Jon Goff writes: “I wouldn’t worry too much about DARPA’s FALCON program. DARPA is one of those agencies whose long trackrecord is relatively untainted by success. I had several friends that tried for a recent DARPA contract called RASCAL (to be able to put small 150lb payloads into orbit with short lead times and relatively low costs), and their comments about their experience lead me to believe that RASCAL and FALCON will both eventually go down the same moneyhole that NASP went back when I was still in highschool.
“Some guys here in DARPA have a fetish with a specific type of engine called a “scramjet” (a form of jet that sucks in air at speeds much higher than Mach 2, and then mixes it with a fuel supersonically), and they’ve take the position that you can make use any sort of engine you want just so long as it is a scramjet. Not to mention the fact that with a 12,000lb payload, the speed they’re choosing of Mach 6-7, and the range of 9000miles, you are talking about one very big aircraft. And almost every piece of technology on it will need to be developed and tested for the system to work.
“All things considered I’d give this program about a 90% chance of going belly up within the next three years, just like the rest of its predecessors. But that won’t bother Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and the other usual suspects in that ndustry. They don’t get payed to succeed, they get payed to try.”
8:03 pm on July 1, 2003
