The Hustler grew out of early-1950s Air Force studies for a supersonic strategic bomber, which Convair won in 1952. Convair — already the delta-wing specialist behind the F-102 and F-106 interceptors — proposed a bomber shaped like a scaled-up delta fighter. To beat the transonic drag rise it applied Richard Whitcomb’s newly discovered area rule, pinching the fuselage where the wing joined it. To save weight and internal volume, the fuel and the weapon were moved outside the aircraft entirely, into a droppable belly pod.

The result was a technological tour de force that pushed 1950s engineering to its limits: stainless-steel honeycomb skins, an early inertial navigation and bombing system, and a needle nose that could touch Mach 2. It also pushed cost and complexity to their limits, and that tension — astonishing performance against ruinous expense and a shrinking mission — defined the Hustler’s whole short life.

Flying at Mach 2 meant defeating the violent drag rise that builds around the speed of sound. Convair used two tools. The first was the delta wing: thin in section, deeply swept, and structurally efficient, it gave low supersonic drag and enough internal volume in the wing roots for structure and systems. The second was Richard Whitcomb’s area rule, which says the aircraft’s total cross-sectional area should change smoothly from nose to tail. That is why the Hustler’s fuselage is pinched into a “wasp waist” where the wing meets it — the narrowing offsets the wing’s bulk so the combined area grows gently. The airframe itself was exotic: much of the skin was stainless-steel and aluminium honeycomb sandwich, light and stiff enough to survive the heat and loads of sustained supersonic flight.

Because the area-ruled fuselage had almost no internal volume, Convair put the mission load outside the aircraft. The original MB-1 pod was a single large streamlined body carried on the centreline that held both fuel and a nuclear weapon; the crew burned the pod’s fuel on the way to the target, then released the whole pod. Later the two-component TCP (two-component pod) split fuel and weapon so the empty lower fuel tank could be dropped separately, improving range and flexibility. It was an elegant idea with real drawbacks — the pod was heavy, drag-producing and complex, and a jet that had dropped it had also dropped much of its fuel. But it was the only way to give a Mach 2 delta the range and payload of a strategic bomber.

The B-58 is one of the classic examples of an aircraft priced out of its own mission. It was extraordinarily complex — exotic materials, an early inertial nav-and-bombing system, four engines and a droppable pod — and it cost accordingly. When the huge research-and-development bill is spread across the small fleet, the effective per-aircraft cost is frequently cited at around US$33 million in early-1960s money, and the type reportedly cost roughly three times as much to operate as the B-52. For a jet with short range, a small payload and a mission that Soviet missiles were rapidly closing off, that price was impossible to justify. Treat any single dollar figure as an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than an audited number — but the direction is not in doubt: the Hustler was gorgeous, brilliant and unaffordable.