You can follow the progress of today’s Hyper-X test here, starting at noon Pacific time.

[Update at 12:23 PST]

Fox News says they’re going to cover it, if you want to see it on television instead of your computer.

[Update about 1 PM]

As Hefty notes in comments, the B-52 is in the air. Listening to Fox is a little irritating. First they have the PR guy from the program on, and he’s talking about how this will enable a five-hour trip to Japan. That’s nonsense. First of all, you don’t need scramjets to do that–supersonic flight will. A scramjet flying at this speed would do the job in an hour and a half. But there’s nothing about this technology that deals with the real issues of supersonic/hypersonic flight–the drag and the sonic boom. This is a military technology, first and foremost, and its first application, if there is one, will almost certainly be in hypersonic cruise missiles. It’s also unlikely that it will be used in launch vehicles for a very long time, for reasons that I explained here, with responses to criticism of that article here.

I’m also irritated that they reflexively go to John Pike as their “expert.”

[Update at 4:45 PM PST]

The test appears to have been successful. Leonard David has the story.