The Falcon bit the dust after 9 minutes, as did the first time they tried this.
Mach5 is the point we can not get past, it is very unstable to fly anything past that.
surely they will attempt it again in the future when they can get some funding in order.
The Los Angeles Times
A test flight of an experimental aircraft traveling at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped vehicle failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were monitoring the mission.
The unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was meant to test new technologies that could give the Pentagon the capability to deliver non-nuclear military strikes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.
But the Falcon's test flight ended prematurely and it plunged into the Pacific Ocean. It was the second and last scheduled flight for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million. Both flights failed to go the distance.
Showing posts with label darpa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label darpa. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2011
Falcon hypersonic vehicle test flight fails
Thursday, April 29, 2010
US military's HyperSonic vehicle missing
DARPA's latest project, a vehicle capable of traveling at 20 Mach known as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), has gone missing after a test launch. Hope this doesn't set back the project too much.
Physorg
The HTV-2 was launched last week aboard a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The test flight called for a 30-minute mission in which the vehicle would glide at high speed before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, north of a US military test site at the Kwajalein Atoll.
The glider separated from the booster but soon after the signal vanished, a spokeswoman said.
"Preliminary review of data indicates the HTV-2 achieved controlled flight within the atmosphere at over Mach 20. Then contact with HTV-2 was lost," Johanna Spangenberg Jones, a spokeswoman for DARPA, told AFP.
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