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With all the focus on the launch of the secret X37B, another space launch by a Minotaur IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California received less attention.
It was carrying the prototype of a new weapon that can hit any target around the world in less than an hour.
The Prompt Global Strike is designed as the conventional weapon of the future. It could hit Osama bin Laden’s cave, an Iranian nuclear site or a North Korean missile with a huge conventional warhead.
But tracking assets lost contact with the triangle-shaped craft 9 minutes after liftoff. "An engineering team is reviewing available data to understand this event," DARPA said in a written statement.
After its release from the Minotaur third stage, the craft was designed to try out its aerodynamic control system and conduct sweeping turns to bleed off excess energy and demonstrate its cross-range capabilities.
A new Minotaur launch vehicle derived from retired missile parts successfully blasted off from the California coast Thursday, but officials lost contact with a hypersonic glider testbed for a U.S. military quick-response global strike system.
Originally posted by Phage
reply to post by fieryjaguarpaw
It is (was) a testbed, far from being a deployable system.
It was not a weapon being tested.
The PGS system is not intended to place weapons in orbit, it is not a space based system. It is based on ballistic missiles and hypersonic aircraft.
Originally posted by jazz10
All i can say about this is, the government has more neck than a giraffe, how can they bang on about nuclear weapons then go and do this?
Unbelievable hypocracy, dont be suprised when countries do NOT hand over anything now,
This "Could" provoke anything!!!
Well done
The X-20 Dyna-Soar ("Dynamic Soarer") was a United States Air Force (USAF) program to develop a spaceplane that could be used for a variety of military missions, including reconnaissance, bombing, space rescue, satellite maintenance, and sabotage of enemy satellites. The program ran from 24 October 1957–10 December 1963, cost US$660 million, and was canceled just after spacecraft construction had begun.
Other spacecraft under development at the time, such as Mercury or Vostok, were based on space capsules which returned on ballistic re-entry profiles. Dyna-Soar was much more like the much later Space Shuttle: it could not only be boosted and travel to distant targets at the speed of an intercontinental ballistic missile, it was designed to glide to earth like an airplane under the control of the pilot. It could land at an airfield, rather than simply falling to earth and landing with a parachute. Dyna-Soar could also reach earth orbit, like Mercury or Gemini.