The last space shuttle mission was ten years ago in 2011.Now let me ask anybody here. Do you honestly think the US would abandon a program if we already didn’t have the technology of another mode of space flight. Now that doesn’t account for UFO sighting from decades ago, but I remember about something said by the head of our skunkworks a few years back. Basicly he said “ if you can think, we have already done it” that “we are a hundred years beyond what you see now”. Maybe they are ours, one day we will know.
Considering who was in charge at the time? You bet your obama the US would do something that stupid.
Skunkworks has never produced an aircraft that was 50-years beyond current tech much less 100-years. He was - get this - BSing, engaging in rhetorical hyperbole.
The technology exhibited by whatever these things are represents technological advancements worthy of several Nobel Prizes.
Can you think of any other aircraft that won a Nobel Prize? Yeah, me neither. Like most technology, aircraft improve incrementally and sometimes generationally, like the F-22 was with its low observable design, thrust vectoring and supercruise supersonic flight mode. Those were all significant improvements upon the previous generation fighter.
But, when an aircraft can descend 80K feet in seconds, hover for an hour or more, accelerate to Mach 7 in the literal blink of an eye and operate both in the air and below the water, that’s not a generational leap forward as we saw with the development of the F-22. Instead, that’s a multi-generational leap forward the likes of which has never been seen in any technological field.