DARPA: That’s Mach 20, Baby
August 10, 2011 at 6:50 am PT
In an onstage interview at the ninth
D: All Things Digital conference in June,
Regina Dugan — who is director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — riveted the crowd by talking about a plane in development that can fly at a speed of Mach 20.
That would be 13,000 miles per hour, or 20 times the speed of sound.
Now DARPA is trotting out the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 for its second and final launch this morning at 7 am PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
According to the
DARPA site, the aircraft will be boosted into the atmosphere via a rocket, and will blast around for 30 minutes. (See the chart below for the info as to how it does so.)
On its first outing, the plane already proved it can maintain Global Positioning System (GPS) signals while traveling 3.6 miles per second. But DARPA also lost contact with the vehicle, which had a controlled landing in the ocean.
The goal of the second flight, said DARPA, “is to validate current assumptions and increase technical understanding of the hypersonic flight regime. More than 20 test assets will collect continuous flight data to achieve this goal.”