Russia Is Building a Nuclear Space Bomber (thedailybeast.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: The Russian military claims it's making progress on a space plane similar to the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B robotic mini-shuttle. The tech is pretty basic. But alone among space-plane developers, the Kremlin is proposing to arm its space plane. With nukes. Lt. Col. Aleksei Solodovnikov, a rocketry instructor at the Russian Strategic Missile Forces Academy in St. Petersburg who is overseeing the space plane's development, said the orbital bomber would be flight-ready by 2020. It's unclear how much money the Kremlin is investing in the project, and how serious senior officers are about actually deploying the space plane, if and when Solodovnikov and his team finish it. In any event, the military space plane could give Russia a potentially history-altering nuclear first-strike capability. "The idea is that the bomber will take off from a normal home airfield to patrol Russian airspace," Solodovnikov said, according to Sputnik, a government-owned news site. "Upon command, it will ascend into outer space, strike a target with nuclear warheads and then return to its home base." Thanks to its orbital capability, the bomber would be able to nuke any target on Earth no longer than two hours after taking off, Solodovnikov claimed.

Comments

Re: muricans = idiots

[MightyMartian]

Let's be mindful here that probably the only East Asian nations not happy that the US is keeping the South China Sea open to navigation is China, and probably North Korea (if NK even really cares at all). Everyone else wants the US there, even Vietnam, a one-time enemy now quickly becoming one of the US's pre-eminent allies. The Europeans sure the hell still want US/NATO military assets in Eastern Europe because of growing tensions with Russia.

And China using water cannons to attack Filipino fishermen is hardly "peaceful", China violating maritime law and trying to turn a sea mount into an island to extend its territorial waters and economic zone is hardly peaceful, and everyone should be damned glad that the US is now regularly reminding China that pouring a bunch of concrete on an atoll does not an island make.

Re:So this is Russia answer to the ,,

[MobSwatter]

I personally believe this to be propaganda in support of current saber rattling between NATO forces and Russia trying to force feed Russia US debt because the Dragon family proved to be just too badass for Rothschild who got handed his ass in a currency war and China began to dump US debt. Current multi warhead ICBM's are far more efficient in delivery to multiple targets to justify spending to develop a reusable craft to do the same. This appears to be an attack on pretty much the only country that still has a viable space program the US has be dependent upon for over a decade as a taxi service to orbit simply because bankster run US has been rendered fiscally incapable of maintaining one, nice shoot'n uncle Sam there's another hole in your foot. There are also globalization benefits to the story as well in an attempt to level the playing field so that we can all have a one world government and a single point of failure because the corrupt elite are simply too lazy to have to make multiple calls dealing with multiple governments to pursue some twisted agenda -boohoo. Not sold on the story, distinct smell of bullshit.