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Hypersonic Test Aircraft Peeled Apart After 3 Minutes of Sustained Mach 20 Speed
coondoggie writes "DARPA's experimental Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2), lost significant portions of its outer skin and became uncontrollable after three minutes of sustained Mach 20 speed last August. That was the conclusion of an independent engineering review board investigating the cause of what DARPA calls a 'flight anomaly' in the second test flight of the HTV-2. Quoting the report: 'The resulting gaps created strong, impulsive shock waves around the vehicle as it traveled nearly 13,000 miles per hour, causing the vehicle to roll abruptly. Based on knowledge gained from the first flight in 2010 and incorporated into the second flight, the vehicle's aerodynamic stability allowed it to right itself successfully after several shockwave-induced rolls. Eventually, however, the severity of the continued disturbances finally exceeded the vehicle's ability to recover.'"
Success is only skin deep
Table-ized A.I.
...so take off all your... skin?
Right. Glad you grasped the point of the project so well, and didn't try to wedge in some off-topic nonsense.
The technology exhibited here is completely independent of the fuel source on which it runs. Your comment misses the point.
This is slashdot. The only point of comments now is off-topic nonsense, hopefully modded 'informative'
650 miles in 3 minutes? I'm SO there!
As a person who flies hypersonic aircraft for a living this is notable on several layers.
1. They did a test and it went far past hypersonic (M5).
2. They achieved M20, altitude adjusted
3. All that happened after 3 minutes is the materials failed
4. It lasted 3 minutes!
To me this is a stupendous success.
I am a hyper-critic of most of the hypersonic tests we all hear about.
Spend more money on this.
JJ
They only need to achieve 39 more minutes of flight time and they'll match the range of a 787!
... get one's velocity going so fast one's skin gets ripped off...
James Han and Leigh Whannell are probably working on the plot right now...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And scientifically, it went around 750 miles in 3 minutes. In an atmosphere. That's a pretty damn awesome piece of engineering.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Isn't that close to reentry speed? What did they expect? If we had a cheap, durable, stable material that could stand up to that for any length of time we would have used it on the Space Shuttles and maybe kept them flying for another 10 years.
That's the point of DARPA. To figure out how to answer these sorts of questions.
Yes. Science and engineering are often advanced by never doing anything you are not absolutely certain will work perfectly.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
When you say the fuel source doesn't matter, are you referrring to sustaining speeds of Mach 20, or to the plane's Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly feature?
So what the fuck is the alternative, then? Do you really want it to be nuclear-powered? Is that really what you want? Because I know you'd be among the first to bitch and moan when the same thing happens during the next trial, and then there's goddamn uranium or plutonium raining down all over the place.
No, solar power won't work in this case. No, wind power won't work in this case. No, hydro power won't work in this case. No, tidal power won't work in this case. No, burning hydrogen won't work in this case. No, burning coal won't work in this case. No, burning wood won't work in this case. No, you peddling your ass off on a bicycle won't work in this case. None of these other energy sources will work.
So I'll ask you again, WHAT THE FUCK IS THE ALTERNATIVE?
Mass driver tech can accelerate buckets at 5000m/sec^2. Buckets using this hypersonic tech, a 6 km mass driver in a very high place, say Tibet, and we could chuck stuff into orbit at 1/100th the current cost.
Am I missing something, or should we start construction?
Except for the fact it runs on hydrogen peroxide and methanol. Plus, I'm given to understand the proposed full scale version would run on hydrogen slush and LOX.... aka rocket fuel.
IMHO, this was not a failure, just another step forward. We learned something useful, to be explored/applied next.
Good job, folks! Keep moving forward....
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
FTA
The HTV-2 could fly anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes.
What the fucking fuck that's fast.
To compare, the space station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes.
Sounds like a really tough design problem. Congrats to any engineer who comes up with a solution to this. He could become famous.
And while they're busy doing that they often manage to put on one hell of a show:
* this effort
* the autonomous vehicle DARPA Challenge
* other random bits that we read about
* certainly other random bits we have no idea about, but I bet they're cool!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Hopefully this kind of project continues in DARPA instead of shifting their focus to non-research projects now that the ex-director has gone to Google .
