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DARPA Looking into Hypersonic Bombers
while(true) writes "As reported previously here on Slashdot, hypersonic jets from NASA has recently been in the news. Now DARPA is showing interest in the military applications and is to host a conference on hypersonic unmanned bombers. These bombers could be based in the US and yet strike from space at any place in the world within 2 hours. BBC has a report about these air/spacecraft that could be operational by 2025."
So we can respond in two hours, now all we need is intel that isn't two DAYS old...
It should make us wonder if this sort of rapid response is always a good thing to have? Perhaps having more than two hours to decide to blow someone up is a good thing given some folks apparent rash decisions.
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"but not very much for making good relationships. " Perhaps you'd care to name a nation that spends more on aid to other nations and their poeple than the USA does?
If you don't need forward bases, you don't need allies. America becomes the uncontested ruler of the entire world. We retire into a "fortress America" that becomes more decadent, insular, despotic and xenophobic with every passing year. Eventually our empire, like all empires, falls. In the eyes of the current administration all but the last are Good Things and the end will be too far in the future for them to care about.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
"I think the point with hypersonic bombers as opposed to ICBMs is 1.) they are reusable ... ICBM's are not, and if I'm not mistaken these are the type that skim the atmosphere to get oxygen then benefits from no resistance of space thus making them more fuel efficient"
I don't mean to be mean, but this is the stupidest thing I've read in a long time. We have a stockpile of over 10,000 ICBMs. they only reason reusability comes in to play is if we plan on running out. The same can be said for fuel efficiency.
Also, do you have any idea how much it costs to design, test, and roll out a few hypersonic planes? Neither does the government, because they've tried three times and dropped it after severe cost overruns and technical problems. I don't think saving a hundred thousand dollars on fuel is valid justification for spending 30 billion designing a superfluous 'defense system.'
Kevin Fox
What would your solution be? What is your grasp on international politics? It's my barely informed grasp of politics that seems to indicate that some countries simply do not like us, period, no matter what our policy is (barring implosion and utter devistation for the US). Besides that, if we cave to the nations who don't like us to get them to like us, we alienate the nations that do like us and then they don't like us much (this is especially true when said nations are on opposing sides of the same conflict).
I'd just like to hear what your resolution would have been for Iraq? Considering all past wars on other nations, there was extreme pains taken to avoid destroying strategic targets such as power generation stations, water reclaimation plants, amungst other targets. In fact, dispite the sounds of war, Iraqi citizens seemed to be largely unaffected unless caught directly in the middle of fire fights (noted by markets opened and filled dispite the siege occuring in and aroudn the capitol). Was there a diplomatic solution? Perhaps. How exactally do you negotiate with a dictator that abuses his people, and doesn't even bother to veil his hatred for you and your beliefs?
But for some reason, the mainstream media in the US has chosen to simply roll over and play dead for the government. Remember all the play given to that boring and irrelevant Lewinsky case? But the fact that the government lied to get us into a war, the fact that the government has marked the enquiry on what went wrong on 9/11 as classified, crucial things involving life and death for thousands of Americans, have barely been mentioned here in the US.
You wonder whether the Republican Party doesn't simply have thousands of incriminating photographs in a file somewhere...
... which is apparently the peak US-bashing time on Slashdot. The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah.
Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value.
An incredible amount of technology that we take for granted exists today because DARPA spent money on it and people complained about the size of the US defense budget (he says while sending his comment of the *internet*).
Hypersonic flight, whether ballistic or not, is incredibly hard to control. Manned or unmanned, incredibly hard to control. This sort of project will develop the skills and capabilities needed to engineer such an audacious plan. That knowledge barely exists now. How do you build something so insanely complex and difficult to control? How do you make it reliable? Someday, that knowledge of how to build impressive stuff will be used to build impressive stuff you'll use everyday.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
The only supersonic passenger plane (the Concorde) is being retired and DARPA wants to build a bomber that travels three times as fast. There's something screwed up in this country when we place a higher value on delivering bombs than people.
It seems to me that this is a defense department end run around an incompetent NASA.
For a while, the Space Shuttle was the only government sanctioned method of putting anything in orbit, then the first shuttle disaster happened and the military insisted on redeveloping non-reusable boosters.
Now the second disaster. The military might just think that they need their own space plane. This can put small satellites into orbit. It carries a payload to the edge of space. That payload is bombs but could be other items. It can survive the worst part of re-entry.
In the US, sadly, it is much easier to spend billions on a weapon then on a NASA budget item, especially given NASA's track record.
If this thing gets off the ground, with a few changes, after 10 or 20 years as a weapon the tech transfers into a cheap launch vehicle, and/or a hypersonic commercial airliner. DARPA does have a track record of sponsoring projects others cannot do that turn out to have non-military applications (the Internet is just one). The military purpose is just a way to get money into the research.
It seems to me that this is a regular "run-up-the-flagpole" idea that comes around every so often. It is rooted in the Sanger Anti-podal bomber project of Nazi Germany during World War II. Every 20 years or so since then, someone brings this up again.
Don't believe that this is right? Check out the x-20 Dyna-Soar project of the 1960's, or the Trans-Atmospheric vehicle projects of the 1980's. Remember the Reagan "Orient Express" speech?
Okay, move forward another 20 years, and now they are hypersonic bombers, not freighters or passenger vehicles. Now we are making no effort to conceal the military applications.
So it's supposed to be "cool" and all that, but it is just a re-tread and do we really need weapons of mass destruction? What happens when somebody cracks the system and uses one to attack our allies or attacks us? What then?
These things have always been too costly and too unproven to be workable. We haven't developed the engine technology as anything more than a drawing board idea.
It is the gee-whiz kind of idea that causes the rest of the world to crap their pants as we drum up another arms race that we don't need. It is a solution in search of a problem.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
It appears, winning a war is not a matter of throwing bombs alone, see Iraq, see Vietnam...
ahh but you are wrong grasshopper....
I can win any war by throwing bombs, espically if I have the largest bomb pile. It's how far I am willing to go in throwing those bombs.
IRAQ could have been completely dealt with in 6 hours.. Simply carpet bomb the entire country and finish it with a few well placed nukes. kill every man/woman/child in the country and you win. It's very simple.
trying to avoid wiping out a country completely and still win.... this is another task all-together... and is still difficult but do-able.
right now in iraq and what we did in vietnam is acting like police... it is always a complete failure at the end with lots of casualties on both sides... NO police action was ever sucessful in the history of man... the romans learned it early on.
in vietnam we were not wanted, so the people fought us... Guess what is happening in IRAQ.
I say pull out right now, and tell them if they rebuild to be asshats... we will be back... but not as police.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"We want to bomb you before we have time to actually think about it."
:\
The faster the planes can bomb, the faster the damage is done. Do you really want to live in a world where: a ruler can do something imprudent yet, not worthy of anhiliation and have his entire country bombed before dinner.
I don't.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Resolution for what? Sadam still being the legal leader of his country? And that was our business why?
Did he have WMD? Nope.
Did he support Al Quedda? Nope. They hated him almost as much as they hated us.
Was he a threat to our "allies"?
- To Kuwait, whose citizens now hate us? Not really.
- To Israel? HAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, right.
- To Saudi Arabia, homeland of most of the 9/11 terrorists? No.
So, what was the problem? What did we have to get tough about? Nothing. It was all a pack of lies told to convince us that we were doing the right thing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
While we are still trying to get manned space flight in order, they are developed unmanned hypersonic bombers that can kill many people in little time..
Great, just great
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean