race all the way to the Oval Office. Wrong information would produce local damage. And because the X-51 wouldn't be confused with a nuke—or have to fly threateningly over nuclear-armed countries—"you don't worry about starting World War III" when you score a direct hit, Lewis notes.

Hypersonic technology will take longer to develop than a conventional Trident. But the X-51, and weapons like it, might make the most sense for the Global Strike arsenal. After all, they reduce potential fallout from the riskiest part of the program: the human element.

Interesting FireArm: Metal Storm

Metal Storm is a machine gun that is capable of firing 1 million rounds per minute.  Yes you heard me right, that's the number 1 with 6 zero's behind it! which is about 16,600 rounds fired every second which is 16,500 more bullets fired in a second than the currently fastest multi barrelled rotary machine gun.

 

Metal Storm has no moving parts, as all the bullets are fired electronically.  Also there are no spent and ejected cartridge cases as in conventional machine guns, as Metal Storm ammunition is case-less.

The bullets are pre-sealed in the barrels in a stacked configuration. By ' stacked ' it means that all the bullets are one behind the other in the barrels, so in effect the barrel itself is now the ammo magazine.  No reloading of magazines is needed, the operator just replaces the pre loaded barrels.

    

Malfunctions such as typical machine gun jams are now totally eliminated, because as stated earlier, there are no moving parts except that is...the bullet moving up the barrel !!  Therefore this weapons system is 99% dependable and reliable, this is a major leap in weapons technology.  The remaining 1% would be if there was an electrical malfunction...such as a flat battery !

The case-less ammunition has the propellant built in to the actual bullet itself and this propellant is ignited via a small electrical charge, in fact a triple A Duracel™ battery will be enough to operate the gun, so large battery packs and electric generators that are normally associated with guns of this type are not needed.

For example, the Gatling gun or rotary barrel machine gun that fires up to 6,000 rounds per minute has to be operated by a large 240volt electric motor as seen in the image below.

The small electrical current is controlled by computer software, ( just plug a laptop into it ) to the exact barrel and the exact bullet within it, so that either one bullet or the entire amount of bullets can be fired.

1 rpm (rounds per minute), 6, or 60 or 6000, or 60,000 or 600,000 or even 1,000,000 bullets can be fired at the shooters behest.  The bullets can literally be fired out of a single barrel like a storm of solid metal in a continuous almost solid line of hot lead like in this simple illustration below, whereas a bullet is depicted by this symbol rather than more conventionally... 

And Metal Storm is a weapons system that has more than one barrel !

Metal Storm is both the name of the company and the product that it builds.  The company is based in Brisbane, Australia and has a subsidiary base in Washington DC in the USA and a pro-active development base in Seattle, USA.  Metal Storm owns all the rights to the method that the gun fires its ammunition i.e. EBT  or Electronic Ballistics Technology, that was invented by Mr. J. Mike O'Dwyer.

Metal Storm technology can be applied in lots of different ways, one of the ways to use this high capacity firing mechanism is in  Sentry  guns.  These quad barrelled guns lie dormant until sensors detect movement, then they automatically acquire the target and give it a quick million rounds per minute burst of say 600 bullets in 1/1000th of a second !

This machine gun is a user friendly, enemy un-friendly  'plug n play' system.

This is the perfect defence weapons system, literally set it up and forget about it, the gun will do the rest.  Just ensure that your own side know where these guns would be emplaced ! because like landmines, it would be totally indiscriminate of who or what it blows away.

Metal Storm can be mounted anywhere and also has the option of firing different types and calibers of ammunition such as, armor piercing, explosive and shrapnel, 9mm, 40mm, 20mm and even non lethal soft rounds.

Metal Storm electronic ballistic technology can also be miniaturized somewhat, and a handgun is under development that uses the same system as the larger ones as described on this page.

A handgun may not be as practical though as the firer would have to carry a fair few spare barrels otherwise called magazines with him at all times due to the rapid expenditure of the ammunition.  In this case, the pistol would need to be set to fire say a maximum of 3 rounds per trigger pull, you could then get 18 shots x 3 rounds if the capacity was 54 rounds in each gun.

Three bullets hitting the target in the same micro second would make a pistol like this a very lethal force to be reckoned with.

                              

It is understood that the Australian Government did not want to invest any capital in any of these weapons, so Metal Storm went over to the USA, where it is now being developed and may soon see service with the military in the near future.

