Test of hypersonic aircraft fails over Pacific Ocean

Test of hypersonic aircraft fails over Pacific Ocean

latimesblogs.latimes.com

A test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of speeding through air at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped plane failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were moderating the mission.

In the test flight, the aircraft, known as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was launched at 7:45 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base, located northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket, made by Orbital Sciences Corp.

After reachi

(visit the link for the full news article)

Great!!! This is all we need, more of our tech, falling into the hands of others... Seal team 6 chopper then this...

This jet that cost enough to feed a city for years, is gone, kapoot gone!!

But about 20 minutes into the mission, the Pentagon’s research arm, known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced on its Twitter account that: “Range assets have lost telemetry.”

This thing could have landed in downtown bangkok for all we know..

We should just start selling all this new stuff... Heck they get it for free anyway.

latimesblogs.latimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

GREAT!! this is all we need!!

another repost....

Sorry beat ya XD
www.abovetopsecret.com...

They lost signal last time too.

Almost makes me wonder if they really lost the signal.

This is DARPA, not NASA, we are talking about.

This is going to be a weapons delivery vehicle as well... Can you imagine if the headline here read:

Test hypersonic aircraft fails over Pacific Ocean Chinese sabotage suspected

reply to post by Gwampo


If you knew anything about ATS, you would know that duplicates are allowed, if one is in Breaking news and another in another category. Although, that was not my intention. I did a search for hypersonic and nothing popped up.

But that you for pointing that out Captain obvious.

reply to post by MikeboydUS


I can see it now.. test vehicle found to be carrying LIVE payload, was lost in error and "accidently" dropped payload on Tehran.

While I wasn't really able to dig up anything on the exact cost of the plane itself, I did find an article from Seattle PI showing how much each flight cost here is the link
www.seattlepi.com...
I did find a proposal by NASA at their site on proposed Hypersonic flight vehicles there is a cost of materials appendix I can imagine that there will be cost differences from company to company however it gives a good baseline.
www.aeronautics.nasa.gov...

Well it certainly is a shame that we lost this bird, however you can bet the Navy deep retrieval teams are on it 5 seconds after it lost telemetry, They had a flight path to start with so the search wont take forever definitely a needle in a haystack, and who the hell puts needles in haystacks anyways, Cheers hope the info is helpful.

Two tests, two failures.... I wonder how much taxpayer money will continue to be funneled into this?

Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-space research (not so much weapon systems) and this seemed a promising development (atmospheric mach 22 is a real step forward) , but we are hurting now, and the typical military industrial complex spending indulgences don't help matters.

I'm sure the captains of industry are all glowing with anticipation over the continued efforts, but two failures in a row should be a "trigger" for reconsideration of funding, don't you think? If they businesses are that hell bent on this platform, THEY should pay for it.

reply to post by ShaunHatfield


Hey i saw a very strange contrail that most would refer as donuts on a rope this morning around 6:00AM central time here over TN. It did not go across the entire sky but seemed to come on and off in bursts. You think it could have something to do with it? The picture came out really bad so im not even going to embarrass myself with them.

I beat ya too

You are already getting more attention even though I maintain my thread is more beautiful. I don't really care it's a great story.

Well, maybe not the first, but the only one that showed up under my "New" feed.

So, with theories of "China's got it!" showing up, why not the theory that they both worked and we just pretend that we are frustrated by "losing another one" instead? We do have a capacity for being really sneaky-- such projects ought to be expected to include a sneak factor.

I mean really, of course China is interested-- and worried. So if we know exactly what is going wrong, we don't say, "Yes, the heat shield is complex and we are trying different materials, the latest test used 5% more ablative material than the first one." Why give away our results to a potential ... um, competitor?

And if it worked perfectly, maybe flew right over North Korea, why on earth would we say so?

Conspiracy people are saying that the military tests technologies that're not secure yet for public use. These technologies might break conventional laws of physics and/or they might pose a dangerous risk in the wrong hands. Either way, the technologies are tested by the military industrial complex for reasons of national security while being examined carefully for their potential uses both in military fields and even in public sectors down the road. One of hte essential services performed is to improve our understanding of hte physics by employing hte worlds brightest minds. This all eventually trickles down to the rest of us, but requires decades.

I am, of course, supposed to be a black agent, secretly posing as an ATS poster.

That can neither be confirmed or denied.

Remember kids, not everything is a toy

Wouldn't you think they would be shadowing this to the best of their ability? Of course there is nothing that can keep up with MACH 20. But, I would assume we (or they, DARPA) would have assets in the air that could attempt some sort of visual/radar.

"The aircraft transitioned to Mach 20 aerodynamic flight," it said. "This transition represents a critical knowledge and control point in maneuvering atmospheric hypersonic flight. More than nine minutes of data was collected before an anomaly caused loss of signal.

Aug. 11, 2011 -- UPDATE: DARPA has lost contact with its experimental hypersonic glider -- and possibly lost the vehicle itself -- following the latest test flight from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Central Coast of Calif. Tuesday morning.

Was anyone else surprised to find out this was a glider?

Imagine if they used that hypersonic craft to fly 20 times the speed of sound towards China.....then exploded and released billions of tiny radioactive nano-razors which would still be traveling at 20 times the speed of sound for Shanghai.

Even if it "fails"....maybe it was successful. Who knows. Would you even notice if Billions of nano-razors were thrown at a country at Warp 10?

reply to post by StratosFear


Oh My GOODNESS! I have been searching all day for someone to help me identify whatever is in my photograph. The other night I sat up waiting to try and catch some photographs of meteorites. I am no professional photographer by no means....and this was my first attempt to take photos by keeping the shutter open. I took some around 3:00am...then went out later at around 4-ish. When I uploaded my pics I was disappointed at first-until I started to zoom in revealing beautiful stars in all colors. I was freaking out when 2 out of about 100 pictures had a mysterious looping and swirling contrails that seemed to appear, looping around and about-then just fading out. My first assumption was that maybe my camera moved and one of the stars looked like a trail as the shutter was open for minutes at a time. Then I thought that could not be possible if all of the other stars were in focus. So, I immediately started searching on what it could be---and first thing I came across was the article stating that this Experimental Hypersonic Aircraft had been "lost" during testing. Is this photo capturing the trail of this craft? I am not educated in any of this-not photography-nor air crafts....so any input would be appreciated! THANKS everyone! (I hope this post did not make me sound stupid)

Originally posted by Pervius
Imagine if they used that hypersonic craft to fly 20 times the speed of sound towards China.....then exploded and released billions of tiny radioactive nano-razors which would still be traveling at 20 times the speed of sound for Shanghai.

Even if it "fails"....maybe it was successful. Who knows. Would you even notice if Billions of nano-razors were thrown at a country at Warp 10?

If you look at the trajectory and flight path-- it was basically headed for Australia, but was not going to go that far. One of the video I watched gave approximate location and Wikipedia has a map on the DARPA Falcon Project.

From that article, it looks like about $5 Million total for the project thus far. This is only testing the airframe. No turbo-jets or ram-jest were harmed in this test.

lalawillis: Snapfish? Really? Do you know it forces anyone wanting to see your link to sign up for snap fish account? I would like to see the picure, so maybe you could put it on your ats account album?

Anyway, referring to the map (here), unless you were taking pictures in the middle of the South Pacific (where I hear the Internet is really hard to get!), what you photographed wasn't this thing.