For the record, I'm as big a detractor of the "military industrial complex" as anyone. That said, the "military industrial complex" brought you the transistor, GPS, the Internet and a whole bunch of other stuff you take for granted. As anyone who has ever played Civilization can tell you, many of the technological advances in the history of the human race have started with "can we kill somebody with it?" and then made their way into the "quality of life" segment. More importantly, the exact same legislators that would happily starve NASA to nothing will jump at the chance to pay for newer, better ways to kill bad guys. ...which is what we're looking at here. The "Advanced Hypersonic Weapon" is the smallest iteration of the DARPA Falcon project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project Every aspect of this project is some variation on the theme of "get something going really fucking fast and see how long we can make it fly." They're basically instrumentation packages thrown through the air in order to generate data on hypersonic flight, because data on hypersonic flight is extraordinarily sparse. Ever looked into what it takes to create a hypersonic wind tunnel? It's kind of a bitch: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_wind_tunnel Such a bitch, in fact, that when the HTV-2 goes tits-up 9 minutes in, twice, the air force regards it as a roaring success: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-08/darpas-htv-... See, thing is, if you want actual data above Mach 9 you get to do it for less than half a second at a time. Cruising along for Mach 10 for 9 minutes? That's such a data windfall it's like that happy scene at the end of TWISTER where Dorothy releases her little cans into the tornado. As far as "bombing the fuck out of someone within an hour", well, a few things. 1) Trident missiles have been going faster than this since 1979. 2) The Soviets deployed a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System in 1969, giving them first-strike capability in 30 minutes (the primary impetus for the SALT treaty). 3) Any ballistic missile system gives you this capability; the US developed a conventional warhead system for the Trident II in 2006 but chose not to deploy it. 4) Not to put too fine a point on it, but in order to launch this particular testbed, you have to put it on a Minotaur, which is a re-purposed MX missile, which was capable of delivering 10 300kT nuclear warheads to the other side of the planet with an accuracy of a couple dozen feet, in 1986: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Peacekeep... So. This "Hypersonic bomb" of which you speak, as a weapon, is slower, less efficient, more error-prone and with vastly less payload than that which we have deployed since Gerald Ford was president. As a test bed, however, it's the first real project to pierce high-mach flight in a measurable way. As far as I'm concerned, if the DoD wants to spend my tax dollars on collecting data (rather than indiscriminately killing Pashtun up in the 'Kush) they're more than welcome to.
