According to the official Russian news agency Tass, the new frigate Admiral Gorshkov of the 22350 project, will perform this year the first naval launch of the new Zirkon hypersonic missile, thus confirming that the new missile can be deployed from vertical silos intended for the Kalibr naval cruise missile or the P800 Onyx anti-ship missile.
The new missile, capable of reaching Mach 9 for a range of over 1000 km, is due to enter service in the early years of the 2020s, and will equip both offshore surface vessels such as the Gorchkov and Grigorovich frigates, or Lider destroyers. , as corvettes equipped to carry the Kalibr missile, such as the Buyan-M, as well as attack submarines, nuclear as well as conventional.
However, for the moment, we still do not know how the missile, capable of targeting naval and land targets, will actually be directed. Indeed, hypersonic speeds generate such a release of heat on the frontal parts that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to install a seeker there, whether radar or electro-optical, the thermal protection of the missile blocking any electromagnetic waveform. In addition, when the speed exceeds mach 7/8, a plasma forms on the front of the missile, itself very poorly permeable to EM waves.
China seems to have solved the problem, at least partially, with its anti-ship ballistic missiles, by directing the missile using a satellite which would correct the trajectory of the missile by communicating with it from behind. But this approach requires having a suitable satellite in the rear reception cone of the missile, and having precise information on the position of the target, which is far from obvious when it comes to naval targets. . In addition, this forces the missile into a ballistic trajectory, the same one against which antiballistic missiles like the THAAD, the SM3/6 or the Aster30Block1 are designed.
However, other technological solutions can be considered to overcome this problem, and allow a hypersonic missile to direct itself precisely and autonomously against a naval target, even a very distant one, by following a flight trajectory rendering ABM missiles inoperative. This approach will be the subject of a future article.