'Blackstar' 2STO system

I saw this yesterday... I'm not at all clear what the point is.

Ignoring the obvious flaw behind any government conspiracy theory (the organization that can't keep the atomic bomb secret can't hide a super secret space shuttle), what the heck is the point of the thing?

The problem isn't man's ability to build such a spacecraft... it's that there's never been a compelling reason to do so. The military has wanted its own astronauts forever... but they've never come up with a way to sell it. The development of unmanned spy satellites killed the Manned Orbiting Laboratory over exactly this point... and the Dyna-Soar died a budget-death because there just wasn't a reason to fly it.

Why would a government that's already spent lots of money including the option of supporting military missions with the existing Orbiter (which it's never done, aside from the occasional spy satellite deployment) need to develop a separate spaceplane? I'd like to think someone is secretly building amazing rockets without any sort of oversight too... but it just doesn't make sense.
 
Development of a manned spaceplane by the military would require a budget comparable to the development of the B-2 bomber (i.e. somewhere around ten billion dollars for R&D alone--about half what the Shuttle cost to develop in today's dollars). That kind of increase in black budgeting would show up unless this thing had been in development since the 1980s.

Second, boron-based fuel is notoriously unsuitable for rocketry, not merely becaue of its toxicity (the waste products are considered to be an internationally banned chemical weapon), but also because it is a paste--too thick to flow through any sort of pump, but too soft to mold into a solid rocket motor.

Third, I don't care what fuel it uses, because if it's powered by chemical rockets of any sort, it has to have a fuel/mass ratio of about six to one (i.e. the fueledass must be sixmes as heavy as the dry mass) to make it to orbit if it is dropped from a plane at Mach 2-3. It's going to need to launch with drop tanks.
 
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