It's important to distinguish between lift generating and air breathing hypersonic craft and simple conical rockets without shockwave impingement sites on the craft body. The former are what are what people talk about when they talk about hypersonic capabilities. But with this Stratolaunch case, and with other militarys' recent "hypersonic" implementations, there are actually no real capability differences from a ballistic missile except trajectory. These are jobs programs for keeping aerospace talent alive at best and get most use as paper dragons. Or maybe it's just a way to normalize using ballistic missiles, because they look slightly different and have a different name, without everyone freaking out?<p>I'm not saying a pointy fast rocket testbed isn't cool or even useful to try to develop ways of avoiding shockwave impingement during air breathing or lift generation. But this isn't doing the thing.