[HN Gopher] Stratolaunch Successfully Completes Reusable Hyperso...
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Stratolaunch Successfully Completes Reusable Hypersonic Flight and
Recovery
Author : speckx
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-05-07 12:35 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.stratolaunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.stratolaunch.com)
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yay? I'm not sure what I'm missing here. In startup parlance this
| feels more like a feature than a product (like maybe a division
| of Lockheed or Boeing).
| 0_____0 wrote:
| It was a Scaled Composites project (or at least a lot of Scaled
| people were working on it! I used to work with an ex-SC guy,
| they had some nifty codename for it), with Paul Allen
| bankrolling it. They built and started testing, then Paul died
| and they shuttered. The project was bought by a private equity
| firm, and now they're back doing this.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I thought I recognized that big dual body six engine launch
| plane!
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I mean it's only the biggest plane in the world!
| numpad0 wrote:
| It is a milestone. "First build succeeded with an artifact
| exiting(0) with only warnings" is an achievement of its own in
| heavy industries.
| cushychicken wrote:
| Hypersonic technology has a lot of strategic military
| importance.
|
| This is a public signal of "we got something to Mach 5 and
| landed it in one piece - twice".
|
| That's a pretty good indicator to people who want to get in on
| hypersonic technology development (I.e. defense contractors)
| that Stratolaunch is open for business.
| superkuh wrote:
| It's important to distinguish between lift generating and air
| breathing hypersonic craft and simple conical rockets without
| shockwave impingement sites on the craft body. The former are
| what are what people talk about when they talk about hypersonic
| capabilities. But with this Stratolaunch case, and with other
| militarys' recent "hypersonic" implementations, there are
| actually no real capability differences from a ballistic missile
| except trajectory. These are jobs programs for keeping aerospace
| talent alive at best and get most use as paper dragons. Or maybe
| it's just a way to normalize using ballistic missiles, because
| they look slightly different and have a different name, without
| everyone freaking out?
|
| I'm not saying a pointy fast rocket testbed isn't cool or even
| useful to try to develop ways of avoiding shockwave impingement
| during air breathing or lift generation. But this isn't doing the
| thing.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > there are actually no real capability differences from a
| ballistic missile except trajectory
|
| Which is all that matters for military purpose. Air breathing
| hypersonic is useful because it offers even more flexibility in
| trajectories, but that doesn't mean that hypersonic gliders
| aren't useful.
|
| > just a way to normalize using ballistic missiles, because
| they look slightly different and have a different name, without
| everyone freaking out?
|
| Ballistic missiles have never been "not normalized", they have
| been used routinely in pretty much every recent conflicts by at
| least one of the belligerent (usually the non-US side, since
| ballistic missiles are a way around the lack of airborn
| capabilities, but the US has its own arsenal: ATACMS are
| ballistic missiles).
| bgwalter wrote:
| I mostly agree, but the military distinguishes between
| hypersonic glide vehicles that are launched from a rocket and
| then glide at hypersonic speeds towards the target while being
| able to do evasive maneuvers and hypersonic ballistic missiles
| (which all 40 year old ICBMs are).
|
| The Oreshnik was famously falsely classified as an HGV in the
| first weeks by alternative media.
|
| There is so much hype about "hypersonic" that I'm not sure if a
| true HGV even exists today. The gadget from the article looks
| like an attempt at it though.
| imcritic wrote:
| Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access
| stratolaunch.com Why have I been blocked? This website is using a
| security service to protect itself from online attacks. The
| action you just performed triggered the security solution. There
| are several actions that could trigger this block including
| submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed
| data.
|
| What can I do to resolve this? You can email the site owner to
| let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were
| doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at
| the bottom of this page.
| jonplackett wrote:
| You are most likely guilt of either, 1. using a VPN, 2. not
| living in North America
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| I'm guilty of both (and possibly more) and can read the
| article fine, FWIW.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Maybe you have a less guilty VPN...
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(page generated 2025-05-10 23:02 UTC)