Radical hypersonic glider vanishes above Pacific Some details are beginning to emerge regarding the failure of an advanced US military hypersonic glider test above the Pacific last week. However, a complete picture of what happened to the HTV-2 test platform may never appear, as communications with it were lost early in the flight. DARPA concept of the HTV-2 manoeuvring in …
The sharp-edged delta shaped carbon-carbon airframe, it was hoped, would resist the terrific heat of hypersonic flight much better than previous materials, though it would still burn away to some degree - losing perhaps an inch or two from the leading edges.......or in this case the whole lot. Oh well back to the drawing board!
"The parallel X-51 WaveRider scramjet project, intended to deliver hypersonic jet engines able to run on normal-ish hydrocrabon fuel rather than troublesome hydrogen, has been delayed into this year."
Perhaps they should start researching hydroCARBON fuels instead - they'll no doubt have much more luck finding that.
It's unfortunate, but an inevitable result of trying bleeding-edge stuff is that things don't work out, such as this. Now, it's a matter of finding out what they can, try to determine what went wrong, and work from there. They'll probably bust up another two or three before getting something reasonably close to a success.
Perhaps they need an English inventor to suggest that they add a camera to the booster nose and then when they release the hypersonic glider, they then follow the glider down while visually recording the flight. In that way they would also have secondary confirmation of what they are recording from the glider's on-board systems. If they had done that, they would have seen what happened. There, job done by an Englishman.
"Approximately 9 minutes into the mission, telemetry assets experienced a loss of signal from the HTV-2. An engineering team is reviewing available data to understand this event."
After six weeks and $372,000 we have concluded the review. We now understand that the loss of signal was due to the fact that it stopped transmitting.
Last week, I was outside having a pre bedtime benson & hedges watching the night sky as I like to do - living in New Zealand a with the lesser night pollution means you get to see to some cool stuff like the milky way 'cloud', meteors and satellites - last week when a burst of red light (circular in shape) popped in the night sky for half a second.
Now I can't remember what night it was,have no clue whether launch times and flight-plan sync up or what a hypersonic vehicle burning up looks like etc, but if it was DARPA's new toy going bang - nice lightshow guys. Do it again!
It seems *every* hypersonic project they try to get into the air is known as Falcon (or FALCON depending if they thought up a really neat acronym). EG the orbital launcher they were planning to use LOX injection into the intakes of a jet fighter to get it up to speed and altitude for an expendable 2nd stage.
Isn't the American national bird the Eagle?
F16 Fighting Falcon...And..
Falcon, the callsign for Apollo15's Lunar Module... And...
Elon Musks, SpaceX, Falcon1 and Falcon9.. And..
Dr Falcon in the War games Movie... ok that was Falken..
Must be some new concept of security through obscurity, whereby anyone searching the web for the new falcon gets the old crap...
Maybe they are trying for the largest disambiguation page on Wikiworldofwonders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_(disambiguation)
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