 

With guns like this mounted  on tanks, armored cars, jeeps, trucks, helicopters, fighter aircraft and well all military vehicles then surely they would dominate any battlefield of the future.  Specially adapted gun carriages could be remotely controlled and sent into hot spots to eliminate enemy positions without the need of endangering military personnel.

Below is an artists impression of a plane equipped with Metal Storm gun pods, imagine this flying over head and deploying a few hundred thousand 20mm explosive shells onto enemy armor.  The word 'obliteration' comes to mind !

If I was in Government, then I would prefer my military to be equipped with this weapon system rather than the other guys.  Read more about this gun and other developments from the companies website.

Metal Storm Weapons

With no moving parts, Metal Storm weapons can lay down a million-plus rounds per minute.

 

To the human ear, the sound of 180 bullets being fired in less than one-hundredth of a second is perceived as one enormous noise. And the fact that some people have heard that noise is testimony to the perseverance of one inventor with a unique vision of the future of weapons technology. "They say that half the engineers in the first company that I worked with wanted me to finish my coffee and leave as soon as possible," says Mike O'Dwyer, recalling the way some of his far-reaching ideas were received.

O'Dwyer's revolutionary weapons concept is based on an electronically fired gun-and-launcher design with multiple rounds stacked in a single barrel. The only moving parts are the bullets themselves. Beyond creating an astounding fast-firing weapon, the concept makes way for the creation of entirely new types of firearms. Among other things, it will allow the shooter to select from different types of rounds and even between firing lethal and nonlethal ammunition. O'Dwyer's ideas were initially met with skepticism, but now they are being taken seriously by the military and police.

"Nothing succeeds like actually building something and pulling the trigger or, in our case, pressing the button to show what happens," he tells POPULAR MECHANICS.

"One of the first things I did was to build a prototype with one short piece of barrel loaded with two projectiles and propellant behind each," O'Dwyer says. "I then fired the leading projectile just to determine whether the system would operate. If it did, the second projectile should stay in the barrel, without being pushed back with the propellant behind it."

Based on the results of that testing, O'Dwyer quickly moved to an expanded firing prototype--a single-barrel design loaded with 15 9mm rounds. "There was nothing particularly optimum about having 15 rounds," he says. "It was just a good number. There was also nothing particularly optimum about 9mm. It was just a convenient size.

"The wedging-system design O'Dwyer used to lock and seal multiple projectiles stacked in a single barrel required each of the 9mm projectiles to be slightly modified from their sporting configurations.

"The 15 shots was a big step for us from two, and electronically firing those 15 shots from a single barrel allowed us to experiment immediately with rates of fire," O'Dwyer says. The smoothbore prototype allowed electronically variable rates of fire ranging from semiauto to the equivalent of 45,000 rounds per minute.

Applying what he had learned about tube loading and firing rates, O'Dwyer constructed a triple-barrel, a nine-barrel, and a 36-barrel firing prototype design that he lovingly named Bertha. "The reason for the 36 barrels was simply to indicate to ourselves and to others the future versatility of this system, in that with the 36 barrels we had 540 rounds on board and, based on the 45,000-round-per-minute rate per barrel, that gave us a maximum firing rate of 1.62 million rounds per minute," the inventor says. Prior to Bertha's well-deserved retirement, O'Dwyer used the demonstrator to achieve a 180-round burst of 9mm rounds (155 grain weight) at a rate of just over 1 million rounds per minute.

New Families Of Weapons

O'Dwyer's experience with the 36-tube Bertha has provided him with a new understanding of the technology--not just the gun. When he speaks of the weapons, he uses the analogy of an inkjet printer. He compares the projectiles to dots of ink exploding out of a print head. O'Dwyer's concept is that of a weapons system capable of delivering a wide range of customized "packages" of varying degrees of lethality.

"While the enormous rate of fire is a major advantage in some significant areas, this is not a weapons system that operates as if it were a shotgun," O'Dwyer says. "This is not an area weapon that deals with a target by overkill. It is about accuracy, precision and electronic controllability."
Other recent Metal Storm demonstrator systems have included a "scaled up" 40mm grenade launcher for the military that fires small "shot bursts" at rates equivalent to 6000 rounds per minute, as well as a Variable Lethality Law Enforcement (VLE) handgun. The fully electronic VLE can be easily safety-keyed to a particular individual or group, preventing its use should it fall into the wrong hands.

Through his company, Metal Storm Ltd., the Australian inventor hopes to apply this technology to a variety of military and commercial products worldwide.

DARPA Zombie Helmet for American troops.

