In Pics: All You Need To Know About US' Minuteman III Missile
The US Air Force launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Minuteman III, in a doomsday missile test on Wednesday. The missile was unarmed when it was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
According to the US Air Force, the missile flew about 4,200 miles, at a speed of more than 15,000 miles per hour, to the US Army Space and Missile Defence Command's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Defence test site at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Here's all you need to know about the Minuteman III Missile
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
6 days ago
- Business Standard
US made a terrible mistake when it deported this Chinese rocket scientist
In 1950, though it didn't know it yet, the American government held one of the keys to winning the Cold War: Qian Xuesen, a brilliant Chinese rocket scientist who had already transformed the fields of aerospace and weaponry. In the halls of the California Institute of Technology and MIT, he had helped solve the riddle of jet propulsion and developed America's first guided ballistic missiles. He was made a colonel in the US Air Force, worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project and was sent to Germany to interrogate Nazi scientists. Dr Qian wanted the first man in space to be American — and was designing a rocket to make it happen. Then he was stopped short. At the height of his career, there came a knock at the door, and he was handcuffed in front of his wife and young son. Prosecutors would eventually clear Dr Qian of charges of sedition and espionage, but the United States deported him anyway — traded back to Communist Beijing in a swap for about a dozen American prisoners of war in 1955. The implications of that single deportation are staggering: Dr Qian returned to China and immediately persuaded Mao Zedong to put him to work building a modern weapons program. By the decade's end, China tested its first missile. By 1980, it could rain them down on California or Moscow with equal ease. Dr Qian wasn't just rightly christened the father of China's missile and space programs; he set in motion the technological revolution that turned China into a superpower. His story has been top of mind for me (I've been working on a biographical book project on him for several years now) as we've watched the Trump administration ruthlessly target foreign students and researchers. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio turned up the pressure, announcing that the administration would work to 'aggressively revoke' visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in 'critical fields.' There are some one million foreign students in the United States — more than 250,000 of them Chinese. Dr Qian's deportation should serve as an important cautionary tale. It proved an American misstep, fueled by xenophobia, that would forever alter the global balance of power. In an echo of the current moment, he became a target of the hysteria around Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare because he was a Chinese national and a scientist. He was humiliated when his security clearance was revoked. The price paid for shunning Dr Qian has been dear. Not only did the United States miss a chance to leapfrog the Soviet Union in manned spaceflight; it gave China the one resource it lacked to challenge American dominance in Asia: significant scientific prowess. In addition to closing that gap, his return to China ushered in generations of homegrown Chinese scientific breakthroughs. To this day, Washington spends billions of dollars on a nuclear umbrella shielding our Pacific allies from his technical achievements. When asked about America's deportation of Dr Qian, the former Navy Secretary Dan Kimball said, 'It was the stupidest thing this country ever did.' Dr Qian came to the United States as a young man of 23. He benefited from a scholarship that now seems to represent a vanished mind-set: the idea that international educational exchange would promote American values and foster world peace. Edmund James, the American representative in Beijing, set up the fund that brought Dr Qian and other students like him to the United States. 'The nation which succeeds in educating the young Chinese of the present generation,' Dr James wrote to President Teddy Roosevelt, 'will be the nation which for a given expenditure of effort will reap the largest possible returns in moral, intellectual and commercial influence.' By the 1960s, three-quarters of China's 200 most eminent scientists, including future Nobel Prize winners, had been trained in America, thanks to Dr James. In California, Dr Qian joined up with a group of other promising young scientists who called themselves the Suicide Squad, after at least one of their early experiments blew up a campus lab. At an annual meeting of engineers, two of the squad members announced they had worked out how to create a rocket capable of flying 1,000 miles vertically above the earth's surface. Soon they acquired a more official name: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1949, Dr Qian was chosen to lead the laboratory, which by then was the precursor to NASA. He not only wanted to help the United States win the space race, but he also unveiled plans to use rockets in air travel to allow passengers to get from New York to Los Angeles in less than an hour. Was Dr Qian a spy? Was he a Communist? There was no convincing evidence of either, but it's unclear whether the American government ever cared. Protests by top defense officials and academics, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who worked with Dr Qian on the Manhattan Project, went unheeded. After five years under house arrest, Dr Qian was begging the Chinese government to help him escape the United States. State Department documents, now declassified, suggest that Dr Qian had become a highly undervalued pawn in the eyes of the Eisenhower administration, traded back to China for US airmen. The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, speaking triumphantly about the negotiations, said: 'We had won back Qian Xuesen. That alone made the talks worthwhile.' Dr Qian never returned to the United States and served the rest of his life as a celebrated leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He is seen as a national hero, too, with a museum built to honor his accomplishments. Most of his remarks in his later years were either technical documents or party propaganda against America. In 1966, however, one of his former Caltech colleagues received a postcard decorated with a traditional Chinese drawing of flowers and postmarked in Beijing. On it Dr Qian had written simply, 'This is a flower that blooms in adversity.' Mr. Rubio's announcement, although short on details, has surely set off waves of anxiety among international students and their colleagues at research universities, as schools and laboratories brace themselves for further disruption. Something larger has been lost, though: America once saw educating the strivers of the world as a way to enhance and strengthen our nation. It was a strategic advantage that so many of the best and brightest thinkers, scientists and leaders wanted to study here and to be exposed to American democracy and culture. Dr Qian's achievements on behalf of China demonstrate the risk of giving up that advantage and the potential dark side of alienating — rather than welcoming — the world's talent. There's always the chance that it will someday be used against us.
