DARPA Looking into Hypersonic Bombers

while(true) writes "As reported previously here on Slashdot, hypersonic jets from NASA has recently been in the news. Now DARPA is showing interest in the military applications and is to host a conference on hypersonic unmanned bombers. These bombers could be based in the US and yet strike from space at any place in the world within 2 hours. BBC has a report about these air/spacecraft that could be operational by 2025."

Comments

Great but...

[linuxkrn]

So we can respond in two hours, now all we need is intel that isn't two DAYS old...

why does this not appear in American news?

[TomRitchford]

I saw this on the BBC this morning and looked around CNN, the New York Times site, and the other usual suspects in vain for any word of this. Surely this has some importance to people in the United States, since we'll be paying for it in our taxes?

But for some reason, the mainstream media in the US has chosen to simply roll over and play dead for the government. Remember all the play given to that boring and irrelevant Lewinsky case? But the fact that the government lied to get us into a war, the fact that the government has marked the enquiry on what went wrong on 9/11 as classified, crucial things involving life and death for thousands of Americans, have barely been mentioned here in the US.

You wonder whether the Republican Party doesn't simply have thousands of incriminating photographs in a file somewhere...

Its is now 1:20 Pacific Daylight Time...

[nadador]

... which is apparently the peak US-bashing time on Slashdot. The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah.

Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.

An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).

Hypersonic flight, whether ballistic or not, is incredibly hard to control. Manned or unmanned, incredibly hard to control. This sort of project will develop the skills and capabilities needed to engineer such an audacious plan. That knowledge barely exists now. How do you build something so insanely complex and difficult to control? How do you make it reliable? Someday, that knowledge of how to build impressive stuff will be used to build impressive stuff you'll use everyday.