Land Speed Record May Hit 1000 MPH [video]

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Chuck Yeager Still Flying at 89

Yesterday, Gizmodo reported –

This is unforgivable. With all the hoopla about yesterday’s crazy supersonic space jump, we didn’t celebrate yesterday’s 65th anniversary of the first man to go faster than the speed of sound, a true American hero: the now retired Brigadier General Chuck Yeager. But yesterday, as Baumgartner was jumping 24 miles up in the sky, Yeager didn’t forget about his amazing adventure. He went to the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and jumped in the cockpit of an F-15 to fly faster than the speed of sound, just like the good old times. He is 89 years old now.

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Hypersonic Plane Lost On Test Flight

The LA Times reports –

A test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of speeding through air at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped plane failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were moderating the mission. In the test flight, the aircraft, known as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was launched at 7:45 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base, located northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of  Earth’s  atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket, made by Orbital Sciences Corp. The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg. But about 20 minutes into the mission, the Pentagon’s research arm, known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced on its Twitter account that: “Range assets have lost telemetry.” It sounds eerily similar to the problems that plagued the Falcon’s first flight, which took place in April 2010. That test flight ended prematurely with only nine minutes of flight time. Engineers went back to the drawing board and were believed to have had things ironed out.

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