I hate it when my
scramjet test platform departs from controlled flight. Better luck next time.
Oh. The X-43 is unmanned, and fairly small as self-propelled supersonic machines go -- about 12 feet long. It looks exceedingly cool though -- a sleek black wedge that Darth Vader would probably covet.
CNN.com simply said it "fell into the ocean". Someday I'm going to write up a node about the observed accuracy of major
news media -- every time I know anything about the subject, I find factual errors in
newspaper articles, for example. I try to remember this when reading the other articles on subjects I know little about.