Pentagon’s $55B mystery plane is secret, but debate on cost is appearing

That said, I can also see the other side of this. According to Wikipedia, the US government spent $66 billion dollars on the F22. I'm naive, so I think that we could save $66 billion on that by just not having an F22, but congress disagrees with me and I'm not sure that I'll ever win that fight. However, imagine that start-ups could do the job 10% more efficiently. That's six billion dollars that you just saved.

Now, imagine an entire government agency, like the Peace Corp, but purely dedicated to fighting human trafficking. You could fund that agency for fifteen years on that six billion dollars. If the startup is 20% cheaper, then you could have a second agency of similar size that is dedicated to helping people stop smoking. If the startup managed to be a full 30% cheaper, you can throw in thirty thousand four-year, full-ride college scholarships.

Again, I'd love to have all of that $66 billion spent on other projects, but even funnelling part of that into a different area could markedly improve the world. I'd never work for a start-up that worked on air combat, but I'd be thrilled to free up some of the air combat budget.

The war in Ukraine in particular will be fought with deniable proxy forces on both sides.

If they are -- and it's a big "if" -- then that means the technology for civilian use is just a couple/few decades away. I haven't seen the numbers, but in my mind the market for suborbital commercial flights, say, New York to Sydney in an hour or two, is already there. It's a place on the road to reducing cost-to-orbit where the money's already there. Somebody just has to go get it. Plus DoD will end up solving most of the problems by being the first mover.

What on earth does that?

"nobody has mentioned Aurora yet?" you've obviously checked nobody mentioned it, so why not just give us the link and say how it's relevant.

"Aw, c'mon" what the hell is that? Who talks like that? What does "aw" mean? You're disappointed nobody has mentioned something is relevant? Why does that upset you? Why shorten "c'mon" from "come on" like that?

Why post this nonsense? Just give us the link and why it's relevant.