It should've started working on the funding piece as well. Hypersonic scramjets and the like are expensive to build and then - if DARPA and the Air Force are any indication - they are generally crashed. That's how aerospace engineers learn. It's also really, really expensive. Aerospace analysts familiar with both the technology and budget situations in Russia reportedly say the PAK-DA will be at best supersonic, and probably subsonic. If Rogozin's aspirations are relevant to anything it might be a hypersonic missile, and even that is beyond the 2020 horizon.

Still, that this conversation is taking place at all at this level demonstrates the amount of strategic interest in cracking the hypersonic frontier, something the U.S. Pentagon has invested heavily in for years now. Payload delivery systems (we won't call them missiles, but they're missiles) moving at speeds upward of Mach 5 - the generally agreed-upon definition of "hypersonic" - would be mighty difficult to defend against with conventional countermeasures. Perhaps we're all lucky that stable hypersonic flight is going to take quite a few more years to figure out.

[Ria Novosti]