Scramjets, hold the hype

A good child of the space age, I was thrilled to read about NASA's recent successful scramjet test. Yet even a nonspecialist would have wondered about some of the claimed possibilities of the new technology ("fly to Australia in two hours!"). Rand Simberg offers a useful corrective; upshot is that there will be little to no useful spinoff in either commercial aviation or space travel -- the real benefits will be military:

What it will be used for is, among others, hypersonic cruise missiles, able to be launched from a continent away and take out a target in a couple hours from warning, or from a neighboring country or location in ten minutes (think Indian Ocean and bin Laden in Afghanistan here). Such systems would have the speed of ICBMs, with the capability of being recallable.

Posted by David on March 31, 2004 9:48 AM