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DARPA Hypersonic Vehicle Splash Down Confirmed
dtmos writes "DARPA has announced that its Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 flight on Thursday, 11 August, 'experienced a flight anomaly post perigee and into the vehicle's climb. The anomaly prompted the vehicle's autonomous flight safety system to use the craft's aerodynamic systems to make a controlled descent and splash down into the ocean.' 'According to a preliminary review of the data collected prior to the anomaly encountered by the HTV-2 during its second test flight,' said DARPA Director Regina Dugan, 'HTV-2 demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled Mach 20 hypersonic flight for approximately three minutes. It appears that the engineering changes put into place following the vehicle's first flight test in April 2010 were effective. We do not yet know the cause of the anomaly for Flight 2.'"
But that's SOCIALISM!
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
Here's a solution to the poor and homeless. Donate all your spare guns to them.
Insightful, but written in such a bad style and with such crap grammar you're going to get modded troll.
Shame, there's some good points in there.
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It's pretty obvious you have never been to a 3rd world country.
That said, I agree with you on military spending.
You're right! We should absolutely stop funding innovation and new technologies! What the hell have scientific advances ever done for us?
I'm fascinated by the notion of the hymenology council myself.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
North Korea must be going ", " (oh shit!) about right now.
Yes, I saw that, and wondered - do they verify virgin status and hold meetings and take votes about them? Do I need my hymen intact to be a member?
I might as well not apply...
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If it makes you feel any better, there's an investigation pending for Darpa surrounding this (and presumably other) contracts. I guess the woman that heads up the agency is in bed with one of their major outside contractors, RedX. Better details here... http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/16/nation/la-na-defense-contracts-20110817
It detected something out on one wing.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is how science moves forward. You make a mistake, you think about it, you engineer a solution and then see how badly it blows up. Granted that is over simplified, but without mistakes, missteps, and anomalies we don't move technology forward. Many of the problems we face as a society will not be solved by buying a solution from the local supermarket, they will be solved by a crazy person who believes that the future can be better and has the resources to "waste" working the bugs out of his crazy vision. Its been that way from the dawn of time, and it will be that way 10,000 years from now.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
You are right, fire sucks!
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
i can't tell
DARPA projects are all done/made in the USA. If anything, it contributes to the economy rather than drain from it. Besides, investing in advanced research is like investing in education, the short term payoff is low, but long term payoff has the potential to be great -- this military version goes mach 20 and does one or two specific tasks, but imagine 15 years from now commercial planes going at a third of that speed, and all built in the USA. Would you complain about that?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Any idea what the propellant was, and how much it was carrying? Probably not related, but for the last two days a mysterious jet-fuel like odor has been wafting around San Diego county.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Why invest in R&D or basic sciences at all, when there are more immediate "needs" like nationalized healthcare, medicare or more unemployment pay? Technology and R&D investment is not just a spigot a country can "turn off" and then "turn on" in a few years. The same is true with investment toward space programs. The country benefits in the long run from advanced defense technology and private sector innovation/spillover, such as the internet and potentially the autonomous vehicle. And failure should be expected when your experimenting with futuristic research if we can learn from the mistakes, as cliche as it sounds. True, DARPA could be better managed, but so could Google. You probably wouldn't have a medium to complain about this if it weren't for the DARPA Internet Program of the 1970s, also during a period of high unemployment, high inflation and Cold War uncertainty.
I think you might be a touch confused about the meaning of the word "research".
If the crap was working, we wouldn't need to spend money on figuring out how to make it work.
I agree we need to re-prioritize our spending, but I would much rather see us cutting things like the billions we give to the oil companies, or maybe if we're going to have medicare pay for prescriptions, we do like every other industrialized country in the world and negotiate with the pharma companies, instead of just giving them whatever they want to charge like we do.
That thing CAN'T fly. It is an anomoly in and of itself. Flight involves much more than a few well photoshopped images.
Holy fuck! Mach 20? I scan slashdot regularly, but I somehow missed this story developing. I think the really cool thing about this is how the onboard systems allowed it to make a controlled splashdown. I bet no pilot in the world could deadstick a landing like that from that kind of speed. This is probably the beginning of the end for the fighter pilots.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
dont tell me you are a global warming denier!
Maybe we need to stop spending money on this crap that doesn't even work.
Like the two $500 Billion "economic stimulus" packages, working on "shovel ready" projects that "haa haa" didn't actually exist, where they spent over $280,000 for each job created or saved. They're planning for another round, even bigger this time! Or the unconstitutional Obamacare, whose costs are increasing rapidly, and they are discovering that it will supply even worse care than was originally stated, even before any major part is actually implemented.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
$600 mil between the two crashed tests for a vehicle with a primary purpose of delivering bombs in less than an hour anywhere in the world. Does the Federal government (my government) seem to have any problem dropping bombs?
