Shaggy Sheep - re your comments on copying (or not) the Concorde, see this mention of how a Soviet agent called Pavlov got sent to collect tire scrapings off the runway from a Concorde test aircraft and ended up being fed 'something like bubble gum' !
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcr...upersonic.html
Not sure how trustworthy that link is. I stopped reading it (it's pretty long!) when I came to :
At 1,400 miles per hour, wind friction quickly raises airframe temperatures beyond the boiling point of water
It's not friction that heats Concorde's skin to its limit of 127 degrees C (on the nose, a bit less elsewhere), it's dynamic heating caused by supersonic shock compression of the air.