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THE US MILITARY will this afternoon hold a test flight for the fastest plane ever to grace the skies.
The Falcon HTV-2, which has a maximum speed of over 13,000 mph - will begin a trial flight at 3pm Irish time.
The unmanned craft started life as a military research project, which sought to come up with an aircraft that could deliver a bomb to anywhere in the world within an hour.
An inaugural test flight was held in April 2010, with the HTV-2 glider flying 4,800 miles at twenty times the speed of sound. The flight had ended prematurely when the on-board autopilot detected undesirable behaviour, but the plane landed itself safely.
The craft is launched by rocket in a capsule, before it ‘hatches’ and launches from near-earth orbit.
Because of its high altitude, the launch will not be shown online, but live data will be posted to Twitter by @darpa_news.
More info on its flight can be found at the DARPA military website.
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Deliver a bomb, anywhere on earth, within an hour!! Not even enough time to pack !!
Do you get the bomb for free if it takes more than an hour?
A bomb anywhere in the world within one hour. What a noble aim.
Now that’s cool.
Al lot of money that could be better spent
It’s amazing what you can buy witha $14 trillion overdraft :D
I wanna go!
So will this put a stop to all the UFO sightings at area 51.
Nah, they’ll just claim it’s based on alien technology at Area 51
Is the truth out there?
The inaugural test flight had perfect timing! All the planes over Europe were grounded at that time! Conspiracy theorists will love this one. ;p
I wonder how long they’ve been at this for?
First test flight was April last year
Iran,you better watch out.The yanks are coming to a town near you.
And there are kids starving in africa.
The technology sound cool. May it could be developed for commercial air flight. Would be great to go to oz in an hour ..
Somewhere in a secret military bunker, engineers are sweating profusely.
“Downrange assets did not reacquire tracking or telemetry. #HTV2 has an autonomous flight termination capability. More to follow.”
http://twitter.com/#!/DARPA_News/status/101690682204372993
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