Exclusive: new super-dart may have been taken out by cyber attack

The loss yesterday of the second unmanned Falcon HV-2 hypersonic test plane in the last fifteen months is being investigated as a possible ‘third party intervention’ by US Military Intelligence, The Slog has been told.

The Falcon HTV-2 is designed to travel at 20 times the speed of sound…fast enough for it to get from New York to Los Angeles in 12 minutes. But yesterday, just 10 minutes after the plane was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the test flight disappeared from tracking radar. The revolutionary arrowhead-shaped vehicle was expected to separate from a rocket near the peak of its ascent and glide back to earth, reaching hypersonic speed before rolling and plunging into the Pacific. However, although after slightly under 10 minutes DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) tweeted that the mission was ‘on track, entering glide phase’, some kind of ‘functional anomaly’ occurred. Half an hour later, DARPA admitted that the plane was lost, and had hit the ocean…but not as intended.

Although the HTV-2 development programme is still in its early stages, military intelligence officials are said to be ‘highly concerned’ that yesterday’s failure is almost a carbon copy of the previous one in May 2010. In November last year, DARPA said it had ‘solved’ the first loss: its independent engineering review board concluded the probable cause of the anomaly was a ‘higher-than predicted yaw, which coupled into roll, thus exceeding the available control capability at the time of the anomaly’. At the time, David Neyland, DARPA’s tactical technology office director, told the media that “Engineers will adjust the vehicle’s centre of gravity, decrease the angle of attack flown, and use the onboard reaction control system to augment the vehicle flaps when HTV-2 flies next summer.” But clearly, this made no difference.

I understand that there are two intelligence concerns – one the similar timing of the two losses; and a second – apparently far more significant – that initial signs suggest although the HTV-2 has an ‘autonomous flight termination capacity’ (suicide rather than create danger to innocent civilians) the loss was NOT a result of this. US Defence Officials vehemently denied that last night, describing speculation about which foreign power might have incapacitated the test-plane as “pointless and irrelevant”.

Designed to be capable of 17,600 miles per hour, the Falcon would revolutionise air travel, but its primary objective is to create a defence fleet of HTV-2 darts with a response speed so far ahead of anything developed by a potential enemy, it would effectively make the US immune from nuclear attack – or any aggression against its interests globally. This second loss suggests that, if the intelligence chiefs are right, the one area where America is thought to be miles behind China and Russia  – cyber attack – remains the flaw in the idea.

“The obvious suspect isn’t necessarily Beijing,” a Washington source told The Slog within the last hour, “You can organise a cyber-hit from anywhere – and the Russians have more to lose from physical developments in weapons capability than the Chinese, because they’re so far behind now….and short of money.”

The source ruled out the possibility of Falcon having been shot down.

“Today, the Pentagon has 100% trace capacity to detect physical interference with a flight,” he said, adding, “And frankly, only a fluke could hit this thing”.