If they're going to the trouble of launching a rocket to intercept the satellite, why don't they build a small booster which could attach to the satellite and perform a controlled de-orbit?
Because that is much, much easier on TV than it is in real life. (And expensive as hell and requiring technologies we don't have to boot.)
There is far too much space junk up there already. Blowing the satellite into a million pieces doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do.
The space junk issue is being vastly over hyped. I discuss why in this post.
For a supposedly technical site, it seems very few Slashdotters are familiar with the tecnichal issues - or even bother to try. Rants before facts seems to be the motto.
This is very unlikely to add to the space junk problem - because this bird is in a decaying orbit. You further reduce the chances by waiting as late as possible (when the bird has been greatly slowed). You further reduce the risks by arranging your intercept geometry such that few (or no) pieces are boosted towards or into stable orbits.
It's not nearly as simple as "oh n0es, bl0w1ng stuffs up 1n spac3 m3ans mor3 spac3 junk !!11!!!1111!!111".
Ah yes - the military has finally bought the birds Hollywood has been offering them for years.
Or in other words, you vastly overestimate the capabilities available. (The same as the knee jerk tinfoil hat crowd here on Slashdot vastly overestimates the uses to which they can be put.)
An aircraft with merely SR-71 performance adds so little speed or altitude that it practically vanishes in the rounding errors. OK, that's exaggerating a little bit, but only a little.
No, not really. Mach 3 is about 1 km/s. LEO is about 8 km/s. Delta-V budget for LEO adds a bit less than 2 km/s for elevation and atmospheric drag. 100 km is about 1/3 of the elevation, and all of the atmospheric drag, so 20% looks like a reasonable estimate to me.
Yes, really. To start with, the SR-71 doesn't operate anywhere near 100km altitude. Secondly, orbital velocity is a vector quantity, not a linear one. Something launched from an SR-71 has no vertical velocity.
By contrast, I believe the shuttle SRBs seperate at about 0.7 km/s and 45 km elevation (the shuttle main engines contribute 17% of the thrust during that time). This first stage represents 60% of the shuttle's mass. A Mach-3 100 km first stage would be a very significant part of getting to orbit.
This goes back to the bit above about orbital velocity being a vector quantity... When the SRB's separate, the Shuttle hasn't completed pitchover - the bulk of the velocity in the first stage is in the vertical plane, not the horizontal, and a medium portion of it [the vertical velocity] is shed to gravity as the Shuttle pitches over into and accelerates in the horizontal plane.
Altitude doesn't help much - you still have to get that vertical velocity from somewhere.
An assumption utterly unsupported by facts. (Among many other things - there isn't anyone building engines for that speed range for example.)
There was no one building engines for that speed range in the 60s either.
Um, yeah they were. SR-71 engine production didn't cease until the early 1980's.
Materials science has come a long way since the early 60s.
Materials science isn't a working engine.
The F-22 exceeds mach 2 (by how much is anyone's guess) without a ramjet
The F-22 exceeds Mach 2 at an altitude far lower than the SR-71 flew Mach 3. You are talking wildly different engine designs.
we know more about ramjets these days
Not really. Ramjets have been a dead issue for over thirty years. Maybe a little academic research here and there, but no full scale operational engines. At any rate, ramjets are precisely the wrong engine for this kind of mission - because they want to keep accelerating, when what you want for this mission is a stable (albeit very high speed) cruise.
Heck, scramjets are finally looking promising.
Scamjets, like fusion reactors, have looked promising for nearly fifty years. I'm not holding my breath.
Except you didn't place that 'fact' (whichever handwaving you are referring to) into 'relation' (whatever the hell that means). In fact Hubble is a unique accomplishment - for several reasons that either didn't list or are unaware of. (For example, on orbit servicing. Or the number of different optical instruments. Etc.. etc..)
She never accepted payment from Best Buy--the unilaterally made a deposit to her credit card and sent her a gift certificate (!!!), which she donated to charity when they refused to discuss the matter.
Yes - she did accept payment, the gift certificate. That she donated it to charity is irrelevant.
In the low-tech case, you'd have a plane with SR-71 performance.
An aircraft with merely SR-71 performance adds so little speed or altitude that it practically vanishes in the rounding errors. OK, that's exaggerating a little bit, but only a little.
Given the SR-71 was built with 45-50 year old technology we could do significantly better and cheaper today in the "just mach 3" range.
An assumption utterly unsupported by facts. (Among many other things - there isn't anyone building engines for that speed range for example.)
this first stage would still eliminate the fuel requirements to compensate for drag, which I believe would add up to about 20% of the total Delta-V budget.
Try 'under 1%'. There's a reason why [orbital] rockets go more-or-less straight up before starting to pitch over.
It's not even clear that high tech works all that well - because what you gain by not having to carry some of the fuel [in the rocket] is the requirement to add weight (in the form of structure) to support the rocket against lateral loads as it hangs under (or sits on the back of) the launching aircraft and to handle the transient loads of launch.
The A-2 camera system used by the U2 is publicly known to have had an image resolution of 2.5 feet. So at 70,000 feet it could clearly resolve an image under 3 feet. The SR-71 could fly at 85,000 feet and its Technical Objective Camera (TEOC), which was used for very high resolution reconnaissance, is reported to have a resolution of 6". This is all information that's publicly available and you can find it yourself if you bother doing a little bit of searching.
