Boeing's X-51 WaveRider Jet Crashes In Mach 6 Attempt 190
An anonymous reader writes "Boeing's experimental hypersonic X-51 WaveRider aircraft crashed today during an attempt to hit Mach 6 while traveling over the Pacific Ocean. The cause of the crash was a faulty control fin, which compromised the test before the Scramjet engine could be lit. A vehicle traveling at Mach 6 (six times the speed of sound) would be able to travel from New York to London in just one hour."
Worse yet, ... (Score:5, Funny)
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We can rebuild him... we have the technology... better... stronger... faster...
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I loved that show. As a kid I could wait to grow up and have my arms and legs replaced.
As an adult I can only say "Hurry the hell up and make it happen."
Re:Worse yet, ... (Score:4, Funny)
Can you imagine how loud the woooshing would have been had the scramjet enjine been lit?
Oh the humanity.
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This is /.
Do you really think anyone reads anything here before posting?
Really?
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What's the hurry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the hurry? (Score:5, Interesting)
And what about individual rooms on a Zeppelin?
Re:What's the hurry? (Score:4)
Personally, I think that would be a great way to travel. Not necessarily a private room, but a nice recliner with leg room, a table and some entertainment would be good.
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And hot-looking female flight attendants in miniskirts would be best for topping it off.
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and you would pay 10 times the price of a first class airline ticket for that?
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Well, no, not personally. Besides, a Zeppelin shouldn't be that expensive; it's slow, and the fuel consumption should be low compared to a jet (it doesn't have to burn fuel to generate lift, only thrust). Part of what you're paying for with a jet ride is the speed.
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You've heard wrong. Jets actually fly quite a bit slower than they used to back in the 70s (when ticket prices were high), specifically to save fuel. They save further costs by packing more people into smaller seats, and cutting out all the extras.(meals) and adding extra charges for other things (luggage fees, optional in-flight movies, optional in-flight WiFi, extra charges for "premium economy" seats (that are slightly more desirable than bottom-barrel economy seats), etc. So yes, fuel savings DO help
Air Charter (Score:2)
If you can afford 1st class it's really worth looking into, especially if considering more than one seat. With a smaller plane many more airports are open to you, including all the ones without the security theatre. You arrive find your pilot in the lounge and you are on up in the air a few minutes later.
There is a reason airlines are reducing and eliminating their 1st class cabin on domestic routes (though they usually call their business class "domestic first class" or some such). Most of the 1st class se
Re:What's the hurry? (Score:4, Funny)
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It doesn't matter anyway, they won't let you through security with the warhead you'd need to make that kind of speed worthwhile.
Actually, they will [sfgate.com]. They'll just poke and prod it a bit uncomfortably before letting you through.
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The types of people who can afford to fly on a hypersonic jet (ticket prices would make the Concorde look like a value airline) don't wait 2-3 hours with the cattle to get through security or catch a cab.
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The types of people who can afford to fly on a hypersonic jet don't wait 2-3 hours with the cattle to get through security or catch a cab.
Exactly right!
Those people are too busy watching the hypnotic pattern their vital organs make as they thoroughly paint the passenger capsule while twined loosely in Versace linen.
Re:What's the hurry? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have family that lives near Fredricksburg, Texas. About 10 times a year (nearly every month!) we drive the 5.5 hours, and then drive home about 5.5 hours. Google Maps says it's only 4.3, but eventually you need to get out and stretch your legs, country stop lights, etc.
So finally I graduated and got a real job, announced "this time we're going to fly, since it's only a 40 minute flight from Dallas to San Antonio, and another hour by car! We'll save at least four hours!"
Yeah. About that.
Total transit time: 7 hrs 15 minutes. We've driven the 5.5 hour journey ever since.
Now, I fly about 2-3 times a year, but my mother doesn't. Neither do many of the people flying airplanes on any given day. You could speed up the process, be like the guy "up in the air", but that sort of efficiency just isn't realistic for "trip to grandma's with mom".
