Thanks, I've started reading it and will continue later, the material seems to be perfect for a non-Aerospace professional.

OMG "The Pentagon’s FY2022 budget request for hypersonic research is $3.8 billion"

Is this a lot? Missiles are quite expensive in general. $3.8 BN is not the budget for this single program, but for several, 8 per this source [1] (although, now it might be 1 or 2 less).

For this particular weapon, a somewhat similar weapon I can think of is the European Meteor [2], which is ramjet (rather than scramjet) powered, and reaches Mach 4, rather than over Mach 5 as this one is supposed to do. Meteor comes at a cool cost of EUR 2 MM per piece. Think about it, you fire one missile like that, and it's like destroying 10 Ferraris.

[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/flight-international/8-key-hype...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(missile)

Just saying that's a lot of money in absolute terms. I'd hope that money could be spent in other ways.

> it's like destroying 10 Ferraris.

But, like, really cool.