Russian Hypersonic Aircraft to Break Through Missile Defense Systems

Russian scientists are working on hypersonic aircraft that will be able to penetrate enemy missile defense, RIA Novosti wrote, citing Boris Satovsky, a project director at the military research agency Future Research Fund in Moscow. Boris Satovsky said that the ongoing technological progress was producing ever new types of weapons, including those based on highly maneuverable hypersonic elements. “Thanks to their outstanding technical characteristics, such systems will be able to break through virtually every existing missile defense system, thus ensuring global military-strategic parity in the next 30-40 years,” Boris Satovsky told RIA. According to media reports, this year Russia has twice tested a hypersonic glider meant to replace traditional warheads for new generations of intercontinental ballistic missiles, including the heavy Sarmat ICBM. In an interview with RIA, military expert Boris Litovkin said that after entering the atmosphere the ultra-maneuverable hypersonic reentry vehicles are able to shift their targets in flight thus making them extremely hard to intercept. Hypersonic aircraft can travel at over five times the speed of sound, or 330 meters a second. The Future Research Fund was established in 2012 law to sponsor high-risk scientific research and development for defense-related studies, which could lead to breakthroughs in defense technology for Russia. The Fund is currently working on over fifty new maneuverable hypersonic ballistic glider projects in more than forty laboratories at Russia’s leading universities, scientific-research institutes and defense enterprises.