DARPA Hypersonic Vehicle Splash Down Confirmed

dtmos writes "DARPA has announced that its Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 flight on Thursday, 11 August, 'experienced a flight anomaly post perigee and into the vehicle's climb. The anomaly prompted the vehicle's autonomous flight safety system to use the craft's aerodynamic systems to make a controlled descent and splash down into the ocean.' 'According to a preliminary review of the data collected prior to the anomaly encountered by the HTV-2 during its second test flight,' said DARPA Director Regina Dugan, 'HTV-2 demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled Mach 20 hypersonic flight for approximately three minutes. It appears that the engineering changes put into place following the vehicle's first flight test in April 2010 were effective. We do not yet know the cause of the anomaly for Flight 2.'"

Re:unending genocidal holycost losses mounting

[webmistressrachel]

Insightful, but written in such a bad style and with such crap grammar you're going to get modded troll.

Shame, there's some good points in there.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right! We should absolutely stop funding innovation and new technologies! What the hell have scientific advances ever done for us?

Science and Research

[TedTschopp]

This is how science moves forward. You make a mistake, you think about it, you engineer a solution and then see how badly it blows up. Granted that is over simplified, but without mistakes, missteps, and anomalies we don't move technology forward. Many of the problems we face as a society will not be solved by buying a solution from the local supermarket, they will be solved by a crazy person who believes that the future can be better and has the resources to "waste" working the bugs out of his crazy vision. Its been that way from the dawn of time, and it will be that way 10,000 years from now.

Re:meanwhile...

[poity]

DARPA projects are all done/made in the USA. If anything, it contributes to the economy rather than drain from it. Besides, investing in advanced research is like investing in education, the short term payoff is low, but long term payoff has the potential to be great -- this military version goes mach 20 and does one or two specific tasks, but imagine 15 years from now commercial planes going at a third of that speed, and all built in the USA. Would you complain about that?

Re:meanwhile...

[nshelly]

Why invest in R&D or basic sciences at all, when there are more immediate "needs" like nationalized healthcare, medicare or more unemployment pay? Technology and R&D investment is not just a spigot a country can "turn off" and then "turn on" in a few years. The same is true with investment toward space programs. The country benefits in the long run from advanced defense technology and private sector innovation/spillover, such as the internet and potentially the autonomous vehicle. And failure should be expected when your experimenting with futuristic research if we can learn from the mistakes, as cliche as it sounds. True, DARPA could be better managed, but so could Google. You probably wouldn't have a medium to complain about this if it weren't for the DARPA Internet Program of the 1970s, also during a period of high unemployment, high inflation and Cold War uncertainty.

Re:meanwhile...

[SnarfQuest]

Maybe we need to stop spending money on this crap that doesn't even work.

Like the two $500 Billion "economic stimulus" packages, working on "shovel ready" projects that "haa haa" didn't actually exist, where they spent over $280,000 for each job created or saved. They're planning for another round, even bigger this time! Or the unconstitutional Obamacare, whose costs are increasing rapidly, and they are discovering that it will supply even worse care than was originally stated, even before any major part is actually implemented.

Re:meanwhile...

[timeOday]

where they spent over $280,000 for each job created or saved.

I don't know why people find this surprising. Obviously you can't build a road for just the cost of labor, teachers need classrooms to teach in, etc. Of course the rest of that money still goes to pay somebody, such as whoever sells construction supplies or maintains the classroom, but you aren't counting that, simply to make the numbers look worse.

As for the shovel-ready projects that weren't actually ready, that portion of the stimulus was never spent [cnsnews.com], so that should make you feel a little better.

As for healthcare, private and public healthcare in the US are in exactly the same mess, which is that we simply refuse to make any rational cost/benefit decisions about healthcare, and over-treat everybody, even lost causes.

No, engineering

[Animats]

This is how science moves forward.

No, this is how engineering moves forward if you have enough money. In the 1940s and 1950s, a huge number of experimental aircraft and rockets were built. Some worked, some didn't, and some went through a large number of prototypes before they worked. There were terrible problems getting early jet fighters to work right. A lot of test pilots died. Even the successful military planes weren't that safe; in the 1950s, a Navy pilot had about a 1 in 5 chance of dying in a crash, without help from the enemy.

In the early days of rocketry, a huge number of rockets were launched unsuccessfully. About 600 V-2 rocket launches were attempted in the R&D phase, before they were able to hit London. ICBM development in the US and USSR had dozens of launch failures. Frequent launches were expensive, but projects were completed faster.