We need to continue looking at things like this. This seems like a useful program that we should be funding. Sadly, CONgress killed blackswift already, which would have been equally useful.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That's about 1224 kilometers or 760.5 miles. In three freaking minutes. That's normally a 1-2 hour plane ride. Or an 11 hour drive. In three minutes.
= 180 seconds * 20 * 0.3432 km/s = 1236 km (ignoring significant digits)
That's a pretty good distance for about the length of time of a TV commercial break.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound )
By all means, and while you're waiting for the distribution to proceed, please enjoy this complementary bulls-eye t-shirt, its the height of fashion!
"Technology and R&D investment" is a miniscule portion of the overall government budget. But if we want to balance things out and reduce the complaints about using tax payer money for projects that provide no short term returns we can eliminate all foreign aid funding, which by the way is also an insignificant amount of money when compared against the entire government expenditures but it is enough to provide the money to fund R&D projects. Even though foreign aid is a small amount it should be the first step in reducing the debt and would also be a very popular decision for average US citizens.
Why invest in R&D or basic sciences at all, when there are more immediate "needs" like nationalized healthcare
There's plenty of healthcare. Just walk into any hospital and state that you are on the "undocumented worker" plan.
Well, it's a relief that it isn't still buzzing around up there.
This is only true if the money taken would not have been put to more useful purposes had it not been taken. You can't say if it would have been or not, but you're told to trust the 'superhuman dictator' to make better decisions than everybody else.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
investing in advanced research is like investing in education,
Sorry, but investing in education does not equal to throwing away billions and let it splashed into the ocean just like that.
Hysterical hyperbole never helps.
Divisive American politics will be the undoing of us all. We need research to keep us in the running. Or have you noticed, we shut down our Space Program and are hitching rides with the Russians to space? I am frankly embarrassed at where we are.
Let's look at what we have done. We are in wars with people that classically never give up, a literal quagmire like we got into in the Viet Nam era. What we did learn from Viet Nam was it was a great way to fund the war machine, and war profiteers. Terrorism is the perfect boogieman, you can scare the people with it into giving up anything, and you never have a "foe" that you defeat and end your precious war.
Don't think so? We have thug cops feeling up children and grandmothers for weapons in our Airports.
Our dollar is so inflated its sickening. How do I know? Check out gold prices. It's not that gold is going up in value, its the dollar dropping in value, and this causes a panic which places gold in more of a demand. Watch how this spirals out of control.
Now screaming "Socialism" because the rich need to pony up their fair share of taxes is the hallmark of a brainwashed lackey of the uber rich. Much worse are the trade polices that gut the American industries, forcing them to move production overseas to compete. Second is labor unions that gouge the manufacturer and put them out of the running due to previously mentioned trade policies. Thirdly are insane regulatory mandates piled up from decades of bureaucracy, that strangle American industry.
We need FAIR trade policies, not Free Trade policies. Free Trade is an oxymoron. These are two words that should NOT be put together. Trade is war, trade must be handled like a hostage negotiation. Trade is the only way our federal government was suppose to be able to raise money according to our founding fathers. Tariffs were what they were suppose to be funded from. Enter a World War to give us our current tax scheme. This Income Tax was never properly ratified as a Constitutional amendment if anyone is interested or cares, making it a dinosaur sized elephant in the room we have all been ignoring for decades.
We need unions to have a fair voice, but not the ability to extort their host business. We need regulations that make good green sense, but are workable and don't gut industry.
Let me bring this to a conclusion to prove relevance to the topic.
It's going to suck big time that we do research like this, but if we don't have our industry, who's going to build things resulting from our research? Who's going to build things HERE, hence we the public get paid back in the form of taxes gained, jobs gained and the benefits of said research? We need research and to never stop it, but we also need to tend to all the other mechanics of the nation.
Take the Red Pill.
Why, how much is your average ass-hymen worth in hymenology circles lately? Are you buying? If not, why the interest? Are you saying you want my ass? AC, you've been stalking me for a long time, but I had no idea you felt that way. I can be reached at
Troll too far, methinks...
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You can certainly look at the portion of our resources that leave the country. Based on that you can come up with a pretty good estimate of how much would have been spend in the US versus outside the US.
Also, if people simply had a bunch more money what would really happen is inflation. Take a look at the housing bubble. Large low-interest loans were easy to get so people were willing to pay more for housing. Now that loans are harder to get the price of housing is dropping. Similarly, someone with a bunch more money won't think much of paying $30 where they would have previously hesitated to pay $20.
