Ready for a 12 minute flight from New York to Los Angeles? Well, those daring guys at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are about to launch Falcon HTV-2 — an arrow-shaped aircraft that will travel 20 times the speed of sound today.
The Force Application and Launch from Continental United States (FALCON) project craft will be launched on a rocket and then glide at hypersonic speeds of 13,000 mph through the Earth’s atmosphere. The problem? The in-flight movie can be no longer than a Sponge Bob episode and the baggage fees are out of this world.
Source: Parabolic as first seen on Reddit.
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ut oh!
“The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”
Ouch! i fore see a ping!
I figured the only falcon that was infalible and thick was dead! In the end we all die:) Even the mighty virile thick powerful Falcons:) Thats why its good to say goodbye so you remember them in their prime:)
Given the extreme hypersonic nature of the vehicle, my first thought was whether the communication antenna may have been damaged by the heat. Just designing an antenna system that could withstand the speed would be a real engineering feat.
Maybe it crashed long long ago and they just reported it today:)
pardon me?,
That is bad news. I don’t care about the bomb delivery aspects of the platform though. We already have the capacity to end human life on Earth. I was more interested in the potential application of the technologies developed from the platform as they could apply to future single stage to orbit vehicles. Maybe they’ll be able to retrieve the craft and get the telemetry from the on-board systems.
DARPA loses contact:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139538880/darpa-loses-contact-with-experimental-hypersonic-glider?sc=fb&cc=fp
puzzling,
I thought Prof. Turley’s article that you linked was an excellent one. I for one have not given up on the system and its ability to correct its errors. I still have some of that idealism that you spoke about.
Pete-
What happens if the sonic boom collapses every lung in the USA on its first test flight? Maybe the “End of the World” dingbats were right. Oy Veh!