Okay, the story at the link below smells really odd to me. The promise is to develop a Mach 10 satellite launch vehicle that can put 5000 pounds into orbit and do the entire development for $154M. Look for yourself.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/nation/2013/11/13/space-plan-to-cut-satellite-costs/3515119/
Fine. Let's run some back-of-an-envelope numbers. I see no way that you're going to get 5000 pounds to orbit without an initial takeoff weight at least ten times that... likely more. So the plane is going to weigh at least 50,000 pounds. Back in the dark ages of Falcons, Eagles, and Tomcats, supersonic PRODUCTION airplanes cost about $1000 per pound. That was 30 years ago, so you've got to at least double that cost nowadays for a production hypersonic launch vehicle. This puts the production price tag - AFTER development - at no less than $100M per copy. Initial prototype costs are typically 10 to 100 times the cost of production models, which means that unless there is something they are not telling us, you're going to need to add another zero (or two) to that development cost estimate.
But wait... look again. The numbers would line up quite well with experience if DARPA were pulling the airplane off the shelf, with no actual development required.
Hmmmm.
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