In a feature on tonight's NBC Nightly News entitled "What we've missed this week", Brian Williams told a story this way (my transcript from the video):
"This was the thing that was going to make us feel good about ourselves after a rough week. The U.S. has been anxious to launch a space plane, a hypersonic flying wing, that could go from New York to L.A. in 12 minutes at 13,000 miles an hour, unless it crashes, which is what it did this week, nine minutes after takeoff. Thankfully no one was on board, just don't call your travel agent just yet until they work the bugs out."
We'll overlook the fact that, thanks to U.S. foreign policy and the enemies it has created around the world, it takes more than 12 minutes just to get through security at an airport. But the truly outrageous nature of this story is the pretense that this plane is something we might look forward to, and even one day call our travel agent to book a flight on.
Wrong! This plane has nothing whatsoever to do with civilian air travel. And you don't have to look any further than the website of NBC itself, where the real nature of this "space plane" is in no way a secret:
The rocket-launched vehicle is part of an advanced weapons program, called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, which is working to develop systems of reaching an enemy target anywhere in the world within one hour.
And by "reaching" an enemy target, I don't think they have "delivering passengers" in mind, unless you regard bombs as passengers. And actually, the final sentence of the article (as well as the name of the program) makes that quite clear:
An engineering review board was to analyze that data in order to help shape future global strike programs, DARPA officials said.
"Global strike programs." Programs of delivering death from the air anywhere on the planet. That's what Brian Williams thinks was going to "make us feel good about ourselves."