The U.S. Air Force says its most ambitious test of its X-51 WaveRider hypersonic aircraft ended in failure less than a minute after launch on Tuesday, due to a flaw in one of the craft's control fins. The X-51 broke apart after it was dropped from a B-52 bomber, with pieces falling into the Pacific Ocean, a spokesman for the project told me today.

If the test had proceeded as planned, the Boeing-built X-51 would have shot through the sky for a five-minute flight at a speed of up to 3,600 mph (5,800 kilometers per hour), or six times the speed of sound. Instead, the Air Force is going back to the drawing board.

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Hypersonic scramjet propulsion has been widely touted as eventually opening up the way for flights between London and New York in less than an hour. But in reality, the first application is more likely to come in the form of super-fast cruise missiles. (Scramjet is a short term for "supersonic combustion ramjet," and there have been many efforts through the years to perfect scramjet-powered aircraft.)

In a statement, the Air Force said the unmanned craft was successfully launched from the B-52 over Point Mugu Naval Air Warfare Center Sea Range, in the Pacific near California's coast, at about 11:36 a.m. PT (2:36 p.m. ET) on Tuesday. The X-51's rocket booster fired as planned — but 16 seconds later, a fault was identified with the cruiser control fin, the Air Force said. When the X-51 separated from the booster, about 15 seconds later, the cruiser couldn't maintain control and was lost.

"'Came apart' is the term that they used," said Daryl Mayer, a spokesman for the Air Force's 88th Air Base Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The WaveRider never had a chance to reach supersonic speed.

"It is unfortunate that a problem with this subsystem caused a termination before we could light the scramjet engine," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory, said in today's statement. "All our data showed we had created the right conditions for engine ignition, and we were very hopeful to meet our test objectives."

The Air Force said the control system had proven reliable during the X-51A's two previous flights — including a successful test in May 2010 and a not-so-successful test in June 2011.

Today's statement said program officials will conduct a "rigorous evaluation" of this week's test to assess all the factors behind the failure. One of the four X-51A vehicles remains, but officials have not decided when or if that vehicle will fly, the Air Force said. The X-51 project's cost has been estimated at $140 million.

More about supersonic flight:

• Video: What the X-51 was designed to do
• Futuristic space plane closer to reality
• Supersonic biplane puts an end to sonic booms
• Supersonic drone set to fly in 2013, if ...

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Are we on the brink of an arms race over zombie ray guns? You might think so, based on the alarms being rung over Russia's potential to create mind-scrambling weapons. But the reality is that it'll be a long time before we have to worry about super-soldiers taking over our brains.

The Americans as well as the Russians have been looking into psychotronic weapons for more than 15 years. You can find ample references to the subject on the Internet, including a feature published by U.S. News and World Report in 1997 and a report written for a U.S. Army publication in 1998.

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Such weapons purport to take advantage of the effect that pulsed microwaves can have on brain activity. Some researchers have reported an effect known as microwave hearing, in which a directed beam of radiation produces a sensation of buzzing, clicking or hissing in the head. "This technology in its crudest form could be used to distract individuals," according to a declassified Army review of non-lethal weapons.

Theoretically, electromagnetic beams could cause an epileptic-type seizure, or involuntary eye motion leading to dizziness and nausea. Military researchers have also looked into using infrasound or laser beams to confuse or incapacitate a foe — but when you start going down this road, before you know it, you're talking about remote viewing, ESP and all the way-out concepts chronicled in "The Men Who Stare at Goats."

The Russian connection
The Russians have looked into these potential technologies at least as deeply as the Pentagon has, and you're hearing about zombie ray guns now because top Russian officials started talking about psychotronic weapons a couple of weeks ago. That has brought the subject back from the dead like a ... well, you know.

Moscow is planning to set up an advanced military research agency similar to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov referred to those plans on March 22. Here's what the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying during a meeting with Prime Minister (and President-elect) Vladimir Putin:

"The development of weaponry based on new physics principles — direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, etc. — is part of the state arms procurement program for 2011-2020 ... We will draft the proposals for the next program by December 2012."

Putin, who begins his presidential term next month, pledged during the campaign that he would beef up Russia's military. In February, he laid out his national security plan in an article published by Rossiiskaya Gazeta. At the time, most of the news reports picked up on Putin's call for almost $770 billion in spending over the course of a decade to modernize the armed forces. But Putin also observed that the current balance of power, held in place by nuclear arsenals, could well shift in the future due to new technologies. It was in that context that he brought up the psychotronic angle:

"The military capability of a country in space or information countermeasures, especially in cyberspace, will play a great, if not decisive, role in determining the nature of an armed conflict. In the more distant future, weapons systems based on new principles (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other technology) will be developed. All this will, in addition to nuclear weapons, provide entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals. Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons but will be more 'acceptable' in terms of political and military ideology. In this sense, the strategic balance of nuclear forces will play a gradually diminishing role in deterring aggression and chaos."

