Looks like they need to add a paperclip to the nose, or tweak the wings a bit. Why does this remind me of our folded paper planes?

How \'bout some data on the price of this super-expensive toy, especially the cost to we the unwilling taxpayers? I\'m getting damned sick and tired of finding out this garbage is going on and without our input of whether or not we want it. Sounds to me like a super-duper, unmanned stealth-drone bomber that can be launched from here in the U.S. to rain death and destruction down from the skies anywhere in the world on whoever our enlightened leaders say is our enemy. Welcome to the future of endless techno war, folks. Some would call it hell on earth.

LOL 'paperclip' good thinking - I just wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on this program. I mean who on earth is so important that they need the capacity to be anywhere in less than 60 minutes I mean who cares can we pour those billions into something with a more real world applicability and benefit please, at the rate were going the earth will shake us off long before sub orbital atmospheric aircraft flight ever reaches the mainstream chrimany the Concord was too far advanced for us to manage safety it seems, sheesh, let's keep raising taxes and debt limits so we can keep projects like this funded PU-LEESE!

At nine minutes of flight time at that speed it would have flown about 1950 miles, about a third of the way to China...

Yes, because it\'s so much better to stop spending on defense and hope no one ever attacks us again.
And this is the way R&D works, folks. Complex systems rarely, if ever, work the first time. Sometimes they never work at all. But if we only attempt things we already know how to do, we never advance at all. IF this eventually works, it has the potential to let us drastically reduce the size of our armed forces, because we wouldn\'t need to maintain air bases everywhere in the world.

@ Neil. Total cost to taxpayers so far is about $320 million. Pretty cheap considering what we could do with this kind of technology. Compared to the $1 trillion national healthcare fiasco going on right now, it\'s a drop in the bucket @ 0.00032% of that total waste of money.

you know, if it wasn\'t for the military you wouldn\'t have things like oh, freedom. Oh yes, cell phones, GPS, and yes even the internet. did i mention freedom? I think experiments like these are awesome, keep it up Big Sammy.

Always nice to look at the bright side of things Neil :-) Actually many, many people considered the NASA Space Program of the \"man to the moon\" era and beyond as little more than a weaponization advancement platform. Whatever it was, the outcomes of that program have been astounding and had a significant impact on all aspects of life. Going where we haven\'t, going faster than we ever have; pushing the limits often get us much more than we even imagined going in.

Military tech is cool, but I agree that maybe we should maybe cut back on the R&D while we are paying so much for the troops on the ground in our wars. If we could take the military down to 10% of our budget, that would be cool (or keep it at 20% and find good ways to reduce the other parts of our budget too, like unified national health care and some sensible adjustments to SS). Also, if the military halts R&D in wartime and then brings it back during peacetime, defense contractors will suddenly have an incentive to actually help end wars instead of simply being interested in perpetuating them. Let\'s face it, you wouldn\'t hand tribal leaders RPG\'s if you knew it would cut into other funding for the next 50 years, and if you were really smart, you might even stop selling guns to drug lords.

Wow, Hypersonic, divergent phugoids.