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'Satan' Missile Now Launches Satellites
colonist writes "The Russian intercontinental ballistic missile known to NATO as SS-18 Satan was converted to a launch vehicle (called Dnepr) and is now launching American communications satellites for profit. 'The giant rocket boasted up to 10 Multiple Independently-Targeted Reentry Vehicles, or MIRVs, each of which would have a carried a hydrogen bomb thermonuclear warhead to incinerate a different North American or Western European city. Even more terrifying, some of them were believed to have been fitted with aerosol warheads to spray smallpox virus over their U.S. targets.' However: 'With the Space Shuttle still grounded, the new generation of American boosters still being developed, and demand for reliable launching rockets building up around the world, the prospect of having a huge already-constructed supply of giant boosters built by the most experienced and reliable rocket engineers on earth has been embraced around the world.'"
Let's hope they load the right payload. Nothing like accidentally sending up a bunch of hydrogen bombs!
Ahhh, swords into plowshares....
It makes even this harden cynic smile a bit.
This signature is a waste of 42 characters
It was the Pentagon that called these missiles "SS-18 Satan" in an propaganda effort to demonize the Soviets; the Russian name for them was simply "R-36M".
Must every slashdot article mention MicroSoft in the headline ?!?
--LordPixie
This is an interesting method to disarm rival countries - buy them out!!! Here's $10M - how 'bout you unscrew that nuclear warhead and attach our new On-Star sattelite? Would you turn that old T35 into a water fountain for $1000? $10k for a MiG crop-duster? This does extrapolate a little from Sun Tzu and Zhuge Liang's theories on conflicts. Get your enemies to see the benefits of working with you and the 'war' is won without firing a shot. A bit flamey, but if the billions used to 'pacify' Iraqi unrest were partially paid to the Iraqi citizens, would the current chaos be quelled? If only me magic 8-ball still worked!!.
The SS-18 is now the cheapest ride into space. The AMSAT-NA (Radio Amateur Satellite Corp. - North America) OSCAR - Echo
(Oribiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) was launched June 29 by SS-18 (also the Italian Amateur UniSat-3) as secondary payloads.
http://www.amsat.org
73 de w0uhf
Saddly no, and they're all wrong too.
The smallpox strain the Soviets put in ICBMS was called India1. It's an extrodinarily "hot" strain of pox gathered in India shortly before eradication was complete.
The Soviets then "heated" the India1 Strain up, probably by introducing the human IL4 gene to it. IL4 acts as a jammer against the human immune system, as the pox replicates it generates a huge volume of human immune signal chemicals.
A independent tests have shown IL4 mousepox to blow through vaccinations that in mice as well as natural immunity to the virus. The only mice that survived an IL4 mousepox were naturaly immune mice that had been infected with a less dangerous strain of the pox within a week or two.
Because mice and mousepox are reasonable models for humans and smallpox, this is terrifying.
Furthermore, WHO stocks about 1 dose of smallpox vaccine for every 17,000 people on earth. Since smallpox has a multiplication rate of somewhere between 10 and 30 (i.e. each patient infects between 10 and 30 other people) a massive infection such as an ICBM delivery of the disease would be completely uncontainable using the ring vaccination methodology employed by the WHO eradicators.
For more information on smallpox check out Richard Presonton's "The Demon in the Freezer."
India 1 is still out there by the way, and the Russians have told us they know that Iran and North Korea have it as well as a few other countries.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
This is nothing new.
The russians have been launching small payloads on their submarine-launched Volna and Shtil for years.
More info on the R36 family of rockets is available here
Reagan didnt get any coverage other dead Presidents didnt enjoy. How about Kennedy? Also, its been a while we lost a President and a Republican one at that, during a Republican administration, at these times of turmoil.. Ofcourse, half the country would want to show their respect.
Now, I disagree about the part about him changing the world for the better. Rest of the world really doesnt care when he was alive, far less now that he is dead. The only time that I ever heard of him was his name associated with the infamous "Starwars" and Reagan-omics. Both really bad ideas (ofcourse can be disputed). But the fact of the matter is Gorbachev had more to do about putting things in order than Reagan purely because (1) Russia was already crumbling (2) Gorbachev was more far sighted than all the Russian presidents before him and (3) Gorbachev realized the world was changing and he had to lead his country to change with it.
The only smart thing Reagan did was he realized what Russia was up to and instead of thwarting their efforts (and making sure Cold war stayed the same), he realized his legacy would be remembered for ending it, and helped Gorbachev speed things up. Also like how Clinton is remembered for not screwing things up when the economy was in an upswing, Reagan will be remembered for not screwing things up. You cant measure a president and his legacy especially when he passed away recently, especially when his memories are fresh and emotions supercede reason and logic, but for definite, years from today, he will be known as a president who was sensible and farsighted enough to let Russia and Communism die a slow death and not for being a visionary neither a statesman.
Now your thoughts about W just plain out scares me. W is neither a statesman nor a visionary. He spoke of bipartisanship and pledged compassionate conservatism but showed neither. The country is more divided than ever and we are at war with different enemies and the army is stretched thinner than butter on whitebread. What were to happen if a new adversary emerges, taking advantage of this situation? How would the world respond? No Sir, these are troubled times and instead of being fortunate enough to be led by a president who were a true leader, a free thinker, an optimist and a realist, what we have here is a fragile humanbeing who is being manipulated by his cohorts, by the religious right, by the same people who should keep his course straight, but instead choose to lead him astray. No Sir, W will be known as a president who could have achieved far more, but fell far short of his goals and led the country through a path of gloom, down a road littered with the corpses of its own soldiers and its shattered dreams.
