back to article New DARPA scramjet-drone contract award

DARPA*, the wacky Pentagon research bureau where it's always white-coat-and-propellor-hat Friday, has doled out $6m (as part of a $40m "increment" to an earlier "other transaction") to US aerospace colossus Lockheed. The payment is in support of the renewed US military hypersonic-plane programme, variously known as "Falcon" or " …

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  1. Senor Beavis
    Coat

    Footnote

    HARDCORK? Did you lose focus in the middle of writing that tortured acronym?

  2. Chris Bradshaw
    Thumb Up

    @ Senor Beavis

    That next-to-last letter should be a C, unless my algorithm is way off... :-)

    Thumbs up because you don't offer an more appropriate alternative :-D

  3. heystoopid
    Paris Hilton

    Hmm

    Hmm , it would probably cost them one tenth of that by funding a certain program at the University of Queensland , who even when working on less then a cent in the dollar paid to their rivals are still lots of Mach ahead of the nearest US equivalent so as to speak !

  4. Charles Manning

    Why you need an enemy

    You need to have an enemy to justify all the money spent on the military toybox.

    The cold war was neat: a sophiisticated enemy with nukes and supersonic aircraft etc. They'd launched Spuntik and were proven to be technologically advanced. Lots of opportunity for the lab-coaters to spend up to advance military technology.

    The modern enemy is portrayed as an unsophisticated camel-fiddling ay-rab so it is very hard to justify development of hypersonic aircraft to combat that lot.

    9/11 must have been very frustrating for the military. They had aircraft carriers etc that could destroy any military force, yet had nothing to stop a few punks with box-cutters.

  5. Rich
    Happy

    Unmanned troop transporter

    Bet that'll piss the grunts off! "Of course it's perfectly safe for you lot. We just wouldn't want to risk any of our highly trained pilots in the thing"

  6. Rich
    Joke

    Gratuitous slight on Queenslanders

    Isn't University of Queensland an oxymoron?

  7. Scott

    Unmanned troop transporter

    Maybe they could auction of tickets for the 1st flight or have a raffle or something.

    I'll get a couple of tickets for the mother in law

  8. Steve
    Coat

    what about the hard part?

    Take off from a runway and "do a barrel roll at Mach 6"

    That just takes a rifled barrel. Surely making it *NOT* do a barrel roll at Mach 6 after takeoff is the real challenge?

  9. TC Taylor
    Happy

    Anglophiliac

    You folks absolutely crack me up! I've abandoned daily newspapers for The Register. It's much more fun and interesting. Who needs antidepressants?

  10. Ishkandar

    Homesick Antipodeans...

    ...usually haul themselves home within that time frame anyway since they live within that staggering radius of Kangaroo Valley !!

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