Spaceflight

DARPA Seeks Mach 10 Airplane-Like Vehicle »

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking to build a "reusable hypersonic aircraft" capable of speeds beyond Mach 10 to deliver payloads of up to 5,000 pounds into low earth orbit for less than $5 million per launch. DARPA will more fully explain the project in October, but for now is seeking to develop an Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) project. The primary vehicle would carry and deploy an upper stage responsible for inserting payload into low earth orbit and be capable of 10 flights in 10 days. DARPA says the airplane-like main vehicle would reach hypersonic speeds at suborbital altitudes and the agency hopes to explore that capability for passenger transport, too. More

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