Rapid Nirvana
Why do you think Reagan's funeral got such reverent coverage? I was against him at the time, but I was wrong, and he was right. He truly changed the world for the better. Personally, I believe that in 20 years, we'll look back and say the same for W.
Man, we don't do history very well, do we. Please RTFHB. Just 35 years before the Gipper was elected, Soviets suffered 19 million civilian deaths out of a population of 194 million and lost 9 million killed and missing in an army of 27 million. So yeah, they were pussies who rolled over when faced with a little adversity from a B-list actor.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The military went away from liquid fuel for logistical reasons and the Minuteman missle series, using solid boosters, were deployed. The Minuteman 3 evolved into the MX Missile aka Peacekeeper, which required only a small crew and was portable making it a "mobile missle" in some deployments.
This logistical advantage was the basis of was the basis of E'Prime Aerospace's proposed launch vehicle series in the late 1980s. Through an effort with the Reagan Administration they acquired rights to acquire the existing assembly lines, 2 of which were still packed up in crates, and managed to cut preliminary deals with the contractors for the parts. The design mods included stripping off the radiation hardening, saving substantial weight, and replacing the kevlar fiber with graphite fiber in the tankage windings, something the Air Force had already funded at about the time the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty put an end to their further development. The launch site preferred was Ascention Island due to its location near the equator, ease of access from Florida (where the production lines were to exist) and a landing strip there that could receive the stages of the rockets in separate shipping containers via DC-3 transport, and launch from a cliff to the east. There was also a problem with the upper stage of the MX containing nitroglycerine, and that stage was eliminated or modified in E'Prime's designs.
It was a good idea. Something not quite as radical was, later, picked up by Orbital Sciences Corporation in their Taurus launcher, which used some surplus MX segments. E'Prime didn't want to do that due to quality control problems on stages that had been stored -- and indeed I was told that when O.S. procured their first MX stage, it had already been rejected by E'Prime due to a huge occlusion in the X-Ray image. They obviously could never have flown stage in any mission and it is unclear why they procured it.
The company had management as well as funding problems, and when I came on board in late 1991 as VP for Public Affairs, it was a few weeks from closing its doors. I really thought the idea of putting the MX into commercial production for satellite launches was a good one and hated to see it die, especially since I had just testified before Congress regarding commercialization of space technology on the day SALT was put into action. I was already broke due to the grassroots lobbying efforts but decided to go on my credit cards and take an unpaid job at E'Prime to help save the company. While there we managed to get the first Ka band license put through the FCC for one of E'Primes potential customers (Norris Communications' NORSTAR satellite), and as a result the stock, by then it was a pink sheet penny stock, had a rebound, going from a low of fractional cents per share to 30 cents a share. I had to leave E'Prime when after a few months they still were unable to pay a salary and I was at the end of my rope. The IRS had a lot of fun with me during a subsequent audit, and they're after me again subsequent to another effort of mine, but that's another story to be written. still being written. Suffice to say I'm getting really sick of the way the US government acts toward inventors and technologists -- most of whom need to be tax lawyers these days in order to avoid prisoner gang rape these days due to the incomprehensible statutes written by tax lawyers for the rest of us to follow.
PS: For more information you may be able to get the article I wrote for "Space Technology International" annual edition in 1992, from interlibrary loan.
Seastead this.
IANAD BIDSAAHILN (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night)
No, a vaccination against small pox is simply a matter of being infected with the vaccinia virus. This virus has a similar makeup to smallpox, but is not nearly as deadly or infectious. A "heated up" strain of India-1 (which is already extremely virulent) would blow through any vaccination that is out there.
Smallpox comes in several "colors". You have your Variola minor (chicken pox style 1-3% fatality), your Variola major (pustule style 30-50% fatality), Hemorrhagic (shudder, just hope you don't get it), and Flat (another deadly strain). The occurrence of the last two in individuals with Variola major is about 7% combined. This is the average run of the mill smallpox. A heated up strain of India-1 would have a much higher fatality rate and a much higher occurrence of Hemorrhagic smallpox. And as TGK mentioned, it probably has been modified to carry the IL-4 gene, which would cause your body to go into a cytokine storm before your internal organs liquefy.
It is a slow and painful death that you are conscious through for the greater extent. I never understood how hateful it was to wish a pox upon someone until I learned about how horrible smallpox can be.
I am not a *blank*, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I say: Yeah right! The shuttle hasn't launched a satellite in years, let alone a commercial payload. And the 'new generation' of American boosters aren't 'still being developed', they exist right now: the Pegasus and Taurus (Orbital Sciences Corp) at the low end of the market, and the EELVs, i.e. Delta IV and Atlas V (Boeing and Lockheed respectively), at the high end of the market (NASA 'next-gen' launch vehicle will most likely be one of the EELVs). Yet Boeing and Lockheed both claimed they couldn't get sufficient commercial launch contracts for their EELVs, and thus jacked the price up on the DOD launches they were slated to do. Even Pegasus and Taurus launches are rare. Why? Because the cost a crapload! Launch costs can be a significant fraction (up to 50%) of the cost of a satellite. Commercial contractors are launching on Russian rockets because they can do it for 1/5 to 1/10 of the price of a US launch.
The only 'next-gen' launch vehicle likely to put a dent in that anytime soon is SpaceX's Falcon, which promises launch costs on the order of $6M. If they can actually pull it off, Falcon has the potential to be a game changer in the launch market. Until then, cheap Russian launches are the way to go.