DARPA working to develop helmets for US Army that control soldiers’ brains The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm wants to trick out troops’ brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to pain treatment and psychiatric well-being. And the scientists want to do it all from the outside in — with a gadget installed inside the troops’ helmets. “Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound,” the Defense Department’s Armed with Science blog promises. It’s the latest out-there project in the military’s growing arsenal of brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon’s funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries and even preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic stress. Now, Darpa’s funding one lab that’s trying to do it all — from boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries. Arizona State University neuroscientist William Tyler has been working with funding from the Army Research Laboratory for years. That neurotechnology work has now caught the eye of Darpa, which awarded his lab a Young Faculty Award to improve upon non-invasive approaches to brain stimulation. “When people question what this kind of device could do, I question them what their brain does for them,” Tyler tells Danger Room. “The brain serves all the functions of your body, and if you knew the neuroanatomy, then you can start to regulate each one of those functions.” Already, scientists have devised cutting-edge brain stimulation …

 

XM25 "Game Changer" Weapon Now Killing Enemies Behind Walls

The future has arrived for the U.S. military: guns that kill enemies behind walls.

Last week, the Army deployed in Afghanistan prototypes of its first-ever programmable "smart" grenade launcher, a shoulder-fired weapon called the XM25 that uses micro-chipped exploding ammunition to target and kill the enemy, Agence France Presse reports.

What is it that that makes this weapon special? The only way to be safe from it is inside a closed, concrete bunker.

The XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System fires 25mm air-bursting shells up to 2,300 feet, making it most closely related to the grenade launcher, but with a range greater than most rifles used by the Army, AFP reports.

Let's say enemy fighter pops up from behind a wall to fire at U.S. troops and then takes cover before they can respond. An XM25 gunner can then use the laser range finder to get the distance to the wall, program the explosive to go off a few feet behind it, fire over the wall, and then watch as lethal shell fragments rain down from above.

The 12-pound, 29-inch system, which was designed by Minnesota's Alliant Techsystems, costs up to $35,000 per unit and, while highly sophisticated, is easy enough to use that soldiers become proficient within minutes, reports Fox News.

"For well over a week, it's been actively on patrols, and in various combat outposts in areas that are hot," said Lieutenant Colonel Chris Lehner, program manager for the XM25, to the AFP. "This is the first time we're putting smart technology into the hands of the individual soldier.

"It's giving them the edge," he said, in the harsh Afghan landscape where Islamist extremists have vexed US troops using centuries-old techniques of popping up from behind cover to engage. "Now we're taking that away from the enemy forever."

PEO Soldier says studies show the XM25 is 300 percent more effective than current weapons at the squad level, AFP reports.

The revolutionary advance involves an array of sights, sensors and lasers that reads the distance to the target, assesses elements such as air pressure, temperature, and ballistics and then sends that data to the microchip embedded in the XM25 shell before it is launched.

The Pentagon plans to purchase at least 12,500 of the guns beginning next year, enough for one in each Infantry squad and Special Forces team, AFP reports.




Most Lethal Weapon Screen Shots and Informative Pictures

A guide to the best HAARP conspiracy theories

A military-funded project called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), located on remote tundra in Alaska, jumps off the horizon just past mile marker 11 on the Glenn Highway. The program's main facility sits behind a barbed wire fence that stretches as far as the eye can see. What grabs the imagination of most, though, are the couple hundred oversized antennas, described by legions of journalists and conspiracy theorists, including Noah Schactman of Wired: "180 silver poles rising from the ground, each a foot thick, 72 feet tall, and spaced precisely 80 feet apart ... Geometric patterns form and reform in every direction, Athenian in their symmetry. It looks like a bionic forest."

Those fanged metal structures have made the sleepy, rural Alaska village of Gakona, population 200, a lightning rod for controversy. Like many federally-funded projects in the Last Frontier, HAARP saw its financial peak when former Alaska U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was at the height of his power in the mid-2000s. Theories abound about what goes on inside HAARP, which was founded in 1990 to conduct research on the ionosphere, an upper level of the atmosphere interesting to scientists for its importance in shortwave radio communication and because it's a place where plasma forms naturally.

