Hello, DARPA.
Yes I know you have the coolest job ever, but tape your boner to your leg for a moment and listen. You’re probably pretty psyched, it’s been a good year already for you. You got to launch this thing:
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| Super cool. |
The X-37B is a 30-foot mini-shuttle that can orbit the Earth at 5 miles per second and could be used for communications, spying, even to deliver very large bombs very precisely and very quickly. All of which are awesome. Oh, and it’s unmanned, so it can hang out up there for months. Granted, some pesky kids managed to snap a photo of the super-secret space plane that no one’s supposed to know about, but still. Point for you.
| Pesky kids. |
Then there’s this beast right here.
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| Super cooler. |
That’s the FA-18 Super Hornet, and it’s one badass motherfucker of a fighter jet. It’ll do basically whatever you want to whoever you want to do it to, and it’ll do it at supersonic speeds. Which is awesome. Well recently, you DARPA bigshot you, you got it to break supersonic speeds with biofuel. Saving America and the earth, all at the same time. Good for you. Have another point.
THEN you got to play with this:
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| Super whoa. |
That is possibly the coolest airborne thing of any kind ever. It’s the HTV-2, also known as the Hypersonic Glider, which sounds like the best Christmas toy in existence but in fact means that it’s a carbon-shelled unmanned vehicle that’s launched from a rocket and is so fast that you literally cannot see it coming, not that it would matter if you could because it can get from any point on Earth to shoving a warhead up your ass in less time than it takes for you to cook breakfast. Hyperbole aside, it goes thirteen thousand miles an hour. So yeah.
And what did you do with this pinnacle of badassery, you titans of aerospace engineering?
You lost it. Sure, technically it “lost contact with its operators,” but really you lost it. You set the fastest thing ever off somewhere, and lost it.
I’m sure it’ll turn up somewhere when it blasts a blistering crater in the ground the size of a small city.
Good work.
Unreasonably Dangerous Onion Rings 
Dammit, I hate it when I lose something important, whether it be a keg of black powder (a la Hunter S. Thompson), or a multi-million dollar supersonic glider. Someone surely needs a slap on the wrists for this.
kinda hard to lose somethng that big. Why didn't they install some gps device so they know it's location?
From what I read, they were using flight path data to track it down. I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if GPS can't track something that fast. It would be moving into and out of the range of the satellites so fast that they wouldn't have time to communicate with it. There are only 32 GPS satellites in orbit right now.