NASA’s New AI Will Terrify Putin

Unless you have been living under a rock you will have noticed international relations have not been so peachy recently. Particularly with Russia, as they continue to use brutal and criminal acts in Ukraine, despite universal outcry. One of the most shocking revelations of the war in Ukraine has been Russia’s liberal use of hypersonic missiles, especially as the US is lagging behind with its hypersonic weaponry designs. However, thanks to NASA and some incredible AI scientists, this may be about to change. But what are hypersonic missiles? Why are they important? And should Putin be worried?

A hypersonic missile is a missile that travels at over Mach 5 (3,836.35 mph +). This is fast enough to fly through current anti-missile defenses unharmed as the current systems simply can’t react fast enough. This means that, in theory, a hypersonic missile could hit any target. Want to hit the White House directly? The Kremlin? Crucial fuel depot? Naval destroyer? What about taking out a power grid permanently? Obliterating a military manufacturing site? Or even eradicating a military base? Well, in our modern world a hypersonic missile is your best bet.

One of the significant advantages of these weapons is that they are very targeted. Unlike the Cold War era bombs that just used an enormous explosion, these missiles have far fewer civilian casualties (at least if you use them properly, unlike Russia) or unwanted side effects. In other words you can use them far more strategically.

Hypersonic missiles sound great, don’t they! (We are talking in strategic war terms here). However, it takes a lot of power and fuel to get a missile up to that insane speed, this is why hypersonic missiles had too short of a range to be useful until recently.

The factor limiting distance has been because the missiles are delivered by rockets and they carry their fuel and oxygen supply with them. This is why they are great for space applications as they can still burn in a vacuum. However, this means that a rocket powered hypersonic missile is very heavy and bulky and therefore doesn’t have a long enough range. You could solve this with a larger rocket, but that would mean more drag, which at Mach 5 is not what you want as it dramatically reduces range. In short, rockets don’t make good hypersonic missiles.

Instead, a scramjet is a better option. Scramjet stands for supersonic combustion ramjet, and they work in exactly the same way as a jet on a plane, except with no moving parts. In a typical jet a turbine compresses the incoming air, fuel is then injected and ignited, which then forces the air out of the jet, creating thrust. But a scramjet does away with the turbine. Instead, it uses the craft’s speed to ram air into the combustion chamber with sufficient pressure to get optimal combustion. This makes them far more efficient and powerful than an average jet.

This efficiency, combined with the fact they don’t need to carry their own oxygen supply, means that they can be built far smaller, far lighter and have a far greater range than an equivalent rocket. This makes them ideal for hypersonic missiles.

However, understanding how air flows through a scramjet at hypersonic speeds is incredibly difficult. So much so that even our best supercomputers struggle to model it accurately or find optimal designs. This results in even our best scramjet designs having a lot of losses and drag being inadvertently built into them, which lowers their speed and reduces range. This sub-optimal design is a weakness of our current hypersonic missiles.

Take the recently tested DARPA HAWC (Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept). This experimental scramjet hypersonic missile is set to be the next generation for the US army. While it did complete a successful test flight and will go on to make a powerful weapon it could still be improved upon.

This is where NASA and Argonne come in. They have designed an AI that can use a scramjet’s CFD (computational fluid dynamics) testing results (this is how a computer models air flowing around or through an object) and use it to figure out how to optimize the design of a scramjet missle for high speeds and greater efficiency. This has already been shown to create brilliantly efficient and powerful designs in far less time than previous methods and could even produce novel new designs.

In other words, this AI could design a hypersonic missile that is far faster and with greater range than any other in the world, sending the US to the forefront of this military arms race. All they need to do is apply this incredible AI to the HAWC, load it up with explosives, and off they go.

Sadly, the conflict with Russia seems to be escalating. Putin appears to believe NATO and The West won’t use nuclear weapons so our old deterrent of mutually assured destruction, that contained Russian aggression since the end of the Second World War, appears to have lost it’s potency. But, if NATO is armed with an arsenal of hypersonic missiles that has enough range to hit any Russian target, our deterrent is renewed. Such a powerful, precise and indefensible weapon would decimate any army, let alone the unorganized Russian army. Make no mistake. This AI really could change the course of the war.

So now you know what hypersonic missiles are, why they are so damn important and how a NASA-built AI could be about to design the best one yet. The timing of this technological leap is apt. We may not want to admit it, but we are closer to World War Three than we have ever been. But unlike the Cold War this one won’t be fought with nuclear bomb deterrents. Instead, next-generation weaponry like hypersonic missiles will play a key role in organized and devastating attacks deep behind enemy lines. We can pray the worst doesn’t happen, but if it does, we are ready. After all, a great man once said “it is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”