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Chinese scientists simulate hypersonic flight to US after devising BeiDou satellite-switching system

  • Chinese satnav system allows ground team to maintain contact with hypersonic vehicle during rapid evasion manoeuvres, says paper
  • BeiDou ‘hotline’ has a time delay of less than a second, theoretically allowing Beijing to call off the strike at the last minute: researchers

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The BeiDou navigation satellite system, with its more than 50 positioning satellites equipped with microwave and laser communication devices, is the only one in China that could support an intercontinental flight in near space between any two locations on Earth, according to Chinese researchers. Photo: AP Photo
Zhang Tong
A Chinese satellite navigation system will allow the Chinese military to monitor, or even control, a hypersonic flight from China to the United States, according to a new study by Chinese space scientists.
BeiDou is a satellite positioning system similar to GPS that also offers a communication service with global coverage.
In the study, the Chinese researchers simulated the flight of a hypersonic vessel launched from Jinan, in China’s eastern Shandong province, to New York via the Arctic Ocean.

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Although China has put several satellite communication networks in orbit, the researchers found that only BeiDou allowed the command centre back on Earth to maintain contact with the hypersonic vehicle while it made wild manoeuvres in the high atmosphere to evade air-defence systems.

The BeiDou “hotline” had a time delay of less than a second, theoretically allowing Beijing to control the flight down to the last minute, the research team said.

These findings “will inspire some engineering applications”, said spacecraft communication researcher Li Shenyang, of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, in a paper published in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Electronic Design Engineering last week.

Maintaining communication with a hypersonic vessel in flight is no easy task. China’s global communication satellite systems, such as Tiantong and Tianlian, are considerably smaller in scale and coverage area compared with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Only BeiDou, currently comprising more than 50 positioning satellites equipped with microwave and laser communication devices – including 30 satellites for communications – could support an intercontinental flight in near space between any two locations on Earth, according to calculations by Li’s team.

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