Basically, Ian, my friendly advice is to stick with theory and not
weapons ideas, as you've not worked in the field before, and you seem
to be somewhat misinformed about the whole subject.  (Not a flame at
all, just a straightforward observation from my POV.)  I think your
other ideas about deep space flight are a good read, but I'd suggest
you relax about weapons rumors.  Just my 2 cents.

Please don't blame me. I am as skeptical as you are. I DID say that a
bomb was likely to be as expensive as a normal cruise missile. There is
however an underlying serious strategic point. We won easily in Iraq -
against Sadaam Hussein, but we are facing an insurgency which we don't
quite know how to deal with. AURORA EVEN IF IT WORKED WOULD NOT HELP
US. We need to develop new weapons, that is true but they should be
associated with intelligence, Psi ops and surveillance not hypersonic
delivery.

The SR71 was retired because it cost too much, the fuel tanks leaked
during fill up, it could ONLY fly at Mach 3 when kinetic heating would
seal its tanks. At subsonic speeds there was a real danger of it
catching fire. The rationale was that satellite surveilance would
replace the need for Blackbird. Aurora you claim was conceived as a
replacement for Blackbird. That is news to me. It "did not exist" till
recently. This serrvs to confirm everything I ever wrote about UFOs.

The pity of it is that Aurora is a complete waste of resources.
Hypersonic survellance is not in fact as good as that provided by
satellites. Better survellance/strike is provided by Predators. A
10-20Kg cheap aircraft would be the order of the day for insurgency.

Could Aurora replace the Shuttle and provide an SSTO? When I first
heard about it I thought it might but the characteristics are all
wrong. At hypersonic speed the airframe and engines are a single
entity. All engines from your automobile spark ignition engine to a
hypersonic scramjet work by compressing air, burning fuel and then
extracting energy as the compressed gas rarifies. Aurora has a
lift/frag of 5:1, this means, in effect, that its scramjets are sub
optimal for LEO inertion. For LEO insertion you want ACCELERATION/DRAG
not LIFT/DRAG.