Its too bad about the failure of the X51A test flight, but that sort of thing is to be expected when developing new technology.

But what’s the point of this program, anyway? If supersonic air transport is of little or no commercial interest, its highly unlikely hypersonic flight will be. Development costs are enormous, and deployment and operational expenses will probably be intolerable. And I can’t visualize a scientific application.

I can’t see a military mission for this platform either. Weapons and sensors can be delivered with pin-point accuracy with cruise and ballistic missiles, and with conventional or stealth aircraft or drones. And it can be done in minutes. I can’t see the advantage of greatly increasing the speed of the delivery system when most of the mission time will be devoted to pre-flight prep and mission planning anyway. I can’t imagine any target or enemy being worth the multi-billion dollar costs of development and deployment, either.

I’ve heard fanatasies of being able to get a tactical team to a distant target in minutes, but those missions require months of prep, training, and remote target reconnaissannce. It may have taken those choppers hours to get to bin Laden, but I’m sure we were preparing for that raid for months. Besides, once your team completes its mission, how do you get them back out? And what if the bad guys capture the craft?

And even if you can come up with a scenario that requires sending a package somewhere across the planet in minutes, for this to be effective we will either need an unrealistically extreme range capability for this bird, or we will have to have launch facilities kept at hair trigger readiness status scattered all over the planet to properly exploit this capability.

As V’ger once remarked, “This device serves no purpose.” It is a solution looking for a problem. I’m ready to be corrected on this, I like neat tech as much as the next guy, but until someone can come up with a convincing cost/benefit analysis, this is just a fun project for engineers to play with, and bureaucrats to build their careers on. We’re bettter off spending the money upgrading our B-52s, or improving our deep water submarine rescue technology.