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The usual estimate is that if you can drive it in 5 hours, it's faster to drive than fly commercially. However, if your time is worth a lot -- and you won't save money doing this but you will save time -- you could buy a small airplane and get your pilot certificate. Small airplanes do about 100-120mph in a straight line and there are typically small airports within 20-ish miles of anywhere on both ends, so as long as your relatives are willing to pick you up at the far end you could have more like a 2 1/
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Those are low speeds for some of the more recently-built craft. An acquaintance bought a plane recently for about $100K which, while limited on features, cruises at about 150 knots and maxes out a little under 180 knots. It's a fun plane to fly, though I can't land it myself since I don't have tail-wheel training. It's also limited on cargo and has only two seats, but since it's just him and his wife, jumping out to Las Vegas or Sacramento (where his parents live) isn't tough to do and doesn't take long.
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but since it's just him and his wife, jumping out to Las Vegas or Sacramento (where his parents live) isn't tough to do.
Man, you have some hard core friends. I'm curious how the plane gets down, though.
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If there's a bunch of you traveling together, you need to try chartering a small plane from a local airport. There's likely a small airport closer to where you live than DFW, there's no TSA security, and there's likely another small airport much close to your destination than San Antonio's, and it doesn't take 4-8 people long to deplane. It's probably too expensive for 1-2 people, but if you've got 4-8, it might be economical, and it'll definitely be very quick.
Re:What's the hurry? (Score:4, Interesting)
But the 1 hour 45 minutes waiting, and the flight, can be spent reading, or watching a movie.
we live in an era of entertainment everywhere.
I'm not telling you flying is better, only pointing out there are other possible benefits.
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Don't forget the total cost too.
How curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always a little strange to see the 'New York to London' figure given for something that is fairly clearly intended for blunt-force diplomacy, not passenger travel.
We ditched the Concorde years ago because there weren't enough customers to make flying that fast economic.
Re:How curious... (Score:5, Funny)
"It's always a little strange to see the 'New York to London' figure given for something that is fairly clearly intended for blunt-force diplomacy, not passenger travel."
Lest we forget, US has fought two wars against Britain, which killed thousands more American civilians than any aggressor since.
The only thing keeping the Brits in their box is DETERRENCE!!
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Strictly speaking, that conflict was Americans vs. Southerners...
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He may not have been talking about that. Let's look at the US Civil War - approx 625,000 dead [wikipedia.org]. WWII comes a close second at 405,000+.
From 1990 to 1997, there were 293,781 firearm deaths [vpc.org] - homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. Even with more than half of those deaths being suicides, that still leaves a lot of Americans being killed, intentionally or accidentally, by their fellow citizens in less than a decade, albeit one with a peak in gun violence. And while only about 90,000 (or 1/3) of those
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I think you'll find more American civilians were killed by fellow Americans than any aggressor before or since.
But that wasn't a FOREIGN aggressor. And frankly, more Americans (and more people in general) have been killed by Kansas swine than any American aggressors.
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The Brits didn't declare war first, but were supporting Native Americans as proxy warriors against the US. Impressment ("capture and enslavement") of US sailors was clearly an act of aggression.
or maybe Kansas to Iran... (Score:2)
It's always a little strange to see the 'New York to London' figure given for something that is fairly clearly intended for blunt-force diplomacy, not passenger travel.
Yeah, shouldn't the canonical flight-time be from the Hauge to London?
what, too soon?
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Yeah, you would thing Germany to London would be a better example~
Better planes and technology may make it more cost effective.
Re:How curious... (Score:4)
No, we ditched it because of fuel efficiency. SSTs use a ridiculous amount of fuel. The Concorde had no trouble with sonic booms over the Atlantic (no one cares out there), and transatlantic flights are very popular these days (why do you think they have so many 747s that make the trip every day?). But that demand wasn't enough to make up for the insane ticket price caused mostly by all the fuel needed.
