Originally posted by UnixFE

Originally posted by JoeSignal
... how can anything be contacted when flying Mach 20?
How you can even trace something flying that fast on gps or radar, is beyond my knowledge.

As far as I know the space shuttle re-entry speed was up to Mach 30 so they should have the technic and experience to track vehicles flying with this speed.

Not only that, but as I've said elsewhere on ATS about this deal, any forty-year-old ICBM can do the same thing. What is the need to have a winged vehicle when a warhead is lopped into the lower reaches of space to fall down on the target anywhere or Earth.

So what could be up with this craft? Suppose you were developing a kinetic bomb-type mode of weapon? It would simply be floated off an orbiting battle station somewhere out in space and directed down (with controls on those little wings) to a target a far distance from the orbital path of the station. Hence, global coverage from one orbital pathway. Given that terrific speed, it would literally need no explosive warhead in most cases and would be relatively safe, cheap to make and store indefinitely