China's navy has apparently tested out a hypersonic rail gun — basically a device that uses a series of electromagnets to accelerate a projectile to incredible speeds — but during a demonstration of its power, things didn't go quite as planned., the rail gun test lobbed a precision-guided projectile — or smart bomb — nine miles into the stratosphere. But because it apparently didn't go up as high as it was supposed to, the test was ultimately declared unsuccessful.
This conclusion came after an analysis led by Naval Engineering University professor Lu Junyong, whose team found with the help of AI that even though the winged smart bomb exceeded Mach 5 speeds, it didn't perform as well as it could have. This occurred, as Lu's team found, because the projectile was spinning too fast during its ascent, resulting in an "undesirable tilt."Successful or not, news of the test is a pretty big deal given that it was just a few months ago that reports emerged about China'smake it all the way to space, could well freak out officials stateside.
Chinese officials, meanwhile, are paying lip service to the hypersonic rail gun technology's potential to revolutionize civilian travel by creating even faster railways and consumer space launches, too. Despite the big promises of politicos, there are still lots of technical kinks that'll need to be ironed out before a giant rail gun is ready to shoot humans — or weapons — into space, not least of which the spinning and tilt issues demonstrated by the Naval Engineering University researchers in this test.
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