Heck, even jet aircraft use a lot of fuel compared to piston-driven aircraft; they only get really economical when they carry lots of people. The only way a supersonic plane would be economical is if it carried a few thousand people somehow.
According to Wikipedia, it was the crash (Score:2)
The retirement wasn't over fuel efficiency, since if you were paying to fly that fast, you'd pay a premium anyway. According to Wikipedia: "As a result of the type’s only crash on 25 July 2000 and other factors, its retirement flight was on 26 November 2003."; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde [wikipedia.org]
Fuel is not cited as one of the factors. It might well have been retired for that reason in the current cost climate, and fuel economy prevented them being purchased by airlines after the 707, 747, and
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They were only profitable enough to have a handful of aircraft. That's not really very profitable. If you want something that's going to become commonplace, you need something that doesn't just cater to the mega-wealthy (many of whom would probably rather just take their own private subsonic jet instead of having to share space on an SST with other passengers, even if they're all a bunch of rich people). The Concorde could never become commonplace, because of the fuel consumption (and to a much lesser ex
we reached that speed in the 1950's! (Score:3, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-15
First flew in 1959. Reached Mach of 6.04 at one point. Had a pilot in it, not just a drone.
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that was done at the edge of space where the air is almost nonexistent. It was basically a spacecraft at that point, not an airplane.
I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing the Waverider is being tested at much lower altitude to study hypersonic dynamics and scramjet efficiency and stuff.
It's not about the speed (Score:5, Informative)
It's not about flying that fast, it's about operating a supersonic combustion engine to produce positive net thrust. Anyone can stick a rocket on the back of a tube and fly fast, but you have to carry all of your oxidizer with you (or use a monopropellant). With this you just carry the fuel and let the shock transition form the compressor for your jet engine. Of course, it's not quite that simple, since you can't slow down the flow to be subsonic and still achieve + thrust, so you've got to make combustion occur in a flow that's faster than the speed of sound.
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Scramjets are only efficient to operate aver Mach 3 to 4. They need that level of speed since they get all of their compression from shaping the incoming flow. While the thrust to weight ratio is worse than a rocket but its specific impulse is greater it can fire for much longer than a rocket since it only needs to carry fuel and not oxidizer. The thrust to weight ratio is pretty much fixed by the flow velocity and combustion thermodynamics.
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Well, that's what I meant by using it as the final stage of another engine that gets the air up to mach 3.5 and then blows it over the scramjet which then spits it out the back at mach 7 or whatever. If the plane only needs to go mach 0.8, you wouldn't have to accelerate that much air to get the required thrust, if you were accelerating the air by so much.
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And that's what makes it so f*cking difficult, or so I'm told. The last time I heard much about scram was in my senior compressible aero class in the early 90s. Back then, only the Russians had gotten combustion, but it still produced negative thrust and it occurred on the downward arc of a ballistic trajectory that resulted in a very deep core sample of the Siberian tundra.
Yes - typically any flame front in a medium moving faster than the speed of sound within that medium is usually considered a "detonati
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The X-15 was a rocket-powered aircraft. This is a Scramjet, and it's a technology demonstrator. It's not about the speed, it's about developing the technology to achieve workable Scramjet designs.
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Mach 6 at the edge of space is a different speed the mach 6 at a lower altitude.
M=V/a
V being Velocity, and a being what ever you are travelling through. .. you know where to go.
For more details,
travel from New York to London in just one hour (Score:2)
Why is this obviously Not Gonna Happen concept *constantly* trotted out in regards to hypersonic flight, when writers should be acknowledging that such meaningful (ie, passenger and cargo) flights will never happen.
Re:travel from New York to London in just one hour (Score:5, Insightful)
when writers should be acknowledging that such meaningful (ie, passenger and cargo) flights will never happen.
"Never" encompasses a very long period of time, and should almost never be used in speaking about technology. I'm sure 250 years ago people would have also said it would never be possible to communicate with another person on the other side of the planet in real-time, and yet here we are.
