Sean
The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC), pronounced HAWK, is a joint program between DARPA and The US Air Force.
It is an experimental project for the development and testing of a scramjet powered air-launched hypersonic cruise missile.
Here is what all that means:
- Scramjet – A jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. A scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to compress the incoming air forcefully before combustion.
- Combustion – Combustion is a reaction in which a mixture of fuel and oxygen is sparked to produce a lot of heat which cause air molecules to expand rapidly and do work.
- Air-breathing – A scramjet is an air-breathing engine because it captures air as it travels through it and uses that air in the combustion reaction which continues to propel the vehicle forward. It is not a fully self-sustaining propulsion mechanism though because fuel is needed too, which runs out after some time.
- Air-launched – A missile that is launched from an aircraft in the sky
- Cruise missile – A guided missile that flies through the atmosphere for a major portion of its flight path at constant speed. They are designed to deliver a large warhead over long distances with high precision.
- Hypersonic – Hypersonic are speeds more than 5 times the speed of sound, or Mach 5. Mach 5 is approximately 1 mile per second. Supersonic are speeds more than the speed of sound, or Mach 1. Mach 5 is 5 times the speed of sound. Mach 4 is 4 times the speed of sound, and so on. Subsonic are speeds below the speed of sound.
