| Hypersonic Spacecraft Take Flight! Have you witnessed a spacecraft flying through our atmosphere, going so fast, that you believed there was no way it could be created by human hands? Think again. Hypersonic travel is being experimented with above our heads and the results are stunning. When we mention hypersonic spacecraft, we are talking about unmanned gliders launched into space by rockets and eventually re-enter |
| our atmosphere at Mach 20; that's 20 times the speed of sound. In August 2011, the U.S. Department of Defense launched a glider by attaching it to a rocket. In May, 2012, the unmanned spacecraft entered back into our atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour, eventually disintegrating over the Pacific Ocean after minutes of controlled flight. Its shell peeled away in large sections but not before demonstrating impressive fast strike capability. Think about this spacecraft as being a hypersonic weapon that could deliver a payload of explosives in an instant directly from space. It would be pretty much undetectable - and if you did know it was coming, you would have no time to do anything about it. The hypersonic spacecraft has now been tested twice – the first time two years ago. This latest entry was the second trial and is providing valuable information to make the units more aerodynamic and correct flaws in design. One can only imagine that if hypersonic gliders are perfected, that could mean space travel in and out of our atmosphere could reach much higher speeds as the technology improves (assuming we could figure out how to survive speeds that fast). What might the future hold? Will we see travel speed up to incredible proportions? And what about UFO sightings? This recent breakthrough in advanced speed will only improve, and the reports of UFOs seen in our skies traveling at high rates of speed will also increase with many gliders being misidentified due to their superfast rate of travel. |