It turns out that tearing through the atmosphere at 20 times the rate of sound isn't good for that skin, if you are an excellent high-tech aircraft developed by the government's best engineers at its far-out research agency.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research study Agency, makes public its best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash within the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin taken off.
After an eight-month investigation, DARPA figured even though the HTV-2 was expected to lose a number of its skin mid-flight, "larger than anticipated servings of the vehicle's skin peeled from the aerostructure," the company said inside a statement Friday.
The company said it expected the HTV-2, which matches so quick it can make the commute from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes, to see "impulsive shock waves" at such speeds, but shocks it experienced last August were "more than 100 times exactly what the vehicle was created to resist."
As the test was very public, the facts from the HTV-2's design, stability system and potential purpose remain highly classified.
Two months after DARPA's test, the Army tested its very own hypersonic aircraft - that one a long-range weapon system called the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) designed to strike any target in the world in just a couple hours.
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