I realize that any scientific endeavour has merit and I recognize that the first jet achieving super-sonic speeds was monumentous and led to a lot of break-throughs in a lot of areas.
But Mach 20? Really? Does it really serve a purpose other than finding out that we can push the limits of things?
I know I'm probably coming off as ignorant but I'm not necessarily saying this project doesn't have a noble purpose. I'm just asking what it is exactly...
To figure out how to question all these sorts of answers. Fixed that for you.
If you tasked me with that, I would have, Oh, I dunno... heated with a torch, or in a kiln with a weight on it to see whether or not it would turn to jelly. You know. Something a bit cheaper. You're telling me that building an actual test aircraft was the only way?
The article doesn't give any background on ho this was achieved, what for etc. I'd like to read more about it.
If advanced planes work perfectly, we will never get a Bionic Man.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Scientifically that's awesome, but practically... couldn't you achieve the same kind of speed by popping into LEO?
I am wondering which would be more practical for one of the obvious end uses of this product, namely making the Concorde look more like a turtle.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
640mi (in 3 min) should be enough for anyone.
So just slow it to Mach 19.7.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Unless they are able to sustain an localized electromagnetic field to dampen and thus disperse such large force vectors on the surface of the object traveling and such high rates of speed what's the point?
And scientifically, it went around 750 miles in 3 minutes. In an atmosphere. That's a pretty damn awesome piece of engineering.
Meteors do that every day. And, they have the same end result.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Unobtainium
Here's the actual press release (which Network World just cut-and-pasted): http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/04/20.aspx
Science and engineering are often advanced by never doing anything you are not absolutely certain will work perfectly.
/. articles should have this as the first comment.
Many, many
It seems we have completely forgotten the words 'trial and error', and 'that's interesting...'
If you can go that fast in an atmosphere, you can use an air-breathing engine to get you most of the way to LEO...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This close to the bleeding edge, definitely. We have better models and more teraflops to run them than ever before, but real breakthroughs come from unexpected, unintuitive results. Remember how hard it was for most engineers to believe that mere foam could bash in a shuttle wing - until they fired an actual piece of foam at an actual leading-edge panel?
Flying real hardware is still the only way to conclusively
1. Learn Something (if it has problems) or
2. Silence the critics (if it works fine).
IMHO, while a good number of aerospace contracts can be criticized for either being pork or thinly veiled airliner-maker subsidies, that should be focused on those never producing an instrumented flight.
Point taken. There are other fuels. Frozen methane, ammonia come to mind. There are rocket scientists, chemists, and propulsion engineers who make their living on this stuff.
No, no, see risk-taking with no guarantee of success is all fine and well for you or I, but if it's the Ebil Big Gub'mint taking risks and doing cool stuff, it's a Waste Of Taxpayer Money, and therefore Very Bad.
I fly unmanned hypersonic aircraft. I would call these rockets spacecraft except they don't go to space.
I and nobody else flies "in" them. The temperatures are too high.
Even SS1 had a peak velocity of altitude adjusted 240 knots at sea level.
The goal here is a 1 hour to target RPV. Not a passenger aircraft and not Fedex to China. This is a military thing. Rediculous cost.
BTW you can see my M5 "aircraft" on the web anytime you want. Search for 152mm rocket in the USA. The 229mm one goes faster and the 457mm "can be manned", albiet not hypersonic. Just well above supersonic.
JJ
You have to get to similar speeds just to get to a low orbit in the first place, so your suggestion is not practical.
There goes another monkey in the name of science! I hope the pilot managed to stay in one piece......
What's even cooler, that speed is close to orbital speed. So with little additional thrust this plane can make it into orbit!
We have no other viable, practical, abundant energy source. Yes, these projects are "relics" of the energy-rich Space Age, and in a hundred years will seem magical to the low-energy, animal-powered society of the future. And no, science fiction is not a valid counterpoint to the reality of our energy situation. There will not be Moon-mined He3 fusion generators or space-based solar arrays. Ever.
I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the problem was not due to the material in terms of heat dissipation, but structural integrity. This doesn't sound like a materials issue.
Even better, the same technology that lets you fly in atmosphere at such extreme speeds would likely aid reentry, wouldn't it?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why is this story breaking on Nerdwork, sorry I mean Network world?
