Article Summary: The U.S. Air Force and DARPA are pushing the boundaries of air warfare with a hypersonic stealth bomber – now being called NextRS designed to strike at Mach 5+. The concept, emerging from DARPA’s Aerospace Projects Office, envisions a next-generation strike aircraft that can evade radar, deliver rapid, responsive attacks, and potentially operate unmanned.
Key Point #1 – With a Turbine-Based Combined Cycle (TBCC) propulsion system, this bomber could revolutionize modern warfare.
Key Point #2 – The Pentagon aims to field a prototype by 2030, making it one of the most ambitious aviation projects in history. Could this Mach 5 warplane change the future of military aviation forever?
The U.S. Air Force’s Hypersonic Bomber: A Stealthy Speed Demon by 2030?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force plan to fly a prototype hypersonic bomber by 2030. The vision is for a bomber capable of high-speed strike and surveillance operations traveling at Mach 5. A hypersonic bomber would be an unprecedented development that could alter the global balance of power.
The reason to develop such an aircraft is simple: speed and detectability. Renderings of a concept for the jet, published in Next Big Future, show an elongated, stealthy looking bomber which, if combined with speeds of Mach 5, might be completely undetectable in today’s threat environment.
The bomber shown in the Next Big Future essay looks something like a stealthy B-1B—a large aircraft with a cylinder-like front section and a blended wing-body emerging toward the back end of an elongated fuselage.
The image does seem to leave room for a large payload capacity by virtue of the rounded, large airframe, and the rendering shows two “tails” or “fins” attached at the end of the aircraft for vectoring. Surely the aerodynamics of a vehicle of this kind seek to optimize speed, stealth, and steady flight. A smooth, or “laminar,” air flow enables stable flight, something quite difficult to sustain at hypersonic speeds, given the high temperatures.
Next RS: Simply Too Fast
Such a plane’s speed would prevent ground- or air-based radar from establishing a continuous target track, as the aircraft will transition from one radar field of view to another much too quickly.
In combination with this speed, stealth properties could allow a bomber of this nature to remain completely unnoticed.
Hypersonic drones and weapons have been in development for quite some time and have reached various levels of maturity.
Should this hypersonic bomber come into existence, it will emerge from DARPA’s formerly secret Aerospace Projects Office (APO), which is tasked with early conceptual and subcomponent or engineering work on the bomber.
Next Big Future explains that DARPA is working closely with the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA to advance conceptual work, with the notional goal of having an airborne prototype by the end of the decade.
“It will use a turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) propulsion system, with an estimated thrust range of 30,000-38,000 lbf, using conventional fuel and metallic construction. It should be able transition from traditional turbine engines to hypersonic speeds, likely exceeding Mach 5, enabling rapid, responsive strikes against heavily defended targets,” Next Big Future writes.
APO has for several years been working on what the Pentagon, DARPA, and the Air Force Research Laboratory refer to as Next Generation Responsive Strike.
This effort helped generate the Next-Generation Air Dominance sixth-generation stealth aircraft program and is now focused on this hypersonic bomber.
Hypersonic Surprise Attack
The conceptual rendering published in the article does not clearly show a cockpit, which raises the question of whether it will have a pilot. Is a large and heavily armed bomber such as this likely to be manned, or unmanned? Perhaps both, like the B-21—but weapons developers have long insisted that humans could not survive the heat generated by hypersonic speeds.
That said, the Pentagon and the service research laboratories have in recent years been vigorously experimenting with combinations of heat-resistant composite materials to support hypersonic technology.
A technology that allowed humans to survive the extreme temperatures of hypersonic flight would be a paradigm-changing breakthrough.
A stealthy bomber traveling at hypersonic speeds could achieve an unprecedented measure of surprise. A broadband stealth aircraft such as the B-2 is designed to strike without an enemy knowing it is even there.
It achieves this with stealth properties that allow it to elude radar. A stealthy bomber traveling at Mach 5 would be exceptionally difficult to target.
“The goal is to initiate a formal design and development phase within five years, potentially commissioning a prototype by 2030. This effort aligns with the U.S. Air Force’s exploration of long-term high-speed strike options, positioning the NextRS bomber as a complement to or evolution beyond existing platforms,” Next Big Future writes.
Hypersonic Aircraft: A Photo Essay
SR-72. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
SR-72. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin.
SR-72 artist image: Image Credit: Creative Commons.
SR-72. Image Credit: Lockheed Martin.
About the Author: Kris Osborn
Kris Osborn is the Military Technology Editor of 19FortyFive and President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
