Pentagon's X-plane: any target on Earth in an hour by 2016

Don’t you hate it when you have to ship something from the North Pole to Antarctica and only have an hour to spare? The Pentagon’s space-age researchers might be able to fix that, and as early as 2016.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, says that an unmanned hypersonic vehicle that soars through the sky at 20 times the speed of sound could be ready within the next four years. If researchers can make that goal, DARPA scientists will be able to give the government the ability to propel their Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) — the so-called “X-plane” — to anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes.

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