It seems like the legitimate channels can't get far enough away from being associated with this "breakthrough" development.
There is a difference between risk-taking and idiotic action paths.
Yes, you can. But I suspect that it will be more than a 10-15 years before that tech will be allowed to do that.
You can also replace ICBMs with this for a fraction of the costs. And it can be dropped from a plane or a ship anywhere we want.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Any target, anywhere on earth, within less than an hour, without condemning the attack missle to a predictable and easily observable flight path in orbit. (Compare that to the pathetic "threat" of a North Korean satellite launch.)
Science it ain't.
AC, they designed it to withstand those temps and act differently to the thin atmosphere. That is why they used the wave rider tech. Obviously, it needs refinement. Still, it did survive up to mach 10 just fine. It was somewhere past that, that it starts to fall apart.
As to not trying this, you have to be a fucking idiot to think that we should not try this. It is from this test ride that they figured out what issues they had.
And if you think that scientists and engineers should not test things, I believe that you are on the wrong site. Go try 'mbas_that_screw_the_world.com'.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And while they're busy doing that they often manage to put on one hell of a show:
* this effort
* the autonomous vehicle DARPA Challenge
* other random bits that we read about
* certainly other random bits we have no idea about, but I bet they're cool!
-nB
also..
* the fucking Internet
you kids these days need to learn your history
The only practical way to obtain hypersonic speeds is to go suborbital, and that really enters the realm of rockets as heat shields are very heavy.
I think the developers of the SR-71 could have predicted these failures. The SR-71 _only_ went Mach 4 or so, at altitudes of greater than 60,000 feet or so. And at full speed the plane was so hot that pilots couldn't touch the canopy of the cockpit (I think the skin temps were at least a 1000 degrees pick your unit) and the plane lengthened by some considerable amount. To handle those speeds special materials were developed and required, which we haven't really exceeded to this day. Given the temperatures produced at Mach 20 in an atmosphere, even thin (think rocket reentry), building control surfaces and heat shields light enough to actually fly is very very difficult, if not impossible. The shuttle had heat tiles to withstand the atmospheric heating but hey were somewhat heavy and the shuttle didn't really fly during reentry so much as plow through the air belly down until the shuttle slowed down to lower mach numbers and in thicker air. And the failure of any heat shield at these Mach numbers will always lead to total destruction of the vehicle as this test and the Columbia tragedy proved.
All this said, having materials that could allow a craft to actually fly under under such conditions as reentry poses would actually be a real boon to space flight I think, but I doubt we will ever find materials that can provide this.
We can always go for hydro. May kill off a few rivers worth of fisn and destroy some ecosystems, but hey, if that what it takes for me to get cheap electricity for my job, TV and car, it'd be worth it.
Why do that when you can just sandblast them?
Are you saying that meteors start at a much lower velocity, then accelerates to those speeds before falling apart? And that they're engineered?
And while they're busy doing that they often manage to put on one hell of a show: * this effort * the autonomous vehicle DARPA Challenge * other random bits that we read about * certainly other random bits we have no idea about, but I bet they're cool! -nB
also.. * the fucking Internet
you kids these days need to learn your history
Al Gore worked for DARPA?
Regina Dugan recently did a TED talk in which she says The only way to learn to fly is to fly. Great stuff.
And while it sounds stupidly reasonable, it really is true that you cannot learn how to fly without flying, just like you cannot learn how to walk without walking, swim without swimming or speak without speaking.
Yet it always amazes me just how many people fails to understand such simple premises when it comes to science. They seem to think that failures aren't science and that nothing is learned from them.
But if you then ask them about gravity, they'll almost always talk about Newton, yet if you point out that Newton got it wrong (mostly right, but still wrong), they will invariably tell you "that's different".
ICBM systems are sunk costs. Some possible salvage value as booster stages, but basically the money is gone. Better to keep them functioning lest someone try to collect on our debt.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You realize it was boosted to speed on a conventional rocket? Don't mistake an aerodynamic testbed for a working vehicle.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks. ARPANET became the technical core of what would become the Internet, and a primary tool in developing the technologies used.
