By Craig Mellow
The Russian MiG-31 fighter is an obsolete plane that hasn’t flown in years. It was mainly used to track down US spy planes during the Cold War. More recently, it has been repurposed to be able to carry the Kinzhal hypersonic missile to help Russia get back into the arms race. But its most intriguing factor comes from a leaked image of it carrying a missile even bigger than the half ton Kinzhal. Observers have speculated that it could be used to knock low-earth-orbit satellites out of the sky.
So why is Russia using the -31? It is big. It weighs 42,000 kilograms and an attain speeds of up to Mach 2.4. It does this by traveling high up in the atmosphere to reduce air resistance. Back in the day, it carried up to 4 missiles and earned the name “Foxhound” from its NATO opponents.
However, its fatal flaw is its lack of versatility. All that size makes it hard to control, and the new F-14 and 15’s, with their multi-purpose capability, rendered the MiG-31 obsolete. It was just no good for dogfights. However, today’s battle field is different. It involves blinding the enemy, such as knocking key satellites out of the sky. Since the Kinzhal missile is 1,200 miles, just outside the range of a low orbit satellite, it isn’t a big stretch to say the mysterious new missile is a modified version that could knock out satellites.
The reason Russia is mounting them on the -31 could be that starting 66,000 feet up in the air has many advantages. It saves lots of fuel and gives more mobility, because ground defense systems have to wait a day for a satellite to come into striking distance.
The MiG-31 was first developed because of its predecessor’s capture. A Russian pilot took it to Japan to get asylum, where he also revealed the craft’s weaknesses. Despite its Mach 3 speed, the plane shakes and overheated at that speed. So the Russians developed a new plane with slightly slower but more reliable engines. It also had state-of-the-art radars and could shoot downwards. It has its flaws, though. Its fuel tank, for some reason, kept showing empty minutes after take off, even though the tank was full. This led to many test crashes and lost lives. It has also been outshined by the lighter and nimbler Sukhoi’s.
But there is one mission only the -31 can handle. The US developed the SR-71 Blackbird with Lockheed Martin, and it could fly at 80,000 feet at Mach 3.3, which was a breakthrough. However, the MiG-31 could, in a fleet, make sure US reconnaissance missions never crossed the border. If it came close enough, a Blackbird could, in theory, be shot down, though no pilot has tested the theory. US pilots, in fact, reported stress after being tailed by the -31 on missions, and the spy missions soon ended. After that threat, the -31 became more and more obsolete under recently, when Russia announced it would be upgrading them to perform the same space capabilities as in the Cold War.
So would Russia actually want to take out satellites? Taking one out would create enough debris to take out all the other ones in low orbit. And Russia has other ways too. It could use lasers and energy beams to temporarily harm enemy satellites, rather than blasting them apart. This would be easier for a victimized country to cover up, and would prevent potential harm to Russian satellites. It also has ground launch anti-satellite systems, rather than relying of high altitude shooting. But beware - the Russians do say that old, forgotten technology can be lethal.
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