Oops, Gone Missing

It's not the kind of thing you want to misplace. After all, it's downright expensive. Say, $320-million-worth of expensive. Not to mention all the technological expertise that has gone into its design and execution. In the current U.S. economy $320-million isn't readily replaceable. So it's a good bet there'll be some frantic searches for the errant aircraft.

Somewhere over the Pacific. That huge body of water, you know? A relatively modest-sized aircraft, bobbing about somewhere in the Pacific.

It's designed to glide from the upper atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound. On its second test flight it got kind of lost. Didn't after all, meet expectations in performing as it was meant to do. Hypersonic aircraft cannot possibly have a mind of its own now, can it? Like don't mess with me, I'm powerful and I'll do as I please ...?

The Falcon HTV-2 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, sitting astride a rocket. The separation from the launch vehicle was successful. But the plane was expected to separate from the rocket at the peak of ascent and decided perhaps not to.

Went off on a tangent instead of gliding back to earth. Think we tweet irrelevancies? Well, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency tweets too:

• ...on track entering glide phase
• Downrange assets did not reacquire tracking or telemetry
• HTV-2 has an autonomous flight termination capacity
• We do not yet know how to achieve the desired control during the aerodynamic phase of flight
• It's vexing: I'm confident there is a solution. We have to find it

Right. This glider aircraft is a critical part of the Defence Department's design to build a "prompt global strike" defense element so targets could be hit anywhere in the world about an hour after take-off with conventional, or with nuclear warheads.

The speed that can be reached is Mach 17 to Mach 20 - about 20,000 kilometres an hour. Now that's fast. Blink and it's outta sight. It's out of sight, in any event. And that's the problem, for the time being.

Amazing, isn't it; such a flight, for example, from New York to Los Angeles would take under twelve minutes. Not that New York would want to bomb Los Angeles; merely an example of lapsed time in transit.