Military Tests Advanced Hypersonic Weapon

See what happens?! I thought when they said after the last hypersonic test that it was the last one...well you see, I was foolish enough to believe that it really was, so when I was told that there was a successful test, I was under the impression that they were talking about the last one you know, the HyperMach SonicStar which even though they lost contact, was deemed some sort of weird success. But no, this was not THAT hyper sonic but the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW)!

You see, as the article in "The Nation" says:

• the AHW is a first-of-its-kind glide vehicle, designed to fly long range within the earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speed.

oooooooooooooh I see the difference.....

• The hypersonic flying missile travels five times the speed of sound and is rumoured to gain up to mach 20 speeds. More impressively, it can strike a target in any location on Earth in just 30 minutes.

The HyperMach SonicStar was traveling at a pedestrian 2 hours anywhere on the globe.... ANYWAY.... check these specs out:

• The test flight was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii to the Reagan Test Site, US Army Kwajalein Atoll. It completed the apx. 2,500 mile journey in just 20 minutes.

The Nation article

Pentagon's Falcon HTV-2 Goes Missing on Test Flight

Ground controllers lost contact August 11th with the Pentagon's Falcon HTV-2 Hypersonic test platform, which is capable of speeds in excess of 20x the speed of sound, less than 30 minutes into its test flight.

Launched atop of a Minotaur IV rocket made by Orbital Sciences Corp. at 7:45 a.m. local time from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, DARPA controllers announced at around 8:22 local time, engineers “lost telemetry” with the aircraft. Controllers said later that day that the HTV-2 had "transitioned" to mach 20 where it continued to fly for an additional nine minutes under full control and telemetry, until, as it was put, an anomaly caused loss of signal..... don't you just love euphemisms?

Even though this could be viewed as a failure, this test flight was 3x longer than the previous 9 minutes of operation before the test bed drone crashed into the Pacific.

The Pentagon's HTV-2 test plane's design will allow a non-nuclear response to threats anywhere in the world, within one hour.

As crazy as a 1 hour anywhere in the world hypersonic bomb might seem, It wasn't the Bush administration's first choice. Rearming nuclear tipped Trident missile submarine with conventional explosives was.