Hypersonic advantage: India joins exclusive global missile, aircraft club

Delivering a missile at hypersonic speed endows it with enormous military advantages. Most contemporary cruise missiles fly to their targets at subsonic speeds of 250-300 metres per second

On Sunday, India announced that the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) had test-flown a long-range, hypersonic missile that all three services can use to strike targets up to 1,500 km. Any contemporary list of cutting-edge military technologies has hypersonic, air-breathing, scramjet missiles close to the very top. Only three countries — Russia, the United States, and China — have flown vehicles in the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds: Six times the speed of sound (Mach 6), or 2 km per second. After three decades of technological effort, India has joined that elite group.

 

Delivering a missile at hypersonic speed endows