Over the weekend, it emerged that the Chinese military in August secretly launched a rocket carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle into space.
It flew around the globe through low-orbit space before returning to Earthhttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/10/17/china-secretly-tests-first-hypersonic-missile-move-catches-us/ …
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While the missile reportedly missed its target by about two dozen miles, the test shows China has made rapid progress on the lightning-fast weapons and is far more advanced than US intelligence officials had realised.
“We have no idea how they did this,” one official saidpic.twitter.com/z7SlhHPwWM
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Drew Thompson, a former American defence department official with responsibility for China, said the test “really should change US calculations”. “I think it is a game changer in a way that little else has really shifted the balance”
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Countries including the US, UK, Russia and North Korea have all been working on developing hypersonic missilespic.twitter.com/hqI2zKjQQW
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Hypersonic missiles have strategic advantages:
They travel at 5x the speed of sound
They have increased manoeuvrability that can make them very difficult to counter
They fly at lower altitudes than ballistic missiles, meaning they can potentially reach targets fasterpic.twitter.com/KTrJU5n2Lj
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Hi, this is technically inconsistent with you saying that it actually circuled the globe in low orbit — to reach orbital velocity it must have reached mach 23-25 or thereabouts. Was it actually an orbital rocket that precision deorbited itself?
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