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Yet scientists/engineers have learned a hell of a lot in 250 years, among them (a) what kind of shapes are required to successfully pass Mach 1, and (b) how much extra energy is required to double from Mach 1 to Mach 2 and then double again to Mach 4.
Bog standard humans have learned at what point the extra speed isn't worth the stupendous extra cost.
This is why civilian aircraft reached their approximate speed peak 55 years ago with the Boeing 707 and has settled around 0.85 Mach 44 years ago with the Boein
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Some monitoring and maintenance? The problems, just off the top of my head, of a suspended-in-the-middle-of-the-sea scheme which would need to be high enough to pass over the highest peaks yet deep enough to not be affected by wave action are:
(a) multiple ocean currents shearing it,
(b) the weight of the cables would be stupendous,
(c) the pressure on the 3,000 mile long tube at 1,000 m would be 1470 psi,
(d) salt water is *very* corrosive,
(e) one manufacturing or construction mistake and the high pressure wa
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Actually, I agree with you on (a)-(f). The advantages of using a subterranean tunnel, which is implied in my post, is that it's much less externally exposed to terrorist actions and, while the pressure would be huge under the ocean floor, more of the pressure could be redistributed into/supported by the surrounding rock with the obvious remaining problem being tectonic plate boundaries. Of course, digging tunnels through rock just makes your last point, expense, even more relevant.
However, suppose EMCC mana
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A warhead could be considered a kind of cargo on a one-way trip, signature not required. Depending on who you're talking to, a scramjet powered cruise missile might be very meaningful.
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Langley to Paris, but not NYC to London...
Good news everyone (Score:2)
why they post the speed in LA-NY terms (Score:4)
They include that bit about "from LA to NY in one hour" so that people can grasp how fast the speed is.
It isn't meant to make you conjure up a day where you'll be flying that speed. It isn't meant to sell you on an airline ticket in the future...it's simply a way to communicate speed to a broader audience. Anything you think of beyond the raw speed involved is *you* day dreaming.
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"New York to London in just one hour"
Woops, got the reference wrong! :P
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Please, that's not canonical units.
How many football fields per fortnight is it?
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It isn't meant to make you conjure up a day where you'll be flying that speed.
Except that somewhere along the way, some lib arts major misunderstood that.
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Can we stop with the New York to FOO comparisons? (Score:2)
The FLIGHT time is 1 hour, down from 5ish hours. You will still have 2 hours of crap security and airport "stuff" to do on either end. This is not a game changer for intercontinental flight. It's not like there's legions of people screaming "If you can get me there in an hour I'll pay a million dollars!" Concorde failed for a reason.
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A lot of people can't visualize 4,300mph. Saying, "New York to London in an hour" makes it easier to visualize.
For me, it's about two weeks' worth of driving per hour. I'm not sure how you would visualize it.
Considering this is an unmanned drone, any passengers would have to be strapped to it. Somehow I doubt anyone willing to try that would have been the same type of customer the Concorde was designed for (but probably the type of customer padded rooms were designed for).
Suborbital, anyone? (Score:2)
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I know the U.S. Marines were interested in a suborbital deployment system, where they could put marines on your doorstep anywhere in the world in a couple hours' notice.
I'm not sure where I read about it (probably here, actually), but it's been a while.
Heart breaking (Score:2)
Finally a flight with no screaming infants. (Score:4, Funny)
At 6x the speed of sound, no-one can hear your baby scream.
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At best, it's a blip on their radar. I don't think ripples in the market will be very big. ;)
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Here it is, 2012, and we still lack the capability to punch someone over TCP/IP...
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and we still lack the capability to punch someone over TCP/IP...
Of course we can. The USB Missle Launcher [brookstone.com] works over WMS or Skype. It qualifies for a sufficiently loose definition of 'punch'.
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Computers do not have the capability to punch someone, in order to give computers the capability to punch someone you will need an attachment that can punch.
Sending the command over TCP/IP should be easy enough.
The problem is how do you convince someone to install a punching device when the only point of said device is to punch the owner of the device?
