Quote:
Originally Posted by scottmandue
How quickly we forget a little over 100 years ago when guys were testing flight with fabric and wood... not much of a "smoking hole" left after those crashes but a lot of people still died so we could have commercial flight today...
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Why do people keep comparing today's ego-driven race to the mesosphere to the national effort for technological superiority of half a century ago?
North American X-15 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (it still hold the rocket-plane altitude record, btw)
That is, what these guys are doing now pales in comparison to what was done some 50 years ago. And yet people keep making claims about
the need to perform highly volatile experiments. This is 2014, where massive computational power is at the disposal of any of these guys. And, rocket science has been well formed, well proven, by generations past; who got there, btw, with slide-rules and massive testing.
PS. I expect that Boeing will have a reliable hypersonic mesosphere-riding transport before these guys. (If they don't already)