

Pentagon releases results of 13,000-mph test flight over Pacific - sunsu
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-darpa-hypersonic-missile-20120420,0,4564567.story

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hencq
The stated goal is apparently to be able to strike anywhere on earth within an
hour. What's the advantage of something like this above an ICBM? I can imagine
one advantage would be that the target can't be easily inferred from the
flight path? Also an ICBM launch is immediately associated with a nuclear
attack, while this might not be? Although I could imagine an enemy detecting
multiple of these hypersonic vehicles heading towards it, wouldn't want to
wait to find out.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Have you looked at the US's defense budget? When you have money like this you
don't need to worry too much about practical uses. Imagine if this money went
unspent, Americans would get a tax break or heaven forbid better healthcare or
something.

Seriously, a good chunk of what the US researches is done strictly because we
don't question the defense budget and the contractors and bureaucrats know how
to game the system and create jobs/fortunes for the defense industry.

As far as the whole "herp derp its not an icbm," well something tells me that
if the Chinese had this and hit our carrier groups with it(1), we'd respond
with nuclear strikes instantly. If we send 10 of these towards downtown
Beijing, its nuclear war as usual fellas. I think the subtleties between
kinetic and nuclear will be lost on the generals and leaders who make
retaliatory strike decisions.

(1) The PRC is playing with all manner of kinetic kill vehicles and probably
have a carrier killer mounted on several warships and subs, so this isn't
purely conjecture

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lchengify
Lets not get too carried away here. At least in the US, the defense
department, specifically DARPA, invests a lot in research that doesn't have
immediate value but has a proven track record for being invaluable years or
decades later.

50 years ago someone might have made an argument that investing 380m in health
care would be more useful than some crazy thing called 'ARPANET', but i think
in the end it turned out better for everyone. Add GPS and self-driving cars to
that list too.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
If ARPANET failed then some other network would have evolved into the
internet. Its not like networking technology was unknown outside of the
military, heck most advances in networking and CS happen in universities, not
via defense contracts.

Heck, the French had Minitel in the 80s while we had a loose network of BBS's
and to be frank it wasn't the lack of network technologies that was the
problem back then, it was the lack of a killer app. TBL delivered that in the
form of the WWW. The WWW is network agnostic. There wasn't a day when people
went "Whoa, T1s are now affordable for my LEC to sell to my ISP, I better get
a shell account pronto!" It was "Whoa, there's email and colors and pictures
and text and even video on my computer's modem via this thing called the web
I'm seeing advertised on movie trailers and on product packaging?!?!"

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lchengify
... and who do you think funded those CS departments? It's all by grants, a
lot of which is from the defense department, who has a lot of money to invest
in high risk, high return, long-running projects with practical outcomes.

Saying 'some other network would have evolved' is a cop-out: clearly that
would have happened, but it would have happened later and that could have cost
us in terms of competitiveness. Same argument for GPS, except even more likely
given the heavy investment in infrastructure needed to even get a basic
implementation running.

Also the 80's are not the 60's, it's ridiculous to think that the networking
technologies were not influenced heavily by the work funded by the military
... hell the only reason killer apps could be created was because the
technology was so pervasive that it made sense to write them.

And GPS, self-driving cars, and ARPANET are only what I came up with offhand
because I was too lazy to check. Add ENIAC and radar to that list, both of
which were developed specifically for military purposes but (obviously) later
had wide-ranging practical civilian applications.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department,

A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP
DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.

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lchengify
In 2010, 227 million over 5 years:

<http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717>

Also I didn't say everything important, I said a lot. In hindsight, I don't
think anyone thinks funding ARPANET or ENIAC was a bad idea...

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Yeah but whats the context? How much of that directly to programs like we're
talking about vs money via tuition, fees, etc.

I think this is really impossible to quantify, but from a rational POV we can
look at countries with small defense spending and see that they have healthy
univerisities and healthy economies as well as healthy technological advances
(again my example of the early french 'internet'). Tim Berners Lee was not
only NOT an American but not funded by the DoD. His www application is what
got the ball rolling. The network or protocol didn't matter, we can run http
over anything. Same with Linus Torvalds, another non-American non-DOD funded
star. We were sitting on nice networking tehcnology and wondering when Joe
Public would see the wisdom of anything other than AOL and dialup (two very
American things). It took a an Englishman at CERN and a Finnish student to
give us WWW on Linux. Whats the Finnish defense budget look like?

