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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.'"
We are many trillions in debt, people are without jobs, living in the streets, our bridges are falling apart, our infrastructure is that of a 3rd world country, the economy is tanking... but oh, we've ALWAYS got money enough for the military.
Maybe we need to stop spending money on this crap that doesn't even work.
it's clearly an unproven mess, evidenced by the apparent need for even more deceptive distracting sideshow style theatrics by our rulers & the chosen ones' miniontic neogods arrogance.
should it not be considered that the domestic threats to all of us/our
freedoms perpetrated by unsavory megalomaniacs be intervened on/removed, so we wouldn't be compelled to hide our
sentiments, &/or the truth, about ANYTHING, including the origins of the
hymenology council, & their sacred mission? with nothing left to hide,
there'd be room for so much more genuine quantifiable progress?
you call this 'weather'? much of our land masses/planet are going under
water, or burning up, as we fail to consider anything at all that really
matters, as we've been instructed that we must maintain our silence (our
last valid right?), to continue our 'safety' from... mounting terror.
meanwhile, back at the raunch; there are exceptions? the unmentionable
sociopath weapons peddlers are thriving in these times of worldwide
sufferance? the royals? our self appointed murderous neogod rulers? all
better than ok, thank..... us. their stipends/egos/disguises are secure,
so we'll all be ok/not killed by mistaken changes in the MANufactured
'weather', or being one of the unchosen 'too many' of us, etc...?
truth telling & disarming are the only mathematically & spiritually
correct options. read the teepeeleaks etchings. see you there?
diaperleaks group worldwide.
ahab the arab's 'funniest' home vdo; http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0bb_1312569503
North Korea must be going ", " (oh shit!) about right now.
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
i can't tell
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/
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!
$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 )
Well, it's a relief that it isn't still buzzing around up there.
Scientists confirm "we were just going too fucking fast".
Robot tries to copy move, gets out-FALCON PAWNCHED by the original.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.