Indian Express
27-05-2025
- Indian Express
The rocket science behind missiles: Newton's laws, neural networks and algos
On a summer day in 1944, residents of London heard a strange buzzing sound overhead—like an outboard motor in the sky — followed by silence. Seconds later, a blast ripped through a block of houses. The age of the modern missile had begun. That sound came from the V-1 flying bomb, a German cruise missile. It wasn't very accurate and could be shot down, but it marked a turning point: the use of guided, long-range, autonomous weapons. Since then, missile technology has grown from noisy buzz bombs to nearly undetectable hypersonic gliders that can maneuver at several times the speed of sound. But behind the scenes, it's all about physics — a complex dance of speed, trajectory, control, and prediction. From ballistics to brains The earliest missiles were just arrows and spears—unguided projectiles. In fact, the word 'missile' comes from the Latin missilis, meaning 'that which may be thrown.' The science behind them is ballistics: the study of how objects move through the air under the influence of gravity and drag. Ballistic missiles still exist today, but modern ones are far from simple. A ballistic missile is one that is powered during only the early phase of its flight. After that, it coasts along a parabolic path—just like a rock thrown into the air, only faster and farther. A typical intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) reaches altitudes of over 1,000 km and speeds of Mach 20 (20 times the speed of sound). Once launched, they are almost impossible to intercept. But pure ballistic paths are predictable — and that's both their strength and their vulnerability. So modern missiles add another ingredient: guidance. Guided missiles and the problem of precision To hit a moving target — a plane, a tank, even a ship — you can't just aim and hope. You need to adjust in real time. That's what guided missiles do. They carry sensors (like radar, infrared, or GPS) and control systems (gyroscopes, fins, internal thrusters) that steer them mid-flight. The problem is harder than it looks. Consider this: you're trying to hit a plane flying at 900 km/h from 40 km away. By the time your missile reaches it, the plane will have moved. So you don't aim at where the target is — you aim at where it will be. This involves solving what's called a 'pursuit curve', a classic problem in mathematics where the pursuer constantly adjusts its path toward the moving target. In the early days, this was done using analog computers. One famous story involves British engineer Barnes Wallis using bicycle chains and gears to model bombing trajectories. Today's missiles use high-speed processors and AI-based prediction, but the challenge remains the same: predicting future motion in a world full of uncertainty. A brief look at rocket science Every missile is, at heart, a rocket. Rocket propulsion follows Newton's Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Burn fuel and expel gas out the back, and the missile is pushed forward. The real challenge isn't just going fast — it's controlling flight at those speeds. When the Mach number crosses 1, the air surrounding the rocket undergoes a process called shocking, resulting in intense friction and heat. Missiles need special heat shields and materials that won't melt at thousands of degrees Celsius. Their electronics must survive g-forces that would crush a human. Modern missiles push into the realm of the hypersonic — speeds above Mach 5. These include hypersonic glide vehicles, which detach from rockets and surf the upper atmosphere while maneuvering unpredictably. Unlike traditional ballistic missiles, their path is hard to model, making them extremely difficult to intercept. Both China and the U.S. have invested heavily in these next-generation systems. India's DRDO is also testing hypersonic platforms. These weapons don't just travel fast — they're smart, maneuverable, and virtually impossible to defend against with today's technology. What makes hypersonic missiles especially disruptive is not just their speed, but the shrinking response time they impose. A traditional ICBM may give its target 30–40 minutes to react; a hypersonic missile could cut that to under 10. That changes the calculus of deterrence and defense. Even tracking these weapons is a challenge: at such speeds, air friction generates plasma that can block radar signals. As a result, militaries worldwide are racing not only to build hypersonic weapons, but also to develop new space-based sensors and directed-energy countermeasures to stop them. Pigeons and missiles In World War II, American psychologist B.F. Skinner proposed a bizarre idea: use pigeons to guide missiles. He trained the birds to peck at an image of a target projected on a screen inside the missile's nose cone. Their pecking movements would steer the missile toward its goal. Though never deployed, Project Pigeon (and its later version, Project Orcon, for 'organic control') showed the creative lengths to which scientists would go in the early days of missile guidance. Today's systems rely on microprocessors, not pigeons—but the principles remain the same: sense, compute, correct. The science of predicting impact At its core, missile science is about solving a fundamental problem: how do you strike something that's far away, possibly moving, and maybe trying to avoid you? The answer lies in physics, engineering, and increasingly, artificial intelligence. That challenge grows more complex as defenses improve. Missiles must now anticipate evasive maneuvers, adjust mid-course using real-time data, and sift through decoys or electronic jamming. A modern air-to-air missile might make hundreds of tiny course corrections per second, all while enduring intense heat, G-forces, and signal noise. The missile, in effect, becomes a high-speed problem-solver — guided not just by brute force, but by algorithms and sensors that mimic decision-making under pressure. It's a blend of old and new — Newton's laws and neural networks, calculus and code. And while the technologies have evolved dramatically, the underlying science has stayed remarkably consistent. Even the most advanced missiles still obey the same principles as a stone flung from a slingshot. The only difference is that today, the stone flies at Mach 10, thinks for itself, and rarely misses.
NDTV
22-05-2025
- NDTV
In Pics: All You Need To Know About US' Minuteman III Missile
The US Air Force launched a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Minuteman III, in a doomsday missile test on Wednesday. The missile was unarmed when it was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. According to the US Air Force, the missile flew about 4,200 miles, at a speed of more than 15,000 miles per hour, to the US Army Space and Missile Defence Command's Ronald Reagan Ballistic Defence test site at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Here's all you need to know about the Minuteman III Missile
