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US To Launch Military Orbital Spaceplane
An anonymous reader writes "Not only is the US readying its first 100% military spaceplane for a November launch, but it's going to push NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission til 2009: 'The USAF and Boeing will launch the X-38B — the first military orbital space plane if you discount the secret military shuttle — on top of an Atlas V rocket in November. They want to test its flying features in space and during atmospheric reentry. And probably its anti-matter rays and nuclear bays and hyperspace engines too (but of course, they are never going to tell you that). However, there seems to be a conflict with the civilian space program which may push one of the Moon exploration missions to 2009.' Screw the moon. We have to defend ourselves against all those alien extremists from Mars!"
OK, its probably just part of the military's super-secret mind rays, but just what is this thing called again?
The summary calls it the X-38B, the RTFA link calls it the X-37B, but the photo at the top clearly shows that it is called the X-40A, while the "artist's impression" at the bottom calls it the plain old X-37!
Wait, I've got it, its some kind of bizarre shell game.
The treaty relates to weapons in space, not military transports. Anyway, USA and Russia dont exactly have a history of following treaties they have signed.
http://www.aviationnow.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/SPACE07298.xml&headline=USAF%20Sets%20Orbital%20Spaceplane%20Test%20Flight&channel=space
After sorting through the linked article, I found the original article that they're basing their article on. 1. X-37B is correct. 2. X-40A was a 'previous configuration' 3. Perhaps we should add a 'no gizmodo' clause to the posting guidelines?
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Isn't space meant to be like demilitarized zone or something?
Yes, the Outer Space Treaty prohibits military bases, any kind of weapon tests and the permanent placement of WMD anywhere outside the Earth's atmosphere (nuclear ICBMs are OK as long as they stay in space only temporary on their way to their destination).
But the article (and even more so the summary) is mostly sensationalist crap: the real news here is that they are doing a test of the small and unmanned Boeing X-37B technology demonstrator. But I guess yet another engineering step in a slow technology development program doesn't sound as much as newsworthy for people that are not in this kind of thing.
Oh, BTW, there has never been anything like a "secret military shuttle" (you simply can't hide anything like that in space). There where a few NASA Shuttle missions in the 80s dedicated to the deployment of military satellites, but the DoD has for a very long time launched its payloads on Atlas and Delta rockets. If something is broken, it's much chepear to simply launch a new one that to mount a risky STS maintenance mission (and the Shuttle can't reach most of the orbits used by military satellites). So this has absolutely nothing to do with the planned STS retirement in 2010.
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1) They didnt even get the RIGHT CRAFT.
2) There never was EVER a secret military shuttle... there where plans to make military shuttles, but they where hardly secret and never made it past the drawing board AS a military project. You could say some of their ideas went into the STS, but then thats hardly a secret.
This isnt even technically a shuttle... its a test bed system which is something NASA and the military have launched multiple times.. again technically the Air Force can not even launch the thing as a military object, it would go against the treaties in place and while I do not put it past our current government, they likely will not be in power when this thing is supposed to be tested and certainly if it get the green light for production.
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The US is insane when it comes to overkill. Half of all taxes go to the military, and our forces dwarf Russia, China, and the "axis of evil" combined.
Wow, you pulled that out of your ass.
2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fy2008spendingbycategory.png
21% goes to our dwindling Social Security porgram.
16.6% goes to the DoD
13.3% goes to Medicare
11.2% goes to unemployment
9% pays the interest on national debt
7.2% goes to Medicaid
5% went to the war on terror
2.4% Health and Human Services
etc.
So to summarize: only 21.6% went to the protection of the U.S. whereas well over 60% went to social programs
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Half of all taxes go to the military
Minor nit... its 20-36%, depending on how you run the numbers. The only way you can get to 50% is if you remove social security taxes and assign nearly all debt payments as "military debt". If you just take military spending and divide it by total government outlays you get 36%, including the extra war spending in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Well, technically ICBMs leave the atmosphere on their path to the target so we can do that already...
Although the fact that they're ballistic (following the path determined only by initial velocity and gravity)) technically means that they are in orbit, most people don't consider a highly eccentric trajectory that intersects the planet's surface to be an orbit. Also, merely leaving the atmosphere does not count as being in orbit.
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However, some people think Super Mario Bros is a communist plot: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mariocommunist
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In exchange for getting the USSR's nukes from the former republics, the Russian Federation agreed to take on all debts and treaty obligations of the USSR, meaning that the treaty applies to Russia (Also See: the uproar over Russia withdrawing from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty)
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Not sure how your rant got scored interesting... and I'm the first one to bash NASA..... but I think this article is talking about the X-37B. The X-37A was DEVELOPED by NASA, though Boeing's Phantom Works actually built it under contact to them. The program was transfered to DARPA in 2004 and the X-37B is a second generation developed by the military. Since the original design is from NASA your venom is somewhat misplaced, at least in this instance.
@de_machina
True. But back in the 90's when the Soviet Union became the Commonwealth of Independent States, the CIS explicitly took over the role and responsibilities of the USSR with regards to various treaties and agreements that the USSR was a party to. Which means the CIS, and by extension Russia as a member state, is still bound by the Outer Space Treaty.
Governments in the US are more or less bankrupt already, and because there is such a wide range of political realities across the nation at smaller than federal levels it is easy to see it is not a D or R issue, merely a society in general issue, there is equal blame to go around. This economic bankruptcy coming, by insisting that wealth can be mandated out of thin air, will effect all of us, this generation, the next, and the next.
The total unfunded mandates for retirees pensions is more in the short time frame now future than can be taxed out of the citizenry without economic collapse.
Want a good indicator, look at the wealthiest state, california, and see what is looming for them shortly. Now imagine the poorer states. It simply cannot be done. Neither can most private pension plans be funded in the future. It cannot be done. The boomers will be wanting to retire, some will, but those governmental workers who get pensions (some are double dippers with two pensions) will be retiring by the millions, once you look at all the federal, state and local employees out there, and they can't just "go to the private workplace" because those sorts of busywork jobs just don't exist in any numbers, there not enough justifiable busywork jobs out there now as it is, let alone tens of millions more currently working governmental workers to have them not retire and just switch.
It is already a burden to states and municipalities and every year it gets worse. How many governmental units in the US are running in the red now? It is most of them. The only conceivable way to pay these sorts of sums would be to inflate the currency levels from beyond ludicrous like it is now into starting to look like zimbabwe levels, or declare bankruptcy and default, which would have exactly the same effect of systemic wide scale and extremely rapid collapse once it starts in earnest, which is something like any day now relatively speaking, we see the signs of it already. Well, some of us do anyway.
It's just simple math. Really, that's it, and it goes beyond an R or D partisan political level. A huge economic collapse is coming soon, followed by social collapse.
You simply can't have only around 5% of the total population in a nation actually creating wealth and think the other 95% can exist on that.
If the numbers seem extreme, just do this: You remove non working minors, governmental employees, the already retired, and those jobs that are only wealth servicing jobs and not wealth creation jobs, and you have *zilch* for any real productivity.
We have gotten by so far in the US by the rest of the planet taking our printed up paper notes as "wealth" for a long time, and giving us valuable assets for those pieces of paper or computer generated bits, and by putting the next generation into debt with bonds and treasuries paper, IOUs, but that is changing fast. They massage the stats to try and make it look better than it is, but it won't work for long.