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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!"
That is probably the oddest article summary I've ever seen here.
Reads like a promo for the new X Files movie.
simon
Not to mention the possibility of a Goa'uld Ha'tak coming to invade Earth!
So does this mean we finally will have the ability to 'nuke it from orbit'? 'It' being the terrorist-sheltering target of the week.
Not if the target has a substantial monetary value.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
their called democrats
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Isn't space meant to be like demilitarized zone or something?
Isn't there an international treaty signed by US and Russia against this ? Is that the start of a new race ?
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Re-railing this first thread:
1. The first picture on gizmodo clearly shows a X-40A, not an X-37B.
2. Secret military shuttles?
3. Secret orbital bases?
Kind of hard to have secret anything these days, especially aircraft that fly into space, and more so for things that are in orbit. Any nut job with a telescope can see stuff in orbit. Shuttles lifting off are fairly dramatic, and show up on satellite scans like a turd in a punch bowl. As for secret shuttles, why bother when the DoD just schedules a military launch of one of the shuttles and keeps the payload a secret. And where are 'they' hiding the orbital platforms? Behind the moon?
Seriously, what kind of paranoid lunatics write stories over at gizmodo? They should stick to reviewing the iPhone and keeping tabs on Steve Jobs' not so well hidden agenda to take over the Interweb and make it so only Apple equipment is used.
Sheesh!
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
UFO sightings does this explain? Military planes take 20 or more years of testing, and TFA says they've flowin it before. So how many times did someone in the Southwest spot one and say, "That ain't no plane. It's movin way too fast!"
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
http://www.aviationnow.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/SPACE07298.xml&headline=USAF%20Sets%20Orbital%20Spaceplane%20Test%20Flight&channel=space
Kinda like how Enterprise flew from the back of a 747
They flew an AIRCRAFT CARRIER on the back of a 747? How did I miss that?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
I'm pretty much a hardcore Republican that thinks Obama is a sort of Pharonic anti-christ, but, Obama's criticisms of NASA suddenly stand in stark relief when we suddenly see that the USAF is actually building a credible spaceplane and NASA, in its Constellation program, is admitting that it can't do it. Sure, one might argue that NASA is strapped for funds, but I like how the USAF had no problem turning to White Knight to test its stuff out rather than NIH'ing the whole program. Maybe we -do- need to kill NASA's manned space flight program.
This is my sig.
OK, your troops are fighting a guerilla war (actually several guerilla wars) against low-tech terrorist cells. Bugger flack jackets and armored vehicles (or better yet, 'educational' aid to Africa to head off the next generation of extremists), you need space superiority.
Ion engines: No
Laser cannons: No
Photon torpedos: No
Shields: No
Warpcore/hyperspace drive: No
Matter/antimatter reactor: No
Transporters: No
Long Range Scanner: No
Sort Range sensors: Yes
Space capabilities: Kind of.
Buyers advice:
This space fighter doesn't have any of the selling features of other space fighters on the market. The lack of ion engines make this a very dated craft. It is more appropriate for a museum than the space age. Buyers are adviced to look into more complete craft like the X-wing or the TIE-advance. This craft makes the old and very well known to be unsafe TIE-fighter look good.
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
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Uhhh... the jabs about the secret shuttle (and its anti-matter rays and hyperspace engines) along with the orbital space station (complete with nuclear bays and chemical lasers) were pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek. You know, when somebody says something so completely ridiculous that it's taken as a given that the reader won't take them seriously?
Art Bell, our guest editor for the day. Art Bell ladies and gentlemen! Let's give him a big round of applause!
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Something that has to be launched from an Atlas missile, has no docking facilities, no cargo space...this will replace the Shuttle how,exactly?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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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So, are you implying that the Ministry of Agriculture really is in charge of Gundam?
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Communism was only a Red Herring...
However, some people think Super Mario Bros is a communist plot: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mariocommunist
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
always mean lower taxes down the road! Good plan! I love the theory that once politicians get a certain amount of money, they just don't want any more. I'm guessing your kids will only have to pay 1-2% income tax.
It is more then just an Aircraft Carrier it is Nucklear wessel.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Anti-matter rays are real, and they are being used on people today!! It really is an apathy ray that is used on people to make them lose foc...
What was I saying? Never mind, it doesn't matter.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
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.
If you re-ran the 2007 budget using the "accrual" method of accounting that corporations must use, the "official" deficit of $163 billion balloons to over $2.4 trillion dollars -- FOR 2007 ALONE!
Indeed, if the US Federal government was a private corporation, it would be considered "insolvent," but on the other hand they have guns and can take as much in taxes from us as they want, which a private corporation can't do (even the oil companies :)
The facts are there, you just need to look for them. However, the idea that revenues are up can easily be counters with "and if taxes were X we would have X more" or "you don't know that the tax cuts caused that increase" when it is obvious from every other tax cut in a weak economy that it brings motion that increases revenues. The vast majority of people wouldn't know the difference and we wouldn't be any worse off.
The bottom line is that the republicans are in a tight situation. There is so much fud going around that they couldn't win if they wanted to. The Major pains if the gas prices started after the dems took control of congress in 2006, we didn't even have $3 gas back then. But they seem to be the "popular ones who can fix? it somehow. The federal budget has increased after they took office too yet the republicans are getting the blame for the deficit spending because of the two wars. It isn't like the democrats don't know what will be spent or what is being spent on the wars and that they don't have the opportunity to cut spending so a surplus budget could cover the costs of the war. But as the great GP just said, tax and spend now instead of taxing their kids.
I mean hell, you will even hear about how the dems ballances the budget in the 90's even though republicans controlled congress, set spending, and made the budget that was passed and sent to Clinton. Forget about the funding wars where Clinton vetoed budgets because there wasn't enough for a certain program or because there was too much in another. Forget about the dot come buble that increased revenue which was completely unique to the times and tied closely to the Capitol gains tax cuts. Forget about all the Roth IRA conversions where someone who has saved 2 million dollars for retirement was able to pay taxes on the 2 million then and not when they withdrew it at retirement. Forget about being able to spread that out over four years time, which had the effect of encouraging people to convert thereby giving the government a surplus tax income that should have been paid out 10 or more years in the future. But all that doesn't matter as long as the democrats take credit for it. It doesn't matter at all that there was 3 maybe 4 specific and non-repeatable situations that happened that increased the federal revenue quite a bit for a real short time.
As another person in this thread mentioned, the problems are both parties. Both of them know how much the war is costing and neither of them are cutting spending to ease the deficit. The numbers are there, the sources are scattered all around and it won't be hard for you to find what the parent said about the tax cuts raising revenues, but it isn't exactly black and white and neither party can take advantage of it.
BTW, McCain has already pledged to not remove the tax cuts. Obama, after finding out how many lower income-non-rich people would be effected by it has changed his stand from removing the Evil Bush Tax Cuts to removing part of them if you make more then $250,000 a year. He now wants to decrease or lower taxes on those same non-rich people who benefited from the Bush Tax cut for the Rich. This is probably why he almost all but gave up on pushing his health care initiatives. He can't cut taxes and pay for that at the same time if we were to believe what he originally said about both. None of these issues is cut and dry because of all the FUD surrounding all of them.