In the wake of Serdyukov's comments, folks dredged up Putin's reference to "psychophysical" weapons, added in some background about the research into electromagnetic mind control, and voila: the zombie ray gun. Last week, Britain's Daily Mail suggested that the guns "could be used against Russia's enemies and, perhaps, its own dissidents by the end of the decade."

The Mail also quoted Anatoly Tsyganov, head of the Military Forecasting Center in Moscow, as saying microwaves could make for "a highly serious weapon":

"When it was used for dispersing a crowd and it was focused on a man, his body temperature went up immediately as if he was thrown into a hot frying pan. Still, we know very little about this weapon and even special forces guys can hardly cope with it."

Based on that comment, Tsyganov was apparently talking about a different kind of non-lethal weapon, an analog to the millimeter-wave "pain ray" that the U.S. military has been working on for years. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the beam of radiation can be directed at a crowd, producing a severe burning sensation on the skin that forces the target to jump away instinctively.

How fast can mad scientists work?
There are a few problems with the pain-ray technology: It takes hours to build up enough power for the beam generator, and the system reportedly works only in clear atmospheric conditions. Nevertheless, testing of the "Silent Guardian" system is continuing, not only for military applications but also for use against oceangoing pirates and rioting prisoners.

The bottom line is that Russia certainly seems to be on track to set up its own DARPA-like "Department of Mad Scientists," working on heat rays, mind-altering electromagnetic beams and heaven knows what else. But there's nothing in the comments from Putin and Serdyukov to suggest that the Russians are anywhere close to having psychotronic weapons. In fact, Putin makes it sound as if the next frontier in warfare won't be the zombie ray gun but the coordinated cyber-attack. And that's scary enough for me.

What do you think? Please feel free to register your opinion in the unscientific poll above, and the comment space below.

Update for 11 p.m. ET: A couple of commenters noted that the zombielike picture that originally accompanied this item had a caption that didn't quite square with the lore for the "Left 4 Dead" video game. The more I learned about the game, the more I saw that the picture really didn't fit. So I've put in the picture of a gun-toting Putin instead. Thanks to the gamers who pointed out the problem. If I ever play "Left 4 Dead," I'll want you on my side.

More about weapons technologies:

• U.S. military seeks 'stunning' new weapon
• Navy's ray gun disables boat with laser light
• Railgun tests could lead to super-weapon by 2020
• Military-funded brain science sparks controversy

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Robotic helicopters capable of ferrying 3.5 tons of cargo in a single load are at work supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan, according to a defense technology blog.

The helicopter is a Lockheed Martin / Kaman Aerospace K-Max designed for battlefield cargo resupply. Confirmation of its use in Afghanistan means "we're now in the age of unmanned logistics," Paul Mcleary writes for Aviation Week's Ares blog. 

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The technology will put fewer soldiers at risk flying over enemy lines on re-supply missions. That doesn't mean, however, that the military will put the helicopters directly in harm's way. 

"Most of the missions will be conducted at night and at higher altitudes," Marine Capt. Caleb Joiner, mission commander, said in a news release. "This will allow us to keep out of small arms range."

While the helicopter should save lives on the battlefield, how might robotic choppers and other supply vehicles translate to civilian life? Feel free to share your wishes in the comments section below.

More on military robots:

• Military faces overload from robot swarms
• Dog vs. robot: Which is the better soldier?
• Military developing robot-insect cyborg
• Scientists debate a robot war
• Future of war: Private robot armies fight it out

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

You can run, you can hide, but the masterminds in the military's high-tech research arm have their eyes on a gadget that will allow them to hear your racing heart even as you try to get lost in a crowd.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has the technology to hear your heart as you crouch and cower in a dark corner across the room. Now the agency aims to increase its ability to do this at even greater distances, through walls — and even hear and distinguish between multiple hearts at once.

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The technology could help chase down terrorists who set off a bomb and then scatter into the fleeing crowd, for example. It could also help rescue victims trapped in the rubble from the explosion.

The goal of the agency's "Biometrics-at-a-distance" program is a technology that "can record human vital signs at a distance greater than 10 meters using non-line-of-sight and non-invasive or non-contact methods" and do this for up to 10 people at once.

The technology to do this, the agency suspects, is likely to build from electrocardiograms, which measure the heart's electrical activity. This is what doctors use, for example, to diagnose heart disease in people.

[Via Gizmodo]

More on DARPA tech:

• DARPA wants smarter machines
• 'Flying Humvee' moves ahead
• DARPA offers $50,000 prize for reading shredded messages
• How MIT team won balloon search-and-rescue challenge

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

A spherical flying machine that can take off and land just about anywhere, roll along walls and hover like a helicopter was recently unveiled by Japan's Ministry of Defense. 