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The problem is how do you convince someone to install a punching device when the only point of said device is to punch the owner of the device?
Easy. Pay them money. LOTS of money.
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So set up a web cam and a web page where people can pay some money to watch you being punched by a machine attached to the PC or for more money they can actually give the command.... Then have some banner ads to rake in even more money?
I can this happening.
Of course this might lead to some form of competition to who is going to be the first one to let some one kick them in the nuts over the Internet....
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Sell it as a masturbatory aid. Neglect to tell them you can also send punch commands.
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At best, it's a blip on their radar. I don't think ripples in the market will be very big. ;)
And its too big to fail.
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Prediction:
You will be very wrong.
Re:Why not build several, perhaps 3, at the time? (Score:5, Informative)
Four were built, three have been tested, one remains.
Re:Why not build several, perhaps 3, at the time? (Score:5, Informative)
Why not build several, perhaps 3, at the time?
I doubt it would make the project three times as expensive.
They actually built 4. The first one flew for 143 seconds at hypersonic speeds, during the 2nd flight the engine shut down prematurely due to airflow disruption, and the 3rd flight is discussed in the linked article that no one is reading. They still have one more, and I am guessing they documented the design somewhere so they could probably build additional vehicles in the future if need be.
Re:Why not build several, perhaps 3, at the time? (Score:5, Funny)
I am guessing they documented the design somewhere so they could probably build additional vehicles in the future if need be.
you think? or maybe they will have to start from scratch, and see what they can remember from when they built the first four.
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yeah, talk to me when you are building scramjets and let me know how that works out.
Re:Why not build several, perhaps 3, at the time? (Score:5, Funny)
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
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How's life in orbit these days?
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So in this case (of an unmanned plane) all parties decided to forego pilot representation in exchange for the lucrative systems integration sub contract...
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Whooooosh!
It's a quote from Contact.
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A misquote, in fact. The real quote refers to military spending.
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Yeah, 640 mph oughta be enough...
Re:I don't think we need to go Mach 6 (Score:4, Informative)
Initially this will be for better cruise missiles, only after the technology has matured would they consider it for human transport.
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Initially this will be for better cruise missiles, only after the technology has matured would they consider it for human transport.
Really? Can we get rides on regular cruise missiles now?
That would be fun. For a while, at least.
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How do you know what the risks will be after the technology is commercialized? The Concorde only had one crash in its history, and that was on takeoff due to a blown tire and debris hitting the wing under the fuel tanks.
And yeah, I'm sure everyone agrees the future of intercontinental travel is undoubtedly in automated cars...
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The future of intercontinental travel is in underwater vacuum trains. NY to London in 45 minutes.
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Crossing the Atlantic wouldn't be that hard. You don't put the vacuum tunnel on the sea floor, you float it so that it's not that far below the surface of the water (deep enough to avoid storm waves), and is anchored to the floor with flexible cables so that it can move around a fair amount. Crossing the continent on land seems like it'd be harder because of seismic problems; you don't have seismic problems in water.
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Just for fun, the fictional MiG-31 aircraft from the movie Firefox [wikipedia.org] was capable of Mach 6, the advantage presumably being that it could simply outrun any incoming attack.
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The advantage of a plane doing that speed is that it can drop it's bombs and be out of the territory before they hit the target. With stealth, you now have a pretty intimidating way to attack.
Assuming you can think in Russian~
Re:"just one hour" (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's the thing - it has to be able to keep going at that speed for an hour.
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Non-alarming warhead delivery (Score:2)
In that case, its a success, because the only non-alarming manner I can think of delivering warheads is crashing long before the intended target.
Well, non-alarming to the target, at any rate.
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Sort of a success yes, at least it will not set off orbital and ground based ICBM detection systems - which is the ultimate goal for hypersonic missiles. Capability of aborting the strike, and oh, hitting the target would be nice to have too, of course.
I never understood this reason. Is there some rule that says they cannot put a nuclear warhead on the cruise missile? Or does it simply evade missile detection systems because it is flying so low?