Make Way For The Space Marines

I'm not expecting it anytime soon, but the concept is slick:

After decades of unsuccessful development, military space planes are finally getting some respect. On April 19 the U.S. Air Force plans to launch the X-37B, an unmanned space plane that will circle the planet a classified number of times before making an autonomous landing. (Popular Mechanics profiled the effort as the magazine's cover story in April.) The idea of a pop-up reconnaissance platform, to be used if a satellite is not available or is disabled, is an importantrationale for the Air Force's project.

The Marines' space plane takes the Corps' slogan of "first to fight" to the extreme: It could transport a squad of Marine riflemen to anyplace on earth within 2 hours, and then extract them after their mission is complete. Though the goal is appealing—imagine delivering well-armed Marines at hypersonic speed to a suspected Osama bin Laden hideout or besieged embassy—the concept seemed outlandish to many when it was first proposed.

Now, this sort of response time would be incredible, but think about the possibilities of how this hypersonic vehicle can be integrated with other technologies in development, such as micro-UAVs, load-bearing armored exoskeletons, ultra-high velocity kinetic weapons, and ever-shrinking smart weapons.

HALO vs. al Qaeda... could be interesting.

Update: More hyper-velocity future weapons at Ace of Spades.