Ask the Air Force what they're doing in Gakona these days and a spokesman stationed in New Mexico will tell you to find out yourself during HAARP's open house. They usually hold those every couple years during the summer. Even though all the research is unclassified, the Air Force doesn't offer much else in the way of explaining what's going on, except to point out their noble interest in studying Earth's atmosphere to further scientific knowledge and maybe improve homeland security along the way.
On a theoretical level, the HAARP website notes that federal scientists are working to unlock the mysteries to other natural phenomena that have captivated humans for millennia. They're studying lightning, aurora borealis and the like. They've even learned how to induce both of those on a limited scale, according to a statement included on a Navy defense budget. HAARP also exists, the project's website notes, to learn more about shortwave radio communications and its application in global positioning systems, among other things. Maybe HAARP was used to search for Saddam's WMD. Maybe it's utilized to gather intel on Iran's underground nuclear facilities. Who knows?
Plenty of other theories have been explored about what exactly Uncle Sam is up to way out in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. Here are a few of the best conspiracy theories in a nutshell.

How HAARP Works

HAARP is an Ionospheric heater. It changes the shape of the ionosphere, allowing for beamed energy to be concentrated on a known spot. It has been speculated that this system can manipulate weather, cause earthquakes, act as a "Death Ray" delivering large amounts of energy to a small location, and put on groovy light shows.

Earthquakes

Could HAARP antennas be generating earthquakes? Eric Dubay, a conspiracy blogger and American ex-pat that lives in Thailand, is part of the crowd that believes the U.S. used HAARP to cause the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rocked northern Japan in March 2011, leading to the devastating Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear meltdown.
The gist of the argument from Dubay and others is that waves generated by HAARP antennas are focused on a specific part of the ionosphere with enough force to make the entire thing buckle into space; the ionosphere snaps back toward the ground with enough precision to cause a massive earthquake that devastates a strategic target that furthers American economic and defense interests.
Others claim the U.S., for bizarre reasons mostly unsubstantiated, caused the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The best guess anyone has come up with is that Haiti was the perfect place for a test run of sorts, which is among 13 reasons included in a post on Godlike Productions that argues the U.S. should be suspected for causing the quake in Port au Prince. A column by another conspiracy theorist on UFO-Blogger.com goes a step further in trying to predict what will be hit next: "Most likely the next target will be the New Madrid fault line in the South- Midwestern United States."
Kansans can rest easy, though: Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani nuclear physicist, tears the earthquake theory to shreds in response to an Islamist group that blamed HAARP for devastating floods in Punjab.

Hurricanes

There's a storied tradition of blaming devastating hurricanes on HAARP. That trend hit a fever pitch in 2005: first it was Katrina, then Rita, then Wilma.
Interestingly, HAARP saw its funding peak that same year at $49.3 million. But why would the U.S. government want to inflict devastation on its own citizens? And how exactly would scientists in Alaska generate Atlantic hurricanes with shortwave radio communication? And what ... well, really, what else needs to be said?
"This is absolute hogwash," Stanford professor Umran Inan told Popular Science. "There's absolutely nothing we can do to disturb the earth's [weather] systems. Even though the power HAARP radiates is very large, it's miniscule compared with the power of a lightning flash -- and there are 50 to 100 lightning flashes every second. HAARP's intensity is very small."

Mind Control

Of all the conspiracies floating around about HAARP, this is perhaps the most entertaining, and scientifically farfetched.
The government is using the shortwave radio communication generated in Gakona, so the story goes, to control the minds of unsuspecting Americans.What conspiracy theorists believe the Feds are trying to control is hazy. A good place to try and get a grip on this one is at the conspiracy website HAARP.net or watch Jesse Ventura's rendition when you have a few minutes. Then go ahead and read Popular Science's rebuttal.

 

Beyond the conspiracies

What makes HAARP susceptible to conspiracy criticism is simple. The facility doesn't open its doors in the same way as other federally-funded research facilities around the country, and it doesn't go to great efforts to explain the importance of its research to the public.
If you want to visit Oak Ridge National Laboratories (a Manhattan Project-era facility with exponentially greater funding but also a heavy focus on top-secret nuclear technology) you can show up to the visitor center for a public tour or schedule something more in-depth without much hassle. You can do the same at Los Alamos -- another bastion of the Manhattan Project -- in New Mexico. At both of those facilities, journalists can access unclassified research and talk directly to researchers and scientists.
None of that is possible at HAARP, though never expressly stated, probably in part because of the tinfoil-hatters that might storm Gakona if allowed visits of any kind. When the movement for more information is spearheaded by Jesse Ventura and TruTV, it's easy enough to laugh and let the real research continue away from the public eye. But the closed-shop tendencies could prove the facility's undoing as budget hawks, like the "super" bipartisan group in Congress assigned to dig up trillions of dollars in savings over the next decade, are eager to score political points.
What's to keep HAARP from ending up on the chopping block? Perhaps opening the project up to public scrutiny might keep those federal dollars flowing to Alaska.