http://www.news.com.au/technology/hypersonic-test-vehicle-falcon-goes-missing-on-test-flight-darpa-admits/story-e6frfro0-1225859603159
http://www.news.com.au/technology/at-mach-20-is-the-falcon-hypersonic-technology-vehicle-2-a-faster-aurora/story-e6frfro0-1225858242469
Is there even any point in asking how much this little failure cost?
THE US has admitted its top-secret military prototype "Falcon" glider went missing on its test flight last week.
US military scientists lost contact with the unmanned Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) nine minutes into its inaugural test flight, AFP reported.
The HTV-2 was launched last week aboard a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The HTV-2 is designed to fly through the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere at speeds of up to Mach 20, providing the US military with a possible platform for striking targets anywhere on the planet with conventional weapons.
The test flight called for a 30-minute mission in which the vehicle would glide at high speed before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, north of a US military test site at the Kwajalein Atoll.
The glider separated from the booster but soon after the signal vanished, a spokeswoman said.
"Preliminary review of data indicates the HTV-2 achieved controlled flight within the atmosphere at over Mach 20. Then contact with HTV-2 was lost," Johanna Spangenberg Jones, a spokeswoman for DARPA, said.
"This was our first flight (all others were done in wind tunnels and simulations) so although of course we would like to have everything go perfectly, we still gathered data and can use findings for the next flight, scheduled currently for early 2011," she said.
