A hypersonic vehicle flying at this speed from China could reach the west coast of the United States in less than 14 minutes.
Zhao Wei, a senior scientist working on the project, said researchers aimed to have the facility up and running by around 2020 to meet the pressing demand of China’s hypersonic weapon development program.
The world’s most powerful wind tunnel at present is America’s LENX-X facility in Buffalo, New York state, which operates at speeds of up to 10 kilometres per second – 30 times the speed of sound.
To generate an airflow at extremely high speeds, the researchers will detonate several tubes containing a mixture of oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen gases for a series of explosions that could discharge one gigawatt of power within a split second, according to Zhao.
The shock waves, channelled into the test chamber through a metallic tunnel, will envelope the prototype vehicle and increase the temperature over its body to 8,000 Kelvins, or 7,727 degrees Celsius, Zhao said.
That is nearly 50 per cent hotter than the surface of the Sun.
Zhao said the construction of the new facility would be led by the same team that built JF12, a hypervelocity denotation-driven shock tunnel in Beijing capable of duplicating flight conditions at speeds ranging from Mach 5 to Mach 9 at altitudes between 20 and 50 kilometers.
China has conducted seven successful test flights of its hypersonic glider WU-14, also known as the DF-ZF, at speeds of between Mach 5 and Mach 10.
The US military tested HTV-2, a Mach 20 unmanned aircraft in 2011 but the hypersonic flight lasted only a few minutes before the vehicle crashed in to the Pacific Ocean.
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And now suddenly the Trump MAGA has a higher ceiling to climb at.
that’s going to be a heck of a potato gun
I don’t think the Mach 40 wind speeds are supposed to test hypersonic weapons or flights (so no reason to ponder about flights from China to US in 14 minutes).
The higher Mach speeds I suppose are to test orbital insertion, aerobraking, etc
To expand upon rogerpenna’s point, I’m not sure a Mach 40 projectile could even potentially be used as a ground attack weapon, I believe 12km/s exceeds Earth’s escape velocity. So I concur that using it at Mach 40 is much more likely to be for stuff like testing a heat shield for returning from the Moon, which China has announced that it plans to visit.