How about mandarin or hindi? Even spanish would open a lot of job opportunities down south. I know, I know, some of you were mentioning not wanting shit jobs, but believe me, some of these places are not as bad as they seem in a struggling economy. And in terms of programming languages, you're probably good to go.

And at that point, the hypersonic payload will literally crash into the thick atmosphere close to the ground. You could launch it along the side of the mountain or from inside a mountain to reduce the density of the atmosphere that you encounter when coming out of vacuum, but you'll still have significant technical challenges.

Accelerating up to supersonic speeds on a maglev track is quite problematic from a controls/stability perspective. The generated shock waves will bounce off of the ground/track creating some interesting ground effects which will mess up the launch unless properly controlled. I'm sure their proposal is to get the sled up to about Mach 1, at which point they'll be able to take off with a ramjet engine. Once they reach around Mach 5 in the atmosphere, they could transition into a scramjet configuration which can theoretically allow them to reach orbital speeds. This specific problem has been in NASA's mind for a number of years now. I used to work on this precise thing in collaboration with them around 5 years ago.