Pentagon’s Mach 20 Missile Lost Over Pacific — Again

Great. why don't they just send truckloads of cold hard cash up into space. I jsut don't know how anyone can be proud of this and yet the economy is in the shitter, healthcare sucks and education is falling apart. Yippee!! we're working on a new way to vaporize people! For Gods sake, don't we posses enough ways to do that already? F_cking US Federal Government! Do all those morons wake up one morning and say to themselves, "well, the country is f_cked.... let's spend money on a new way to kill people!" What a bunch of a-holes!

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, the reality is, they don't actually bundle up $20 bills and shoot them into space. Real people get paid wages with it, suppliers get orders, etc etc.

@Greg: Speaking of rality, please wake up and smell the coffee. My whole comment reaks of sarcasim. I am well aware that they won't bundle up $20 bills and shoot them into space. Yes, real people do get paid wages for all of this, right down to the janitor who mops the floors. I am all for job creation. Though, i think that any logical person would agree that we really don't need a new method of killing people. Sure, whatever is learnt from this may be applied to civilian use. But at the moment, here is another over priced, over budgeted, five sided crap house project that only has one purpose: to kill people. Whoever has the nation's priority list, please bring it back to the people who are sane! Just think of all the military hardware and technology we have and then think of how Bin Laden was killed!? He was not killed by some super-duper,stealthy, mach gazzilion, $30 billion, space flying, unmaned, sexy, disco dancing, top secret, area 51 type of hardware. He was killed by a Navy SEAL who shot him with a gun. This whole Mach 20 gizmo is money for old rope. We have very capable ICBMs and Cruise missiles if we want to vaporize someone from afar. Just turn the 2 keys and press the red button and call it a day!

I get the sarcasm, but the research could lead to air travel at fantastic speeds.

Considering how underfunded and underutilized NASA is at present, the military is the only government agency that can take the lead on this type of cutting edge technology. Although they see weaponized uses for it, others will find ways to use it for positive applications. Also, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of highly-trained scientists, engineers and technicians that have lost their jobs at NASA who must find jobs somewhere. The private space exploration groups are still miniscule in scope, so who is going to hire them? After 15 years at NASA, one of my former students has taken a job with the Indian Space Agency. How's that for "reality"? When the Soviet bloc fell apart, there was a lot of talk that their scientists would be lured over to the militaristic nations (and terrorists) by the promise of lucrative incomes. It would not surprise me at all to see some of our people go over to the dark side after the way our country has treated them.

Complete waste of tax payers money, and dangerous. They can make it go up to high speeds altitudes and kill people but they can't control it! Which now makes it not only a waste of money but a hazard.

In other, unrelated news; <East Asian country here> got hit by something from space.