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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.'"
You're right! We should absolutely stop funding innovation and new technologies! What the hell have scientific advances ever done for us?
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
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
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.
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.
Yah, I thought it was pretty crazy when they went straight from Mach3 to Mach5. My question is,"How do they get 20 blades on a razor? Does it look like a chisel or something?"
God spoke to me
Mach 20 isn't really exotic in this context: don't think of it as a plane; it's more like a Reentry Vehicle for an ICBM warhead. The innovation is instead of following a ballistic trajectory (perhaps with minor maneuvering with an RCS), it glides aerodynamically. That gives it considerably more maneuverability, which would let it drop a bunch of bombs along the way, retarget late in flight, evade countermeasures like a fox, and perhaps even work as a rapid-deployment surveillance platform.
As far as air breathing aircraft go, we haven't progressed very well since the late 60s / early 70s. In that era, we came up with the Concorde (Mach 2 supercruise), and the SR-71 (Mach 3 on an engine that's built like a turbojet with reheat, but effectively operates as a ramjet at cruise speed). For practical aircraft, that's the best we've ever done. Prototypes like the X-43 and X-51 are pushing it farther, but they're only running a couple minutes at a time so far. Sustained flight at those speeds is really hard, so the Falcon's approaching it from the other end: bringing down the speed of a rocket-boosted vehicle instead of trying to raise the speed of an air-breather.
Unfortunately it's mostly a military toy since it's rocket-launched. Few peaceful applications are going to want to pay for an IRBM or ICBM per-use. The most we'll get out of it is knowledge about how to fly at these speeds which may come in handy if we get a practical scramjet working.
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.