China's new hypersonic weapon is a lot like America's 1960's space bomber

The news prompted a slew of headlines about China shocking the world with an advanced new hypersonic missile; the problem is, neither of those assertions is true. The weapon China tested a few weeks ago was not a missile, nor was it new technology. In fact, the Soviet Union deployed a dozen and a half similar weapons during the Cold War, and the United States very nearly leveraged the same basic premise to field a hypersonic sub-orbital bomber in the 1960s.