First ARPANET IMP log: the first message ever sent via the ARPANET, 10:30 PM, October 29, 1969
The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990
Senator Albert Gore, Jr. began to craft the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (commonly referred to as "The Gore Bill") after hearing the 1988 report toward a National Research Network submitted to Congress by a group chaired by Leonard Kleinrock, professor of computer science at UCLA. The bill was passed on December 9, 1991 and led to the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Al Gore called the "information superhighway".
A potential turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill.
The Internet was commercialized in 1995 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html
to be peeled would that make sense economicalistically? durrr....
You're retarded. Given enough electricity a chemist can make hydrocarbons all day long.
I recall having heard that a majority of flight testing for vehicles such as the B-2 and F-117 was conducted in digital windtunnels, before any physical vehicles were constructed for actual flight tests. Considering that, I wonder if the HTV project is not using similar testing? or if the existing areodynamic modeling techniques might not apply, at hypersonic speeds? (Or maybe it's something completely different...)
In theory, yes. The type of design (a "waverider") places the hypersonic shockwave directly beneath the vehicle. Basically, you're surfing the shockwave. This reduces the stresses involved, improves stability and should allow considerably more control than could be achieved with the space shuttle (you have sufficient lift from a waverider to glide). Waveriders do have disadvantages - most designs only work at specific speeds, the wings have a habit of frying and they rely on cooling by radiation (only effective at high altitude).
Old wisdom on waveriders:
http://research.lifeboat.com/surf.htm
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/waverider/waverider.shtml
Published theory:
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v79/v79-79.pdf
http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~mason/Mason_f/ConfigAeroHypersonics.pdf
Multi-speed waveriders:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x75nh2154nuh5464/
Amateur waverider research:
http://www.gbnet.net/orgs/staar/waveriders.html
NB: The STAAR group beat NASA and the US DoD to the first working waverider airfoil, as noted on their site. Perhaps NASA's problem with their current design is that they're not threatening the engineers with bagpipe music.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Research costs are always high. However, in principle, a basic waverider with a hydrogen-powered scramjet aught to be a lot cheaper than an ICBM (hydrogen being a much cheaper fuel, and 100% of the vehicle is reusable).
Note - that's in principle. Practice rarely pays much attention to theory. A space elevator would be nice, too, as would a pony.
The biggest problem is that the hypersonic craft was NASA's last shot at this for a while. The last time the test craft was covered, it was stated that the project is terminated. Kaput. (In short, in about the same shape as NASA's blended wing body passenger aircraft, whose sheer size would have made the Airbus 400 look like a unicycle.) NASA hasn't the funds to see projects to completion any more. That wouldn't be a total loss, if the data collected was made available. But, no, this sort of stuff is kept under very heavy wraps. Nothing learned will be made available to anyone, the research will get redone by others at massive expense (and possible loss of life), and all to stop those nations who could never build such a vehicle anyway from scoring a PR coup. ie: it's politics. It's not even military, it's politics.
Ok, correction, then. The biggest problem is that we have politicians.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not only we.
The recent rise in article retractions (calling it "fraud" is too general, but that's one of the reasons) is also caused by this change in attitude.
See, we don't expect interesting stuff from science anymore. We expect marketable results. Getting something else than you set out to find means that marketing, product management and everyone else down the line has to re-tool and, more importantly, re-think and we can't have that. We already printed the packaging and filmed the TV spots!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yet it always amazes me just how many people fails to understand such simple premises when it comes to science. They seem to think that failures aren't science and that nothing is learned from them.
But if you then ask them about gravity, they'll almost always talk about Newton, yet if you point out that Newton got it wrong (mostly right, but still wrong), they will invariably tell you "that's different".
That's unhelpful. Newton's work on gravitation was based on a lot of previous work by other scientists over a long time; experimental work, observational work and theoretical work. Newton was the guy who first pulled it all together into a coherent framework, but he couldn't have done it without Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, probably many others. What replaced Newtonian dynamics? Relativity (which reduces to a damn good approximation to Newtonian for most everyday activity) and that was Einstein building on a lot of work of others again (particularly Maxwell, Lorentz, Michelson, Morley, and especially Riemann, and Eddington was important in confirming GR) some of whom were definitely experimentalists.
