U.S. military loses contact with experimental aircraft

[SpArK]

U.S. military loses contact with experimental aircraft​

Thu Aug. 11 2011 9:42:37 PM

CTV News.ca Staff

An experimental aircraft touted as the fastest plane ever built failed a test flight Thursday, according to officials with the Pentagon.

The Falcon HTV-2 is an unmanned aircraft that can travel about 20 times the speed of sound, or about 21,000 kilometres per hour. With that speed, it could deliver a nuclear warhead to any point on Earth within 60 minutes.

The aircraft's designer, the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), had tracked the test on its Twitter feed.

DARPA officials launched the HTV-2 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early Thursday morning. It was taken to its ascent into the atmosphere on a rocket, where it was then supposed to detach and glide at hypersonic speeds to the Pacific Ocean.

But DARPA appeared to have lost contact during the glide phase of the test.

"Range assets have lost telemetry with #HTV2," the agency posted on Twitter.

Michael Belfiore, author of The Department of Mad Scientists, a book about DARPA, told CTV News Channel on Thursday that there was a good chance the agency would fail because it often takes on projects that are "almost impossible."

"They're supposed to fail and fail often," he said from Woodstock, N.Y. "Then once in a while they hit a home run."

Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, the DARPA HTV-2 program manager, said the agency has had difficulty controlling the HTV-2.

"Here's what we know," he said in a statement on the DARPA website. "We know how to boost the aircraft to near space. We know how to insert the aircraft into atmospheric hypersonic flight. We do not yet know how to achieve the desired control during the aerodynamic phase of flight. It's vexing; I'm confident there is a solution. We have to find it."

He added that DARPA would review data from Thursday's test flight and study what went wrong.

In order to travel at such a high rate of speed, the HTV-2 is able to withstand temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees Celsius -- hotter than the point at which steel melts.

Schulz called it an "incredibly harsh flight regime. As today's flight indicates, high-Mach flight in the atmosphere is virtually uncharted territory."

Belfiore said that this project could have broader applications.

"We could have aircraft that could carry people or cargo at this speed and that would really change transportation," he said, adding that DARPA is close in succeeding.

"I think that within the next five years they're going to end up with a vehicle if they continue with this program, that can combine propulsion and an airframe that can handle that," he said.

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