Soviet Strategic Winged Rocket “Meteorite” was a powerful and unusual weapon of the Cold War, ultimately “doomed to failure”, reports The Drive.
“the rocket was designed to fly thousands of miles at a speed of more than three Maha numbers, before with a nuclear charge to dive to the target,” the publication says.
The American publication reminds that the rocket since the end of the 1960s developed a scientific and production association (NGOs) of mechanical engineering in three versions: ship, aircraft and ground. It is noted that the range of the product is 5 thousand kilometers, the maximum height is 24 kilometers.
The publication writes that the “meteorite” received, in particular, the folded triangular shape covered wings and the direct-flow air jet engine. Initially, the rocket was to transfer a pair of 100 kiloton warheads in TNT equivalent each thrown at a distance of 100 kilometers from each other.
Edition also reminded that 37 METEORITE missiles were launched, of which only one managed to achieve a project distance of 5 thousand kilometers. The Drive concludes that although the “meteorite”, “possibly turned out to be a deadlock, the heritage of the high-performance strategic winged rocket remains still alive in Russia.”
In November, The Drive wrote that in the future the newly recreated 56th artillery command of the US Army in Germany will receive at its disposal a number of samples of the newest American weapons: a promising Hyper-Rocket Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which ranked Dark Eagle ( “Dark Eagle”), a Typhon multifunctional system that allows you to run a variety of rockets from one installation, including RIM-174 Standard Extended Range Active Missile (Eram) and Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM), and the Precision Strike Missile (PRSM) rocket.