No Commercial Use

5 April 2004


X-43A Hypersonic Jet -- NASA Turns to Weapons Research

NASA does more than just shuttles and space stations. It has had airplane research as part of its brief since the beginning. Its latest foray into that field, the X-43A hypersonic jet, just flew at 7 times the speed of sound. NASA flaks say it is the beginning of scramjet technology that will make it easy to travel from London to Sydney in a few hours. Unfortunately, the only application of the scramjet for years to come will be military.

Expected to be deployed around 2025, the scramjet will be able to reach any target in the world from bases in the Continental US in a couple of hours, flying at around Mach 10. Because it can breathe the very thin atmosphere at the edge of space, the scramjet is ideally suited to fulfil Project Falcon (Force Application and Launch from the Continental US). Because a nation's airspace is considered to end where space begins under international law, the scramjet means no more negotiating with difficult regimes to let the US fly over en route to a bombing site.

Better still, the scramjet technology does not need a pilot; it fits nicely on a missile as well as a plane. Unlike ballistic missiles that fall at the speed gravity allows, scramjet missiles would not need to turn off their engine as they descended. Hitting the ground at Mach 10 provides quite a bit of bunker-busting capability before the warhead explodes.

There is a downside to this military application -- it makes the current efforts at missile defense obsolete already. The Pentagon has relied on rigged and skipped tests to begin deployment of a rudimentary system to keep North Korea from nuking Alaska. This system is not yet active, and it is already useless. Scramjet missiles move too fast to hit.

Of course, pretending that there is a commercial use for this technology means that NASA can call on more funding sources. And it gets into that nice grey area of dual use that will prevent various treaties against militarizing space from coming into play. But in the age of the internet and the ubiquity of cell phones in the developed world, what business leader really needs to get from Washington to Tehran in two hours? Warheads, though, are another matter.

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