Remember the Darpa Falcon HTV-2 mach 20 test plane that the Pentagon lost control of? Well in an ongoing effort to put a positive spin on, DARPA has concluded that the Falcon HTV-2 which controllers lost contact with 20 minutes into the flight, has been rated a successes. DARPA reports that after contact was lost, the test vehicle flew 3 minutes making a controlled decent into the ocean. Now I don't want to call BS on this, but...3 minutes? From what 80 thousand feet? With the control surfaces locked and not in powered flight...well look, it takes a balloon over 9 minutes to fall from 60...So isn't that bs already? as for controlled entry into the ocean? Sounds like a euphemism for crashing to me... So what they really are saying it seems it took 3 minutes to crash into the ocean? ok, well that is the last I am going to mention this...It just seemed so strange that they would put such an obvious spin on this thing, just makes me suspicious... ehhhh....
2 comments:
If my math is correct, at 20 times the speed of sound, this craft can glide 700 miles in three minutes (yes, I know it wasn't going 20 times the speed of sound the whole way down). At 80,000 feet of altitude,the HTV-2 was 15 miles high, so yes, the craft could travel 15 miles in 3 minutes (if it went straight down, which I'm sure it didn't). Even if it didn't dive straight down, it is certainly within reason that it could have glided all the way down from an altitude of 15 miles in 3 minutes...
Better put than I did Jon. I think it just irked me that they made it sound like controlled flight when the times seem to say otherwise. At those speeds its more likely that, since it had no real control surfaces, it went into a long steep dive.
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