[meteorite-list] New hypersonic glider article

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:29:33 -0500
Message-ID: <57fbt5lkjbg478qeikhtpajjmn1bs88u23_at_4ax.com>

It sounds like the 13,000 miles per hour (around 5.8 km/s) speed is only during
the suborbital part of the flight, with impact speeds a much more believable
"mere" 3,600 miles per hour (around 1.6 km/s.)

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/26/falcon-hypersonic-missiles-project-aurora/

Military's Hypersonic Falcon Missile Test a Dud?

FOXNews.com

On the heels of last week's top-secret X37-B launch, the U.S. Air Force launched
-- and ultimately crashed -- an experimental hypersonic glider theoretically
capable of hitting Mach 20.

It was a watershed week for conspiracy theorists, with President Barack Obama
throwing his support behind several major upgrades to the country's
rapid-response strike capability.

On the heels of the top-secret X37-B launch, the U.S. Air Force launched an even
more secret experimental hypersonic glider able to travel more than 4,000 miles
in 30 minutes from launch. The craft -- dubbed the Falcon Hypersonic Technology
Vehicle 2 -- was launched via a Minotaur 4-Lite rocket Thursday from Vandenberg
Air Force Base, the Air Force announced.

Conspiracy theorists have long reported on a secret project known as "Aurora" --
a hypersonic spy plane capable of speeds up to Mach 6 (3,700 mph). The Falcon
seems to be the culmination of that project, but it's capable of much, much
more, according to a fact sheet from the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA).

The sheet explains that once the vehicle accelerates into the upper atmosphere,
it is designed to separate from its booster and glide across the Pacific at
around 13,000 mph, or nearly Mach 20.

The test vehicle launched last week reached Mach 5 on launch, and was designed
to crash and sink into the sea and sink near Kwajalein Atoll, 2,000 miles
south-west of Hawaii, 30 minutes later and 4,000 miles from the launch site.

But in a statement released Friday night, DARPA said that while ?the launch
vehicle executed first-of-its-kind energy management maneuvers, clamshell
payload fairing release and HTV-2 deployment,? all wasn't perfect with the
superfast craft. ?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.?

The DARPA press release did not specify whether any of the test maneuvers were
completed by the Lockheed Martin built craft before controllers lost
communications with the craft, the site adds.

In the real world, Project Aurora is called the "Prompt Global Strike (PGS)
program" and it's actually part of the President's solution to maintaining peace
in non-nuclear times. President Obama signed a treaty with Russian President
Dmitri Medvedev last week that put both countries on the path to full nuclear
disarmament.

However, the U.S. part of the agreement states that the country can replace
every decommissioned nuclear weapon with a PGS missile. Within a week of the
treaty being signed, Obama welcomed in the technology to make it possible.

And overnight, Obama announced he would support deploying a new class of
hypersonic missiles that could hit any target on Earth within an hour.

Depending on the version the Pentagon chooses, the warhead would either split
into dozens of lethal fragments in the final seconds of its flight or simply
smash into its target, relying on devastating kinetic energy to destroy anything
in its path reports the Times of London. As a precision weapon its effects would
be quite different from the mass destruction inflicted by nuclear warheads
delivered by intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach 13,400 mph.

The glider's speeds of 3,600 mph are more than seven times faster than the
Tomahawk guided missiles that were too slow to kill Osama bin Laden at an
Afghanistan training camp in 1998. The White House has requested almost $250
million for research into hypersonic technologies which harness shock waves
generated by a fast-moving missile to increase its speed further.








Plus:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7107179.ece
Received on Mon 26 Apr 2010 12:29:33 PM PDT