How Cleopatra’s bath loofah may help China’s jets vanish from radar
From ancient royal baths to future stealth warfare – a humble kitchen vegetable may hold the key to defeating space-based radar hunters.
Over 2,000 years ago, in a secluded bath chamber along the banks of the Nile, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt may have reached for an unlikely luxury: a fibrous, spongelike gourd – the loofah.
This porous plant was prized by ancient Egyptian royalty as a natural exfoliant, a symbol of purity and refinement. Light as a feather, yet strong and intricately structured, the loofah scrubbed away impurities – both physical and spiritual – in rituals that blended hygiene with holiness.
For decades, stealth aircraft like the American F-22 Raptor and B-2 Spirit relied on shape-shifting designs and radar-absorbing materials to shrink their radar cross-sections (RCS) – sometimes down to the size of a bird. But technology has caught up.
China’s deployment of a revolutionary low-Earth-orbit radar satellite constellation has changed the game.