Was USAF Space Plane Mission A Fail?

There's word on the street that that the recent launch of the US space plane tanked after takeoff.

On the heels of the top-secret X37-B launch, the U.S. Air Force launched an even more secret experimental hypersonic glider able to travel more than 4,000 miles in 30 minutes from launch. The craft -- dubbed the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 -- was launched via a Minotaur 4-Lite rocket Thursday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, the Air Force announced.

Conspiracy theorists have long reported on a secret project known as "Aurora" -- a hypersonic spy plane capable of speeds up to Mach 6 (3,700 mph). The Falcon seems to be the culmination of that project, but it's capable of much, much more, according to a fact sheet from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The sheet explains that once the vehicle accelerates into the upper atmosphere, it is designed to separate from its booster and glide across the Pacific at around 13,000 mph, or nearly Mach 20.

The test vehicle launched last week reached Mach 5 on launch, and was designed to crash and sink into the sea and sink near Kwajalein Atoll, 2,000 miles south-west of Hawaii, 30 minutes later and 4,000 miles from the launch site.

But in a statement released Friday night, DARPA said that while “the launch vehicle executed first-of-its-kind energy management maneuvers, clamshell payload fairing release and HTV-2 deployment,” all wasn't perfect with the superfast craft. “Approximately 9 minutes into the mission, telemetry assets experienced a loss of signal from the HTV-2. An engineering team is reviewing available data to understand this event.”

By: Brant