WATCH China Test-Launch Sky Star-2 Hypersonic Waverider Vehicle

A video of Sky Star-2's testing, conducted Friday by the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics in China's northwest, has emerged online, with the hypersonic vehicle said to have successfully separated from its launch vehicle and engaged in high-altitude maneuvering during its ten minute flight.

Online military magazine Defense Blog has published more detailed photos of the hypersonic systems's launch vehicle.

Waveriders are a hypersonic aircraft design using the shock waves generated by their own flight as a lifting surface to improve their lift-to-drag ratio. Carrying a conventional or nuclear payload or simply using the immense kinetic energy unleashed by their flight to destroy their targets, the maneuverable high speed systems can evade any existing or prospective countermeasures. Russia is expected to deploy its Avangard hypersonic boost-glide vehicle aboard the Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missile by late 2018 or early 2019. The US is has its own projects in this direction, most notably its Boeing X-51 unmanned scramjet aircraft. In May, the US Air Force announced that it was accelerating the development of its hypersonic weapons projects to catch up with Russia and China.

Earlier this week, strategic weapons experts spotted what they believed to be testing of the CH-AS-X-13, a new Chinese two-stage solid-fuel ballistic missile with a 3,000 km range.