The Mother Of All Roller Coasters

Eat your heart out, Top Thrill Dragster! LLNL is designing a hypersonic aircraft that will be able to fly between any two places on Earth in less than two hours:

"A HyperSoar aircraft would boost into space, then coast back to the surface of the Earth's atmosphere, where it would refire its engines and skip back into space. Twenty-five such skips [emphasis added] would take the craft from the midwestern U.S. to Japan in 90 minutes, designers estimate."

That's twenty-five first-hill-type drops, folks. Hell, I'd pay cash money to ride that even if I just ended up where I started!

Update: The original reference is here. I wouldn't get too excited just yet - the article is from 1998, and I haven't heard anything about it since then.