Sorry to everyone who is unemployed, but HEY! The Pentagon finally has the Mach-20 missile!

Link: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/08/pentagons-mach-20-missile/

The Pentagon has been working for nearly a decade on an audacious plan to strike anywhere on the planet in less than an hour. Wednesday could prove to be the do-or-die moment for that plan.
At approximately 7 a.m. PDT, a three-stage Minotaur IV Lite rocket is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will puncture the atmosphere, and then release an experimental aircraft. That aircraft, known as the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, will then come hurtling back to Earth at nearly 20 times the speed of sound, splashing down near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 4,100 miles away. Total flight time: about 30 minutes.

-SNIP-

The Defense Department is pursuing three different families of technologies to accomplish the task. One is to rearm nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. But that runs the risk of accidentally triggering a response from another atomic power, who might mistake it for a nuke. Oops.

A second effort is to build shorter-range cruise missiles that can fly at five or six times the speed of sound. But that X-51 Waverider project is running into complications: A June flight test ended prematurely, for reasons that are still unclear.

Some variation of the HTV-2 is the third choice; to some in the defense community, it’s the most appealing. The HTV-2 spends most of its time flying through the atmosphere, before it dives down to hits its target. That means it’s unlikely to be mistaken for a nuclear missile, which spends most of its time above the atmosphere. World War III averted.
Yet despite the aircraft’s potentially revolutionary role — and despite the tens of millions of dollars poured into the Falcon program every year — Darpa was somewhat cavalier in its first test of HTV-2. The HTV-2 has an unusual, wedge shape; think of it like a 13,000 mph slice of deep-dish pizza. In theory, the shape should provide more lift. But no one had really flown anything quite like the HTV-2 before.




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Edit: Things like this are just a huge slap in the face to our struggling citizens. When will they realize that? NO ONE in the world hates us that much to even NEED one of these, and those who do feel threatened just by our nuclear supply alone. These weapons are pointless. There's only about 5 countries that hate us.

nm...the MIC would probably force them to build a deathstar!

as well as anything I've ever read/heard. :shrug:

And, if they're not sufficiently threatening anymore - well, we can just as easily use it against that guy on the camel carrying an RPG.

They're already here.

big boys. sigh

:silly:

COMING TO SAVE THE MOTHERFUCKING DAY, YEAH!

:nuke:

Once our Alien Overlords hear about this Mach 20 missile, heads will roll.

Whatever it wants, it gets.

Isn't that worth millions of starving Americans? =\

Doesn't mean Russia necessarily would attack, especially not in this day & age, but even today it's a possibility we mustn't entirely ignore, even though it IS admittedly far more remote than back in, say, 1983.

If they dont have them already

They poured TENS OF MILLIONS into this over at least the last decade. Just this one single weapon alone could have had hundreds of thousands of people working. Yet, defense cuts off the table? Who are we preparing to use this on, an alien invasion?! This country's priorities are FUCKED!

woohoo!!!

Can it house people? Transport people? Clothe people? Create any new jobs?

No? And you wonder why we have a moribund economy.

The price seems a bit steep though. The big question is... how do they keep the cheese on at 13,000 mph?

Lost contact. Guess they'll just have to try a third time, cause you know they won't defund that damn thing.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/08/11/scitech/main20091239.shtml