You can certainly look at the portion of our resources that leave the country. Based on that you can come up with a pretty good estimate of how much would have been spend in the US versus outside the US.
Right, if it's spent on commodities that's true, but what if it's spend on developing new businesses or products; an inventor in his garage that can afford that extra part he really needed, etc. This is all 'the unseen' that is prevented from occurring.
Also, if people simply had a bunch more money what would really happen is inflation. Take a look at the housing bubble. Large low-interest loans were easy to get so people were willing to pay more for housing. Now that loans are harder to get the price of housing is dropping.
Agreed, artificially fixing interest rates is a really bad idea.
Similarly, someone with a bunch more money won't think much of paying $30 where they would have previously hesitated to pay $20.
Quite so, but I'm not making the connection back to DARPA here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Oh man.. fire was made to cook meat, people are made of meat... therefore fire was made to cook people! Obviously we need regulation on this fire so that someone doesn't use it to cook people!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Scientists confirm "we were just going too fucking fast".
Robot tries to copy move, gets out-FALCON PAWNCHED by the original.
Yes it does.
Every year a percentage of students fails at being educated. It amounts to billions wasted on students who would be better served learning to dig ditches.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Might just be. Watch this:
Wouldn't be the first time.
I think NASA overhypes the amount of tech spin offs it produces compared to research for the military. ARPAnet was built to survive a nuclear war. ENIAC was used for calculating trajectories of artillery shells. Spy planes pioneered use of liquid hydrogen and titanium. Nuclear weapon simulations were a major customer of early supercomputers. ICBMs made use of transistors, and later, ICs. ICBM experience would prove valuable in the upcoming Apollo project. The military pioneered radar, and satellite communications. Naval research has made good progress on the railgun, and financed development of superconducting motors. There is much more I have not included, but it is more than NASA has done.
I don't know why people find this surprising. Obviously you can't build a road for just the cost of labor, teachers need classrooms to teach in, etc. Of course the rest of that money still goes to pay somebody, such as whoever sells construction supplies or maintains the classroom, but you aren't counting that, simply to make the numbers look worse.
As for the shovel-ready projects that weren't actually ready, that portion of the stimulus was never spent, so that should make you feel a little better.
As for healthcare, private and public healthcare in the US are in exactly the same mess, which is that we simply refuse to make any rational cost/benefit decisions about healthcare, and over-treat everybody, even lost causes.
while we're on fantasies, maybe you can find a different station to parrot. My *god* slashdot has become a wingnut echochamber lately...
This is how science moves forward.
No, this is how engineering moves forward if you have enough money. In the 1940s and 1950s, a huge number of experimental aircraft and rockets were built. Some worked, some didn't, and some went through a large number of prototypes before they worked. There were terrible problems getting early jet fighters to work right. A lot of test pilots died. Even the successful military planes weren't that safe; in the 1950s, a Navy pilot had about a 1 in 5 chance of dying in a crash, without help from the enemy.
In the early days of rocketry, a huge number of rockets were launched unsuccessfully. About 600 V-2 rocket launches were attempted in the R&D phase, before they were able to hit London. ICBM development in the US and USSR had dozens of launch failures. Frequent launches were expensive, but projects were completed faster.
Don't feed this troll...
Sure thing, isn't it great that the US has release the F117 technology from 1981 ... that's twice 15 years exactly if I can count
Mpls/St.Paul got their entire freeway fixed because of that program. A full 10+ miles of 94 between downtowns was ripped up and re-paved, and many of the bridges along it fixed. Even longer stretches outside the cities were fixed/impoved as well.
I dont care if it worked out to $280k a person, the 6" gravel gap between concrete lanes that formed over the years is gone. The 4 inch deep 6 foot long potholes that made the highway feel like a warzone are gone. The dangerous on-ramps now have their own merge lanes.
Just because your local politicians fucked things up or refused the money, doesn't mean the entire program was a failure.
They should have used larger billboards along the way, then more people would have noticed. I was proud to know that the money was spend on this, instead of building another road in Baghdad. MnDOT had wanted to do this for years, but never had the budget.
Putting it into RTS terms, what your advocating is building up large swarms of troops, wait until you've got the maximum (meaning loads of resources collected and lots of supply buildings built), and then upgrade them. The better strategy is to upgrade them while you build them.