All of that really just goes to show that science has always been about building on the work of others. There's no problem at all for some people to be theoreticians (they tend to be the ones to come up with ideas to unify areas) but you still need plenty of experimenters and observationalists too to tell the theory guys where it is worthwhile doing something and to check that the results of the theory apply to reality. Scientific theory, like computer programming (or anything else highly abstract), can easily slip into GIGO.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
That's part of the point. A working scramjet, if it can have sufficient payload, may be a much more effecient way into orbit.
If you intend for something to leave earth orbit in the outbound direction, that's pretty much your only option. Both voyager missions and most other planet flybys are nuclear powered.
I can't see why NASA is supposed to spend the money since they should be a research and development agency, not a design house. If it is backed by the Government, they can put a tender directly out to the producers via DoT or Army (the real big space programme of US). Similarly, if a company sees that there's a future, they can licence the tech from NASA and build their own aircrafts. I don't understand why it has to be the NASA funding and operating everything end to end.
"...lost significant portions of its outer skin..."
So were the forces involved higher than expected in the design, or was this a manufacturing defect? Seems like the key question is "why did the skin peel off", not "why did it lose stability".
We are the 198 proof..
Like http://www.v-serv.com/usr/motors/images.rr152-40960.htm ?
So.. you launch model rockets. One could even say you fly model rockets. Or even, you launch rockets. You don't fly hypersonic aircraft. Way to be misleading there, buddy. Completely unnecessarily, too; being involved in rocketry, at an amateur or professional level, is laudable enough as it is.
As the hypersonic craft demonstrated so well, there is a vast gulf between what theory says could be done and what can actually be done in practice. The only way to know is to build.
Secondly, and more importantly for NASA, something like a BWB airliner could perform high altitude research currently impossible because no conventional aircraft has the lift capacity or the space availability. NASA use aircraft extensively in research, but are usually stuck with aircraft wholly unsuited to what they want to do.
Finally, and most importantly of all, NASA Langley IS a design house for aviation. LaRC is also where NASA began and what a key part of NASA is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, if by propellant you mean the oxygen content in the atmosphere, than sure.
There seems to be some crabby-old-man effect that takes over on internet message boards
Doesn't matter if it's LED lightbulbs, electric cars, or stuff like this, there's never any shortage of angry cynical types ready to whine about how the technlogy isn't perfect, doesn't perform 100% how things they are used to perform, costs too much, etc..
Enough allready, we get it Mr. internet cynic, you aren't as nearly as smart or interesting or original as you imagine yourself...
It is a craft that flies through a medium that we all call air on a regular basis, I don't see the problem here. I assumed he meant high-powered rockets in the first place.
The hive mind disagrees:
"An aircraft is a vehicle that is able to fly by gaining support from the air, or, in general, the atmosphere of a planet. It counters the force of gravity by using either static lift or by using the dynamic lift of an airfoil, or in a few cases the downward thrust from jet engines.[1]
Although rockets and missiles also travel through the atmosphere, most are not considered aircraft because they do not have wings and rely on rocket thrust as the primary means of lift."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft
You have to get to similar speeds just to get to a low orbit in the first place, so your suggestion is not practical.
Well yes, that's true. I read and really enjoyed the insights I got from the above responses.
I try to think of it in terms of like... I don't know, cost/benefit ratio? I know factoring in "costs" in R&D is really shitty, I do, but if I had to say whether or not NASA should develop a cleaner atmosphere-to-space propulsion or Mach 20 in-atmosphere propulsion, I'd say the former. We can already get to space - what if we could do it without rocket fuel?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
You are getting confused by thinking that they can be one or the other and not the same thing. Think of things like scramjets as an airbreathing second stage rocket that saves around half the fuel mass (more if hydrogen is the fuel instead of a hydrocarbon) and lets you use that mass for payload instead.
The costs for this research have actually been trivial and have had spinoffs of possibly even greater value (hypersonic shock tunnels etc), although I'm biased because NASA helped pay for a bit of my engineering degree in the 1980s because scramjet research was going on in the same building.
Of great importance to the ICBM people is readiness. A vehicle that needs to be fueled (no cryogenic fuel can be stored in the vehicle) is unacceptable to them. That's why ICBMs like Titan II use nitric acid and aniline.