The Chief executive officer of BrahMos Aerospace Atul Rane said that ” India is completely capable of designing and developing Hypersonic Missiles and India will have its own version of Hypersonic missiles in the next five to six years.
Mr. Atul Rane gave this statement while attending a function to mark the commencement of “Silver Jubilee Year” celebration of BrahMos (1998-2023).
BrahMos Aerospace is a Indo-Russian aerospace and defense corporation which was established with the goal of manufacturing state-of-the-art cruise missiles in February, 1998.
The corporation currently manufactures the world’s fastest anti-ship cruise missile BrahMos with a range of 290 to 300 kilometres. The Missile travels at the speed of Mach 4, this extraordinary speed makes the BrahMos missile very difficult to be intercepted by enemy defence systems.
BrahMos Aerospace is currently developing BrahMos-II, a hypersonic missile which is expected to have the operational range of 1,000 km (620 mi) and the speed of Mach 8 (9,800 km/h). Once developed and accepted by the Indian Armed Forces, the BrahMos-II will become the fastest cruise missile in the world.
The BrahMos-II will be developed in several versions same like the BrahMos-I. According to various sources the BrahMos-II will be developed into five main versions such as Land-Attack Missile, Anti-ship Missile, Hypersonic Cruise Missile, Air-launched Cruise Missile and Surface-to-surface missile.
This missile will be launched from multiple platforms, such as warships, fighter aircrafts, submarines and land-based missile launching platforms.
Although this Missile Project is running behind schedule, the BrahMos-II was expected to be tested in 2020, but the project is delayed.
What actually are Hypersonic Missiles?
In Very Simple words, Hypersonic Missiles travels at the speed of 5 to 8 times greater than the speed of sound. They are the successors of Supersonic Missiles, which travels twice the speed of sound. The maximum speed of Hypersonic Missiles can exceed upto 25 Mach. That simply means that Hypersonic Missiles can travel upto 25 time greater than the speed of sound. This destructive speed makes these new weapons very deadly and devastating.
Hypersonic missiles are very costly and have the ability to perform maneuvers during the entire flight. Depending upon the speed and manoeuvrability characteristics, Hypersonic Missiles are divided into two different types of missile systems: Hypersonic Glide Vehicles and Hypersonic Cruise Missiles.
Many countries are trying to develop Hypersonic Missiles and some have already developed and inducted them on their different launching platforms. The Russian Navy uses the 3M22 Zircon scramjet powered anti-ship hypersonic cruise missiles on their warships and submarines.