Perhaps you did not read the page you linked to. Project Pluto was cancelled, in large part, because the powers that be decided that flying an unshielded nuclear reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium which spit super-heated radio-nucleotides out it's ass end was a bad idea. Besides the bombs it was slated to carry, the plan was to crash the plane into an enemy target because the radioactive fallout from the reactor would do substantial damage. Let's hope it never crashes over our own or our allies territory. Yeah, this looked like a good idea all right. Sure.

that could be interesting, there would probably be a fair bit of stress generated in an airframe that might be harvestable.

"DARPA, the Pentagon techwar shop where they're not at home to Mister Practical; but where rooms are always kept prepared for Mister Unfeasible and his old chum Mister Cockup."

So I take it El Reg regards the Internet as impractical and unfeasible?

... all they need is a supply of unobtainium...

Neat. If you can make it work of course.

"Project Pluto." That would be the nuclear ramjet?

i have a few old batteries and solar cells laying around...

ill just grind them up and mix them with unpolymerized carbonates and expose to UV for curing..

but first send me my U$3 mil (oh and 2700 ounces of cold for contacts)

paris cause she will help me spend it

My drone will swoop low at night harvesting Methane from herds of cows,goats, donkeys or camels, disguised as a vulture.

It shall henceforth be know as the Bovine Ultra Low Level Subtle Herd Infiltration Transformer!

mwahahaha, muwhahaha

What are they waiting on? Vacuum deposit the solar cells onto the plane skin and produce long battery tubes you weld into a frame. This is entirely do-able right now, are they holding out just to try and find even more weight reduction or did they expect custom manufacturing at the cost of a pack of AA cells? It's a government agency, the requirement to spend bucket loads of money is there even if it could've been done cheaply, so the main issue seems to be making it cost even more by drawing out the process until people are screaming and throwing even more money at them to finish up already.

What about NASA's project Helios? Seems to be a good starting point.

Hemp!

The whole point of DARPA is to get people to investigate things that they might never have thought of doing, and/or things that have too little commercial use to be worth the research costs.

At first glance, this fits neither of those categories. If anyone has the slightest inkling that this is possible, my advice is to make sure that you have private investment, so that the Government can't just take the results off you.