A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for
technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.

~~~
lchengify
> A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for
> technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.

You're confusing procurement costs with R&D. Lumping all military spending
together is ignoring the subtleties as to why and how the money is used:

[http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/04/d...](http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/04/death-and-taxes-2010.jpg)

* Tim Berners Lee got the ball rolling on www decades after the ARPANET investment, that doesn't help your point.

* The English have large military R&D spending, given their GDP, and always have.

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darklajid
The technological feat seems amazing! But .. my English parser crashes here:

“The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from
which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded
by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA
Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major
validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for
hypersonic flight.”

Is he saying that (my understanding) the shock wave disturbances exceeded the
designed/expected maximum by a factor of 100? And claims that this is
supporting the idea of understanding hypersonic flight so much better?

I _think_ he wants to say 'In spite of these troubles we were able to recover,
due to our good understanding of the underlying principles' but I parse it as
'The outcome of the experiment showed that we greatly underestimated the
forces involved and this clearly validates our understanding'.

Can some native speaker point out were I stumbled?

~~~
ryanmolden
I believe he is trying to say their ability to recover from such a large
variation from their initial expectation is proof that they truly
understand/are advancing in their knowledge of hypersonic flight. That said,
since there is a break between the two quotes the second could have come 10
sentences later and the writer could have unknowingly dropped
context/information in some omitted statements. It is a bit of a hard to parse
statement, but that is what you get from people, rarely do people speak in
memorable, concise sound bites 'off the cuff'.

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markdrago
Here's a TED talk by Regina Dugan that discusses these flights as well:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_g...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_glider_to_humming_bird_drone.html)

~~~
0003
The juxtaposition of toddlers and the "DARPA" logo is not jarring, given the
benefits DARPA has produced for humanity due in part to its unleashed
creativity, but certainly 'weird' given the context of its mission statement.

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evoxed
I still can't even fathom a _12-minute_ separation between Los Angeles and New
York.

~~~
rorrr
Plus two hours getting to and waiting at the airport.

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evoxed
Maybe that'll be solved by the time I can afford a hypersonic flight between
NY and LA.

~~~
melling
It is a solved problem. At least getting to the airport. Now we just need to
make it more affordable.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train>

~~~
adestefan
I think the OP is instead refering to the standard disclaimer to arrive 1-2
hours before your flight to get through baggage check, security, and sitting
at the gate.

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schnaars
The technologist in me says that is pretty awesome.

The cynic looks at $320M price tag and wonders why I don't have better schools
for my kids and DARPA doesn't have a better video of this thing.

~~~
wdr1
Would $320M make much of a difference? The city of LA just spent $500M on a
single school building.

I wager had the money gone towards education, we would either have a $820M
school building or a second one worth $320M.

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rollypolly
When the technology does start to work, could this have civilian applications
one day?

~~~
untog
In theory, yes. But the fastest civilian plane, the Concorde, was shut down
years ago. There's cost/benefit ratio that needs to be met.

~~~
andymoe
Let's not forget the concord was shut down mostly because one of them ran over
a 17 inch bit of titanium that sent pounds of debris flying at the plan at
500mph rupturing a fuel tank and causing it to blow up. The next year some
a-holes flew into buildings in NY and the pentagon and put the airline
industry and economy into a tailspin.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590>

~~~
Someone
I think that crash was more the excuse they were waiting for. Economically, it
was past its prime, a prime at which I do not think it ever brought in much
money, if at all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Operational_history>,
for example, claims "By around 1981 in the UK, the future for Concorde looked
bleak. The British government had lost money operating Concorde every year,
and moves were afoot to cancel the service entirely". It also says "It is
reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their
French counterpart", so there may have been years it was making a profit, but
Concorde was flying for prestige, not for the money.

I also think that 500mph figure you give is incorrect. Wikipedia lists
Concorde take off speed as 250mph, and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590> talks of 500kph, or
310mph.

