It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) Mach 20 aircraft, and apparently, that pesky glider is so fast that it's rather difficult to track.
DARPA this morning conducted a test flight for the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, or HTV-2, but the agency lost contact with the vehicle after it separated from its booster, the Associated Press reports.
The HTV-2 took off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base around 11:15am Eastern time. About two hours later, DARPA announced on its Twitter feed that it had lost contact with the vehicle and had been unable to regain it.
Few details of what happened were provided, but DARPA tweeted that there is "more to follow."
The HTV-2 is said to be capable of hitting speeds of up to 13,000 miles an hour, fast enough to get from New York to L.A. in 12 minutes. It would also be able to identify a target on Earth and send a missile strike within an hour. But those capabilities remains theoretical for now.
This morning's flight might have been the last chance for the HTV-2. It was last tested in April 2010, when it befell a similar fate. DARPA lost contact with the aircraft after just nine minutes when it disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, never to be recovered.
DARPA made some changes to the HTV-2 for its second test, but it seems those changes weren't enough to reverse the outcome, and it might be the end of the road for the aircraft. The agency has no plans to build a third HTV-2, and as Wired noted Wednesday, because it's not likely that a branch of the military would pick up DARPA's research.