The reasons for the military use aside, it's a technology that is coming. Nasa had
a successful test on a hypersonic craft .. Just takes time to work out the bugs, and
at those speeds there is little if any room for mistakes.
I am more concerned at how much of the hypersonic and spaceplane research that was originally being done by NASA have been taken over by various U.S. Military and Department of Defense organizations after NASA's budget was reduced and could no longer support the programs. A case in point was
NASA's X-37B unmanned robotic vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) spaceplane. NASA started this project back in 1999, and after a few years NASA was having a hard time keeping it funded and the project was promptly taken over by DARPA in 2004 and made classified. For all I know, technology and experience from the X-37B program may have been used to help develop the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle-2 robotic drone attack craft that DARPA just tested.
That's the sad thing when NASA loses projects-- When NASA develops a technology, it is made available to the public and industry so that everyone can benefit from it. That is how the public benefited from everything from advancements in integrated circuit chips to memory foam mattresses to Tang that all resulted from research done for the U.S. space program in the 1960's. But once DARPA or the U.S. Air Force takes over one of NASA's projects all of those technological developments become off-limits to the public and made secret. So while I am very glad to hear that we are continuing to make advancements in hypersonic and spaceplane technology because that kind of stuff is absolutely awesome, I wish that it was NASA that was still largely leading that kind of research instead of the Department of Defense so that we could all benefit from the results of that research much sooner.
