Falcon has its wings clipped in hypersonic glide test

by Stevie Smith - Apr 27 2010, 09:59

After making the news last week via its mysterious X37-B space plane, the U.S. Air Force is back amongst the headlines after launching – and promptly losing – its unmanned experimental Falcon hypersonic glider.

The Falcon, or the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) as it’s also known, launched aboard a Minotaur 4-Lite rocket on Thursday on a test mission designed to propel it into the planet’s upper atmosphere before then gliding across the Pacific at speeds up to 13,000 mph (almost Mach 20).

However, according to a statement released on Friday by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), contact with the Falcon was severed approximately nine minutes into its flight when “telemetry assets experienced a loss of signal.”

DARPA has said an engineering team is already working to review all available data gathered from the failed flight in order to better understand why the vehicle was lost so early.

If it had completed its full flight, the Falcon should have travelled 4,000 miles from the launch site in around 30 minutes, before entering a controlled crash into the sea 2,000 miles south-west of Hawaii.

With the Lockhed Martin-made vehicle now officially lost, the military’s Falcon programme has only one other HTV-2 craft remaining.

It is believed that the hypersonic gliding technology utilised during the test is a possible precursor to a change in how future long-range missiles will be delivered – enabling the U.S. to hit any target on the planet at vastly improved speeds.

Around the Web