The beach-ball-size machine consists of commercially available parts that cost about U.S. $1,400. The researchers built it to study a problem associated with their aircraft R&D, as explained in the video above from DigInfo. 

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"We have a plane that can stand up vertically after flying horizontally. But the problem with that plane is take-off and landing are very difficult," the researcher explains. "As one idea to solve that problem, we thought of making the exterior round."

Since the flying ball works like a propeller plane, it can fly forward at high speed using wings, which a helicopter can't do, DigInfo notes. And three gyro sensors keeps it moving along even after bumping into an obstacle.

Ultimately, an aircraft developed with this technology could be used for search-and-rescue missions in otherwise hard-to-reach places. For more information, check out the video above. 

More on defense robots:

• Robots hook up to fly as a single unit
• Man flies with jet pack at the London boat show
• Robotic insects take flight on wings made using printers
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A stealth U.S. Navy drone — one designed to take off from and land on moving aircraft carriers at sea — successfully retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration for the first time, engineers announced today. 

The test flight at Edwards Air Force Base on Sept. 30 also helped validate the hardware and software that will allow the X-47B to land with precision at sea, among the harshest aviation environments known, said the drone's maker, Northrop Grumman.

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The tail-less plane is 38 feet long and has a 62-foot wingspan. In the images released today it looks like a UFO straight out of a 1950s cartoon. 

The military is hoping unmanned aircraft will allow aircraft carriers to remain out of reach of land-based missile systems while they launch airstrikes and reconnaissance missions. 

First flight of the X-47B took place in February. The latest test flight is part of on-going "envelope expansion" flights used to demonstrate the aircraft performance under a variety altitude, speed and fuel-load conditions. 

"Reaching this critical test point demonstrates the growing maturity of the air system and its readiness to move to the next phase of flight testing," Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS program manager for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector, said in statement.

The aircraft will transition to Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Md., later this year for further land-based testing, and will move to at-sea demonstrations in 2013. By 2014, Northrop Grumman intends to demonstrate autonomous in-air refueling.

More on Navy technology:

• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy raygun disables boat with new high energy laser
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones
• New robotic stealth fighter jet set to soar

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Lab scientists are pitching a new high-tech laser that is able to detect roadside bombs before they explode, potentially thwarting the deadliest weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, account for 60 percent of coalition soldiers' deaths, according to NATO figures. Finding a way to improve on — or at least replace — bomb sniffing dogs is therefore a priority abroad and at home. 

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Using lasers to do the dirty work is an ongoing effort. This latest approach combines short and long pulses of light to excite and "listen" to the fingerprint of individual molecules, allowing soldiers to pick out explosives in a crowded urban environment.

"We are using an ultrashort pulse that whenever it gets to the molecule at the target, it gives it a kick in a very, very short timescale," Marcos Dantus, who is leading the research at Michigan State University, explained to me on Monday. "The molecule starts vibrating." 

Dantus likened this vibration to an individual ring tone people might put on their cellphones. The longer laser pulse "listens" to this ring tone, allowing soldiers to know if the target is a bomb. 

The technique is so sensitive, he added, that it can distinguish between molecules that have the same chemical formula but a slight different arrangement of atoms. What's more, a laser no more powerful than the ones used during PowerPoint presentations is required for the technique to work. 

This differs from an approach Princeton University engineers unveiled this March that bounces ultraviolet pulses off chemicals in the air, carrying the fingerprint of the molecules.

"Our approach uses 100 times less energy per pulse, can detect much lower concentrations," Dantus noted in a follow-up email exchange. "Our method was designed for solid targets with approximately one -billionth of a gram of an explosive mixed with other compounds." 

The laser bomb sniffing technology is currently undergoing development in the laboratory. It has been shown to work at distances up to about 40 feet, though should be possible at distances of 330 feet. "Beyond that, we need engineers who know how to handle longer distances," Dantus said.

His team is currently seeking funding to bring the technology from the lab out into the field. If secured, Dantus said, it would take about a year to deploy a system that can function, for example, in a mobile unit. 

More stories on military technology:

• New laser detects bombs right out of thin air
• Bomb sniffing robots put to test in Iraq
• Military faces info overload from robot swarms
• Military plans hummingbird-sized spies
• Navy gets fix for speed need

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A paper on the laser technology appears in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters and is available here. The research is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

The future of war at sea is looking fast and agile.

The U.S. Navy will christen on Saturday a catamaran-style cargo ship that can zip through shallow waters at speeds up to 40 miles per hour, loaded down with 1.2 million pounds worth of gear.

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The joint high speed vessel, named Spearhead, is the first of ten 338-foot-long aluminum dual-hull boats that are being constructed by Austral USA in Mobile, Ala., as part of a contract worth a reported $1.6 billion.

The company is also under a $3.5 billion contract to build ten trimaran Littoral Combat Ships, which can cruise at more than 45 miles per hour.

