The SR-92 is the US military’s advanced hypersonic interceptor, its forerunners operated for years in secret service without public knowledge and existed under three classified programs throughout the 1980s and 90s. The earliest program to succeed the SR-71 was the SR-81 program codenamed Aurora. Aurora was built around a scramjet-powered engine that had a considerably more complex engine cycle design and was nearly twice as large as the SR-71 engine. To conduct ISR missions over the soviet union at the time the air force was still operating a few airworthy SR-71s. The aircraft achieved its program goals of sustained Mach 5 flight and a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet. The air force retired the Aurora series jets after only 10 prototype models were produced. The SR-81 became an urban legend and its status in aircraft performance history remains unconfirmed. The program was canceled in the 1990s after the fall of the soviet union before it could be publicly acknowledged. In the late 1990s, the SR-91 with a next-generation engine required for sustained Mach 6+ hypersonic flight while simplified was still immature and both prototypes’ engines melted during testing, the air force unhappy with progress shifted funding and diverted to stealth aircraft programs like the F-22. The SR-91 was canceled before a serial production model was built, but the black program continued in the lab using air force research grants and special black budgets, despite lack of progress the Air Force continued to push for an unmanned hypersonic aircraft into the late 2000s. This coincided with Russian and Chinese advances in hypersonic weapons, land-based interceptors that could shoot down the SR-71 Mach 3 aircraft, and outrun missile defense systems. The USAF caught off guard by the advances, restarted the program after it demonstrated a mix-cycle engine technology considered the holy grail of hypersonic engines, a mixed-cycle hypersonic engine that uses a rotation detonation turbine-based system for cycling from Mach 2 to Mach 3 and then shockwave ramjet for speeds above Mach 3 up to Mach 12 but generally flies at Mach 6-10.
The SRT-92 is a Mach 6+ high-speed interceptor designed to fly in the upper atmosphere and can launch anti-satellite weapons, conduct ISR missions, and precision strikes, the HV-11 comes in manned and unmanned versions which can be remotely piloted via satellite and internal flight computers. The HV-11 has two mixed cycle hypersonic engines that use a rotation detonation turbine-based system for cycling from Mach 2 to Mach 3 and then shock ramjet for speeds above Mach 3 up to Mach 12 but generally flies at Mach 6-10.
The SR-92 is both manned and unmanned versions, and it has a crew of two the pilot and mission payload operator work together to ensure the mission is carried out. A crew module can be swapped out in the field when more complex missions are required, Its payload is inside a central internal bay which can include ISR sensors and strike weapons. The SR-92 while officially a recon aircraft can carry precision-guided bombs and stand-off missiles, the SR-92 can drop a guided precision bomb from over 150km away using its extremely high airspeed to launch a glide bomb long distances from an altitude of over 80,000 ft giving it stealthy standoff capabilities unique to the platform, as the glide bomb is unpowered making it difficult to detect the term has earned the nickname “Hypersonic bomb tossing” or HBT.
