back to article 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 …

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  1. Annihilator
    Coat

    "may never know what happened"

    I know! I know! It fell out of the sky, right?

  2. Doug Glass
    Go

    Disappeared???

    You mean cloaked.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Hydrocrabon?

    "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."

    I for one welcome this new crustacean based fuel type

  4. Ministry of Truth
    Unhappy

    If I...

    ...lost an inch or two from my leading edge every time I re-entered...

    1. Liam Johnson

      No Problem

      You will not have a problem as long are you remain subsonic...

  5. DI_Wyman
    Pint

    Hope

    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!

  6. OffBeatMammal

    Lost

    wonder what the flight number was...

  7. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Carbon fibre?

    They should have used paper. Wait till PARIS touches down, and flog 'em that concept.

    Simples!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Hydrocrabon fuel?

    Must be powered by my wife during those "water retention" times...

    AC because the wife reads TheReg too...

  9. Alex 79
    FAIL

    Must be looking for the wrong fuel

    "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.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    C......C......Co2...!

    can't C the point really....

    crash n burn baby

  11. JohnG
    Alien

    Aliens

    The aliens have it.

  12. Charles 9
    Go

    Back to the drawing board.

    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.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Lost?

    Did it "lose contact", or just decide to quit transmitting to it's meat-based overseers and become the first orbital observation platform for an emergent Skynet?

  14. Adrian Esdaile
    FAIL

    Unfortunately,

    the scientists had neglected to file a flight plan.

    10 Internet Points to the person who gets THAT reference! This will show who reads the Classics.

    1. MrPatrick

      Catch 22?

      Catch 22?

  15. TK

    Ummmm

    Shouldn't that fancy shmancy missile shield have been able to pick it up on re-entry and shot it down?

  16. the bat
    Thumb Up

    Worm Hole

    STL jump!

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Backyard Yo

    This shit is in my backyard, took out my chicken shed and has increased the frequency of alien anal probes in the neighbourhood.

    What gives!

  18. Chris Coles

    Why not follow it down with the booster following behind to record the flight?

    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.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Review:

    "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.

  20. HRH Martin

    I think I may have seen it's final moments (or maybe not)

    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!

  21. Will Shaw
    WTF?

    Hmmmm.....

    Launching intercontinental ballistic missiles from miltary bases on trajectories overflying potentially unfriendly countries?

    What could possibly go wrong?

  22. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    FAIL

    What is it with DARPA and Falcon

    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?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Badgers

      Excess Falconism...

      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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