Look, as much as we need stuff like socialized health care (and better social programs in general), it's not going to help us in any way to stop or slow down doing R&D. We have more than enough money to get it all done - it'd be better to spend effort on trying to fight waste and pork spending rather than something that produces something incredibly useful for us in the long run. The reason we're in this mess is that we don't do shit that pans out in the long run - we want results, and we want them NOW.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Ask the Chinese government...they have the schematics.
along with her father (who still runs it). She doesn't rule on contracts they're vying for though; she delegates that to her direct underlings. The very definition of Conflict of Interest.
Yeah, screw Obamacare! We were so much better off when Dubya shipped over pallets of hundred dollar bills to Iraq. Twelve Billion of which promptly vanished into thin air. USA! USA! USA!
Sorry, but investing in education does not equal to throwing away billions and let it splashed into the ocean just like that.
Sure it does. The purpose of the program is education -- education of the scientists, engineers, and technicians trying to understand hypersonic flight. That's why the craft has no economic payload: It's crammed full of sensors and telemetry equipment to educate its designers and builders on its performance. And they're learning: Note that "It appears that the engineering changes put into place following the vehicle's first flight test in April 2010 were effective."
Look at it this way: Think of all the term papers, exam pages, and homework assignments generated by the billion grade school students around the world. Except for the occasional bit kept in a scrapbook, they're all turned in, graded, and go right to a landfill. Would you say that was "throwing away billions"? Probably not, because the students (we hope) learned something from doing the task, and the paper was just the investment needed to get that return. It's the same here -- except that Nature is the teacher.
We are in wars with people that classically never give up, a literal quagmire like we got into in the Viet Nam era.
No we're not. You should better understand the players before you comment. The FACT of the matter is, most the players which caused us to enter the region are dead.
Terrorism is the perfect boogieman, you can scare the people with it into giving up anything, and you never have a "foe" that you defeat and end your precious war.
Its the same as the war on drugs - which everyone always seems to forget. The war on drugs literally, directly creates and empowers slavery, sex trade, murder, destruction, and massive levels of illegal drugs.
Don't think so? We have thug cops feeling up children and grandmothers for weapons in our Airports.
Don't forget thug cops and federal troops literally entering old lady's homes and stealing their property; including firearms. Though thankfully, that hasn't happened since the last large scale natural disaster here in the US.
What else is there to eat?
If the Ju-Ju had meant us not to eat people,
He wouldn't have made us of meat!
(Flanders & Swann, the Reluctant Cannibal, circa 1957.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I believe Arthur C Clark said something to the effect of
"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."
While Hypersonic flight does have some pretty high hurtles, I would wager its completely possible. We've only been really flying for about 100 years, and going into space for about 60 years. To think we've reached the apex of whats possible is laughable.
Mpls/St.Paul got their entire freeway fixed because of that program. A full 10+ miles of 94 between downtowns was ripped up and re-paved, and many of the bridges along it fixed. Even longer stretches outside the cities were fixed/impoved as well.
I dont care if it worked out to $280k a person, the 6" gravel gap between concrete lanes that formed over the years is gone. The 4 inch deep 6 foot long potholes that made the highway feel like a warzone are gone. The dangerous on-ramps now have their own merge lanes.
Lucky you. They repaved several of our roads and now they are FAR WORSE OFF than before they ripped them half up and added less asphalt back on than they took off. You know something is wrong when you have to also LOWER THE CURBS cause you've taken off so much more than you put back on.
They didn't even put enough back on to cover up the rows they cut into it to make the new asphalt stick better. I'd much rather they just burned the money in a fire than fucked up all our exist roads that were perfectly fine (okay, a couple of potholes, but far better than they are now!)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Am I the only one who looks at this and sees a payload delivery system, and not a quick ride for the man who just has to be in Asia in 58 minutes!
Did they actually grind down the curbs to match the road level? Normally they lay it down in two layers, a few weeks apart; so the first layer will be 1/2" lower than the curbs, to make room for the 2nd. If they never put down the 2nd layer, then thats shoddy work.
Well, ideally we'd look at every possible use we could find for the money and spend it on the best one, but unfortunately for us we don't have a "superhuman dictator" who can see the future to work out where the best payoff is. We've just got to rely on what we know about what's happened in the past and go from there.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Quite right. Our problem at the moment, though, is that governments have appointed themselves to the 'superhuman dictator' role (von Mises's term, not mine) when their track record of predictions has proven to be quite poor. At least spreading that money out over a vast populous ensures the good ideas won't get neglected, even if some of the poor ones get malinvestments too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
HT-2 managed ~three minutes of controlled flight at _Mach 20_. THAT'S the pudding. The rest is washing up.
I'll bet there are uses for this when we get to other (exo)planets. Seems like the aero-pneumo-dynamics will be transferable, or at least, the experience of how to design for extreme atmospherics.