Impressive! Nevertheless it would be nice to know if it was performed against ECM. In such a case… very impressive.

From RIAN

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Ilya Kramnik) – By 2030, the United States will be able to strike from space on a global scale, including Russia, Air Force Commander Alexander Zelin told journalists.
“Development of air and space attack weapons by foreign countries shows that by 2030 air and outer space will turn into a single sphere for armed struggle,” he said.

Zelin said that to counter this threat, Russia is planning to build a fundamentally new force of air and space defense (ASD) by 2020.

This defense force will be equipped with anti-aircraft missile systems – upgraded S-300s, S-400s, which have recently been launched into production, and eventually with S-500s, which are currently under development. It is reported that the S-500 will not be based on its predecessor, the S-400, but will represent an entirely new system capable of effectively countering ballistic targets.

In addition, ASD will be armed with aviation systems. Zelin announced the decision to reinitiate the program to develop anti-space systems based on the heavy fighter interceptor MiG-31.

But how serious is the aforementioned threat? At the turn of this century, a number of authors wrote about U.S. plans to create expeditionary aerospace forces (EAF), which would combine space vehicles and aircraft of various designations, and would be capable of mounting precision strikes on a global scale.

However, today even the United States cannot deploy an EAF system. It is not clear what will change by 2030. Experts believe that given the inertia of research and time-consuming development and adoption of new hardware, an EAF system is not likely to be built within the next 20 years.

It is also important to consider the problems in relationships between the Pentagon and those who design modern weaponry, as mentioned in a recent report by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA). In effect, the engineers have accused the Pentagon of an inability to grasp what industry and science can realistically develop, and of staking too much on global technological supremacy.

Many specialists believe that 2030 may only see the emergence of the first prototypes of flying vehicles capable of attacking targets on a global scale in a suborbital ballistic and aerodynamic mode. Supersonic vehicle research is playing a considerable role in this respect, and is being developed in Russia among other countries.

Flying at much higher speeds and deployed at much higher altitudes than conventional aircraft, these vehicles will have an impressive capability both militarily and otherwise.

Judging by all that we know, Zelin’s recent statement on the development of a fundamentally new high-altitude reconnaissance plane which would be immune to air defense would proceed under the same reasoning. In addition, according to some sources, this technology could be used to develop a strategic bomber under the PAK DA project (perspective long-range air hub). Its appearance is expected in the late 2010s-early 2020s.

To sum up, American and Russian military plans are designed with a very long perspective, and the terms of their implementation may change substantially under the impact of various factors including the global economic crisis.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

Angara started graound-tests 🙂

2009 July 30, 17:15 Moscow Time: Angara’s URM-1 rocket booster (Article I1A1S) test fired for the first time at the IS-102 test stand in Peresvet near Moscow at NITs RKP test facilityt (former NIIKhIMMash). The engine was burning for 232 seconds, essentially imitating the entire process of the first stage operation during the orbital launch. According to preliminary information, no major problems arose during the firing. At the time, the second firing was expected at the beginning of September 2009. The total of three firings of the same booster were originally expected.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/angara.html

Good. Awesome system.

It was the Russian Doomsday Machine real after all? :eek::confused:

http://www.slate.com/id/2173108/pagenum/all/

From RIAN

Whatever the new START stipulates, it should leave Russia with MIRV-ed ICBMs
Sergey Piatakov
14:5403/07/2009
Sergei Roy, Editor, Guardian-psj.ru, Moscow

Of all the numerous items on the Obama-Medvedev meeting agenda, the issue of reduction in the two countries’ nuclear arsenals is, in terms of its possible impact on world history, the weightiest one. President Medvedev has already offered a greater reduction than envisaged by the previous treaty, and if president Obama takes him up on this and agrees, or promises to agree, to satisfy Medvedev’s conditions for such a reduction, a breakthrough in this area is possible. Which is a prospect that fills many a Russian mind with apprehension. The reason? We have once witnessed a breakthrough in this field, and a lot of good it did Russia.

Before Reykjavik, fear was expressed in some U.S. media that president Reagan, though not exactly a country rube, might still “sell the farm” to city slicker Gorbachev. Well, the opposite happened, though not at Reykjavik. Russia certainly sold, or as good as sold, its nuclear farm. Through the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev and later Boris Yeltsin, its nuclear arsenal was brought to a state of near uselessness as a means of containing aggression.

Particularly indicative was the START II treaty, signed in January 1993 by George Bush Sr. and Yeltsin. It envisaged the elimination of all multiple-warhead ICBMs, which, among other things, knocked out of Russia’s hands its most powerful weapon, the heavy MIRV missile known in Russia as Voyevoda and in the West as Satan, and required the Russian side to pack its silos with slabs of concrete.

No wonder Russia’s parliament dragged its feet over ratifying that treaty as long as it could. Whatever the obstacles it raised, the real reason for procrastination, and later for withdrawing from the treaty, was the readiness of the U.S.-led West to resort to military force as a tool of geopolitics, as demonstrated in Serbia and Iraq, and also a year ago, when Mikheil Saakashvili’s Western-trained and equipped troops came closest to Russia’s borders and actually carried out an act of aggression against Russian citizens.
With the U.S. defense budget amounting to nearly half (46 percent) of the world’s total, not to mention the armed forces of its “willing” allies, and the Russian army a mere shadow of the Soviet one, nuclear weapons are Russia’s most reliable instrument for containing aggression.

Nuclear weapons are surely not weapons as such; they cannot be used to achieve victory, as Adolf Hitler planned to use them and as America actually used them in 1945. After the 1962 Caribbean crisis it became obvious that nuclear weapons’ only usefulness is as a psychological factor ensuring that they will never be used against a country that is capable of a massive retaliatory nuclear strike.
Anything that undermines this nature of nuclear weapons, like the building of an NMD-like “shield” or a drastic reduction of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, one that would make it incapable of delivering an annihilating retaliatory strike, changes their perception, at least in some minds: they cease to be a tool for eliminating the threat of war and come to be regarded as “usable” weapons.

We’ve seen evidence of such a change of perception on the U.S. side. The March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs carried an article by Lieber and Press titled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy,” which came up with this shocking declaration: “It probably will soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike.” And further: “the age of MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction] is nearing an end.”

That article was published by the Council on Foreign Relations and was therefore taken as a statement of the official position of the then U.S. administration. President Obama’s stand on this may be different, but presidents come and go – while NATO’s Drang nach Osten continues inexorably.

Whatever the new START stipulates, it should leave Russia with MIRV-ed ICBMs, and enough of them to assure that America’s dream of “nuclear primacy” never comes true.
The Obama-Medvedev meeting promises to be a great PR success, but the hype surrounding it should not obscure the nitty-gritty issues like the one discussed here.

This comment first appeared as part of the weekly Russia Profile Experts Panel.

Rodolfo on the face of it it may look draggy , but Rubin must have found after lot of testing and optimisation that this sail design would be the best approach instead of streamlined Akula type.

May be you are rigth austin. Perhaps, this strange shape is related to the clean line of the vessel. Anyway, I don’t like this sail. Compare with the beautiful Yasen sail.

Borei

Yasen