Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Yes the author is correct and she did compare apple to apple . I suggest you do your home work before responding in knee jerk fashion .
There are 2 program in US hypersonic development one is glide vehicle just like China did and the other is using scram engine
China did more test than us 7 vs 3 and Sofar China has only 1 failure
The falcon program experience 2 test failure and the army program also ended in failure And so do the scram jet test
Flight testing
Launch of HTV-2a on a Minotaur IV Lite rocket
Falcon HTV-2 baseline flight test trajectories
The HTV-2's first flight was launched on 22 April 2010. The HTV-2 glider was to fly 4,800 miles (7,700 km) across the to at Mach 20. The HTV-2 was boosted by a rocket launched from , California. The flight plan called for the craft to separate from the launch vehicle, level out and glide above the Pacific at Mach 20. Contact was lost with the vehicle nine minutes into the 30-minute mission. In mid-November, DARPA stated that the first test flight ended when the computer autopilot "commanded flight termination" after the vehicle began to roll violently.
A second flight was initially scheduled to be launched on August 10, 2011, but bad weather forced a delay. The flight was launched the following day, on 11 August 2011. The unmanned Falcon HTV-2 successfully separated from the booster and entered the mission's glide phase, but again lost contact with control about nine minutes into its planned 30-minute Mach 20 glide flight. Initial reports indicated it purposely impacted the Pacific Ocean along its planned flight path as a safety precaution.
Army Hypersonic Missile Fails in Second Test
Advanced Hypersonic Weapon test aborted shortly after launch
Artists impression of the Falcon HTV-2 hypersonic aircraft / AP
BY:
August 25, 2014 5:00 am
The Army’s test of an advanced hypersonic weapon failed shortly after takeoff early Monday, the Pentagon said in a statement.
The failure is a setback for a key part of the Pentagon’s strategic weapon program of building arms that can attack any point on earth in 30 minutes.
An unmanned U.S. military jet designed to fly at hypersonic speeds and travel from London to New York in just 45 minutes has failed during a trial as it crashed into the Pacific Ocean within seconds of its launch.
The test had called for a five-minute flight off the coast of southern California at Mach 6- up to 7,300 kmph — six times the speed of sound.
The X-51A Waverider was dropped from a B-52 bomber on Wednesday and launched by a rocket booster as planned but the flight was over in seconds after a control fin malfunctioned, said the U.S. Air Force in a statement. The faulty control fin meant that the vehicle’s flight ended before a specially-designed “Scramjet” engine could be ignited, it said.