This need for speed stems from a desire for ships to operate in near-shore environments in the post Cold-War era, explained Loren Thompson, a defense analyst and chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

"The Navy decided that its future was going to be mainly about influencing developments ashore," he told me Thursday. "It therefore started thinking about what sorts of vessels could survive close to shore and the conclusion it came to was speed mattered a lot."

Fast ships, for example, can outrun enemy warships and torpedoes, and the nimble agility of these new boats also allow quick maneuvers to dodge other types of dangers, Thompson added.

The JHSV being christened on Saturday in Mobile can berth 146 passengers and carry an additional 312 in airline-style seating. A flight deck allows helicopters and rotary air vehicles to take off and land. It has a range of more than 1,380 miles.

The ship is essentially a giant ferry, Thompson noted, and neither it nor the [Littoral] combat ship was "designed with the goal of conducting highly-classified sensitive missions. They were designed with the goal of getting around fast."

The highly-classified missions could be conducted by ships such as the stealthy Ghost, being produced by Juliet Marine in New Hampshire.

More on military tech:

• New stealth boat touted as ideal for special ops
• Navy testing two pricey, super-fast warships
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy raygun disables boat with new high energy laser

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

 

The ongoing military campaign against Afghan insurgents may get a boost from new computer software designed to zero in on the locations of weapons caches and warlords.

"The idea is to say, look, this is a large area, where do you target your resources," Venkatramanan Subrahmanian, co-director of the Lab for Computational Cultural Dynamics at the University of Maryland, told me today.

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The software, called SCARE (Spatio-Cultural Abductive Reasoning Engine), combines data on terrain, road networks, tribal affiliations and past attacks with a computational analysis technique called geospatial abduction to help locate the enemy.

Geospatial abduction is a way to infer unobserved geographic phenomena (such as where explosives are hidden) from a set of known observations and constraints, such as the locations of past attacks and the roads that have been used to move around large caches of bomb-making materials.

Optimized SCARE
SCARE was first used to analyze attacks in Iraq involving IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and predict the locations of IED weapons caches. Subrahmanian's team optimized the second generation of the software for use in Afghanistan.

Applying the technology to Afghanistan presented several new challenges, including the varied terrain, the vast area that had to be covered (360 by 270 miles, or 580 by 430 kilometers), and the influence of multiple tribes.

"There are inter-tribe rivalries, so clearly tribesmen who carry out certain attacks are more likely to want to seek refuge with parties they trust, which happens to be their own tribe," Subrahmanian said. "So we had to understand the geography of the region both in terms of terrain and roads as well as tribal affiliations."

Other constraints on the insurgents include a desire to carry out their attacks near their home bases or weapons caches, but not too close to them.

And since the software is designed to find large weapons caches and high-level insurgent leaders, "We use an assumption to restrict movements of the insurgents to the road," Paulo Shakarian, a US Army Captain and PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland told me.

Zeroing in
In an evaluation of the software's effectiveness in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, it pinpointed the insurgents and their weapons to regions of less than 39 square miles (100 square kilometers), that contained an average of 4.8 villages and a density of high-value targets 35 times greater than in the provinces as a whole.

"What that tells a commander of international security forces in Afghanistan is that four or five villages are the places he can zero in on and bring his other assets to bear," said Subrahmanian.

For example, the commander might decide to get aerial imagery of the villages with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

"With a UAV, you have to plan out the route, there is only so much fuel, there is only so much of a camera lens to look at things, so you need to be able to reduce the area you are searching for quite a bit in order to make that platform effective," Shakarian noted.

But while the technology helps pinpoint where the insurgents are likely to be found today, won't they just adapt? No, they probably won't, Subrahmanian said, since they are still forced to operate under the same constraints: terrain, roads and tribal affiliations.

"Even if they read our paper, all they know is that we know they have to operate under certain constraints, which they know we know already," he said. "So we don't see this as giving them any kind of advantage of any sort."

What's more, Shakarian added, the software depends on the data input to the system and that information is closely guarded.

Disease detection
In addition to military applications, the technology, which as cost about $300,000 to develop, is being tested for use in identifying animal hosts for certain viruses that spread disease in Africa, Subrahmanian noted.

"The idea is you see where the outbreak occurs and then try to infer back from that locations of the animals that host the viruses that cause the diseases and presumably the public health organizations could look at those regions and decide what action to take," he said.

A paper on SCARE-S2 has been accepted for publication in the 2011 International Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

More stories on military software:

• Pentagon seeks billions to battle terror abroad
• Today's G.I.s train with video games
• Computer has eye for suspicious behavior
• Robot warriors will get a guide to ethics
• U.S. Army turns to phone apps to win wars
• Pentagon: Insurgents intercepted spy videos
• Fog of war demystified by financial 'power law'

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).