Twenty times the spees of Sound

 

The US military has created a supersonic aircraft that can travel to any place on Earth in less than 60 minutes, reaching speeds of 21,000kmph

US defence agency DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) will soon test fly a vehicle that can move at speeds in excess of 20,000 kilometres per hour. The aircraft called Falcon hypersonic technology vehicle 2 will be launched in a rocket and will deploy in space. During re-entry the vehicle will experience temperatures up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, that's hotter than a blast furnace used to melt steel. The HTV-2 will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard an Air Force Minotaur IV rocket, which is a decommissioned ballistic missile, the HTV-2 will separate and fly at a hypersonic glide trajectory within the earth’s atmosphere Mach 20 speeds, approximately 21,000 kilometres per hour. The US military hopes that the success of the mission would give them strike capability to hit terrorists or rogue states anywhere in the world in short reaction time. The Falcon HTV-2, estimated to cost $308 million, has the potential of carrying a payload 400 Kilograms, including a nuclear bomb and the projects completion schedule is 2025. The hypersonic plane was tested in April this year, but the previous experiment lasted only nine minutes before the vehicle was deliberately crashed due to technical difficulties. This mission, should it succeed, could set new records in sub-orbital space travel and pave the way for a generation of super weapons, he said. Though the DARPA engineers have not disclosed which other countries are experimenting with the technology, it is believed that Indian defence scientists are also fairly advanced on hypersonic technology.