NASA pushed an unmanned scramjet to nearly mach 10 recently. The technologies are all new and never before put into effect on a flying vehicles before. NASA has broken the flying speed record twice now. The report says that possible military use in the creation of a bomber could reach anywhere on the planet (surface-level, I presume) in 2 hours or less. That’s from takeoff to dropped payload! Kind of a scary prospect. No matter what your technology, what hope have you got to prepare for a bomber coming in at 7,000mph? In a side note, NASA dropped the aircraft into the Pacific Ocean to its watery grave where it will be left. Why would you drop a couple hundred million dollars into the ocean never to be recovered? Shouldn’t they be afraid of people going down to scoop up the remains? And since when is it okay to drop a hundred tons of slag and scrap metal into the ocean?
In other news, there’s a ‘freakin laser’ mounted to a massive turret on the nosecone of a Boeing 747 ready to takeoff and blast missiles from the air. The laser fires a megawatt of power into the hull of a rocket entering boost phase to dimple the surface. That dimple apparently renders the rocket unstable and disables it (not sure if by obliteration). The thing has several other lasers mounted to it for tracking and uses some sort of telescope barrel to emit the infrared laser of destruction. I assume that it’s capabilities against missiles could also work for other targets as well. Oh yeah – it has a range of about 100 miles too. Why not mount these things to stationary turrets too? Might be nice to pick-off bombers as they pass overhead. I’m thinking of some updated clone-and-conquer games to use these new space-age technologies. What better way to end the threat of nukes, which inevitably decide the winner in every one of those games.