This will make finding out what went wrong easier.

Anomaly: failure Controlled impact with Pacific Ocean: Controlled Crash
It failed in flight and crashed into the Pacific. Period.

These things are two expensive for them to be freaking out over every little anomaly. My car doesn\'t go \"low pressure detected in tire... steering into a ditch!\" :-)

If it was heading towards land/populated area that\'s one thing, but if they crash it every time it doesn\'t work as expected... well, there\'s a lot of things they still don\'t understand about flight under these conditions, so that\'s going to be a lot of crashes. And then I\'m going to be tempted to don a snorkel and go diving for souvenirs. ;-)

Am glad it hit the Pacific Ocean after the \"anomaly\"...

The most important thing is that they can recover it and look at the flight data. If it was an uncontrolled descent, they would have lost it and the data. You have to understand that this device is traveling well outside of known conditions. The fact that is was able to maintain Mach 20 for 3 minutes is really amazing. This is what R&D is all about.

here\'s a way to travel 5,000 miles per hour without fuel. go up into space, or build a vaccum-tube and send maglev bullet pods through it.

Well, the article didn\'t tell us as much as they know at this point. However, they may learn more after the mishap recovery. Also, there surely is much data to analyse yet. I used to analyse 1553 flight test data, and often the original cause can be found. The emergency ditch system obviously worked well. In breaking new ground as they are here, it does seem they are making progress. It would have been nice if it has been a complete success, but I\'m sure they\'ll uncover what ever the cause was and overcome it.

Well , it would certainly make an idea propulsion system for sending warheads to an unfortunate receiver across the world somewhere. Just think of the \"cost savings\" of using these for armament or ordinance from anywhere in the world , being launched with the assist of a booster rocket or launched from another craft pretty much undetected. There would be no purpose to send our military anywhere , just bomb them from an anonymous place. It flies so high in the atmosphere where there is virtually no air , so therefore not much of a sound that would be detectable from the ground at all or no acoustic signature to detect. About the only way it could even be detected flying up there is from the exhaust infra-red signature just like a stealth plane. Of course if it was flying at mach 20 , there would not be much anyone could do about it anyway .

I think the case is that what is left after the flight is an empty biscuit tin with a pointy end and a hand full of onboard instruments and sensors.
When they fly, all the relevant data is gathered and what hits the water is just scrap - not worth collecting or caring about.
This time tho - rather than have it go into a plain crash and smash into the ocean, they were able to modify the design into being a self stabilising and landable configuration - all steps in the process of designing fast and reusable air craft.

While I think that the biggest use of scramjets will be to lower the cost of orbital insertion, if they get the thing to fly reliably it could be safer than trying to negotiate the scrapyard we call LEO.