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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!"
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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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.