I guess I need to point out the obvious - a golf ball is quite a bit smaller than 6", let alone 2'-6".
Given that we could accurately photograph something 6" from an SR-71 flying at 85,000 feet back in the mid 1960's I think it's safe to say our military has much better capabilities now, 40 years later.
I don't think it's safe to say - but then I've actually studied the issue.
I know of one website created by a former SR-71 technician who had firsthand knowledge of a lot of this. He describes seeing photos of a parking lot taken from an SR-71 at over 80,000 feet and the lines between the parking spaces (less than 6" in width) are clearly visible. He describes seeing photos of a parking lot taken from an SR-71 at over 80,000 feet and the lines between the parking spaces (less than 6" in width) are clearly visible. He also describes seeing blowups of these images where even more detail can be seen.
Folks claim all manner of things - some of them are even true.
You don't need much more detail beyond 6" resolution to read print on something 1" in diameter.
ROTFLMAO. At six inch resolution the smallest printing you can read are letters about two feet tall (under ideal conditions). Something a foot tall is just a blobby handful of pixels.
If you really care to spend a few minutes with Google I'm sure you can find it.
Sorry, I get my information from actual sources - not random webpages.
I held a clearance in the USAF (1971-1975) and saw stuff that is still classified. I wouldn't doubt for a minute that today, decades after the Carona, they can point a satellite at your house and count the fleas on your dog while looking through your roof.
I held a clearance in the USN during the 80's - so what? Having a clearance doesn't mean the USAF can violate the laws of physics.
He's spoken a few times about a series of photos he once saw, taken from a spy plane something like 10-15 miles up. It started out with a photo of the continental United States. The next one in the series was of a region within the US. The next one was of one particular state (I forget which).
This doesn't even pass the giggle test. A bird that high up can't see an entire state (unless it's one of the tiny ones in New England), let alone the entire continental US.
If that had that level of sophistication back in the 60's you can be sure they can do even better than that today
We didn't have that level of sophistication in the 60's, nor do we today - because it violates the laws of physics. (Atmosphere scatter alone limits resolution to a few centimeters - you'd barely be able to see the ball.)
There are spysats around that are bigger than hubble, today, too.
If there are - they aren't much bigger. We don't have an operational launcher that can hoist anything much heavier.
Just because we dont hear about them doesnt mean they dont exist.
That's the thing - we would hear something. It's impossible to hide a launch of a booster big enough to hoist a surveillance bird of any size. We might not know the exact orbit (though that can be found by other means. We might not know the exact purpose - but we can get pretty close once we know the orbit. (Photo recce birds tend to end up in specific orbits, different from the specific orbits of a ferret for example.)
From a technical standpoint air launch isn't that unreasonable.
Sure, from a theoretical viewpoint air launch is quite reasonable. The problems start when you shift from pure theory into the the real world.
Think of it as a first stage that provides 25% of the delta-v needed for LEO. This first stage gets the remainer of the rocket to about 100KM elevation, and moving reasonably fast, but not so high or fast that the first stage needs heat shielding for re-entry. The lack of heat shielding means making the first stage reusable isn't just crazy talk.
Sure, in a world in which an aircraft with those performance numbers doesn't need heat shielding. We don't live in that world.
25% of orbital velocity at 100KM is well into the realm that needs some form of heat shielding, not as much as orbital re-entry but still a decidely non trivial amount. Assuming of course that someday we develop a propulsion system that will perform at those speeds and altitudes - currently those numbers are science fiction, with nothing on the horizon to make one think otherwise. Even scamjets (no that is not a mispelling) don't even theoretically approach that level of performance.
Realistically, any aircraft with sufficient performance to serve as a reasonable orbital launcher is going to require some form of heat protection and rejection system. The problem is, it has to be both reuseable and economical... Something we don't know how to do, and there really isn't anything on the horizon.
It's a question of economics whether an air-breathing reusable first stage, or a traditional rocket first stage, makes more sense.
True - lets examine the economics.
You have to understand one thing - any airlaunch aircraft is going to be big, scary big. A C-5A will support a ton or two to orbit - useful commercial payloads start at around 5 tons, but realistically you need to figure on being able to launch payloads in the 10-25 ton range to be commercially competitive. (Or even bigger if historical trends hold, as there is every reason to suspect they will.) So what you end up with is a very large, very high performance aircraft - which means expensive. In all likelyhood, you are talking either a unique aircraft at worst or a very small production run at best. This means very, very expensive once you amortize program costs across the limited number of airframes. (Think on the order of several tens of billions per aircraft for a production run of five or so. That's enough aircraft to cover roughly ten times the current commercial flight rate.) This means individual flights are expensive, very expensive.
But wait - it gets worse. Far worse.
Once your flight rate gets high enough to reduce the idea of air launcher to merely insanely stupid - it starts becoming very smart to invest in mass production equipment for conventional stages (which are currently handbuilt). This means that conventional stages (which are already pretty cheap) start to drop in price steeply. Long before you reach that point it starts to become economically attractive to increase launch and processing automation. (Which is the real cost driver currently - the sheer number of manhours involved in a launch.)
All of the sudden aircraft don't look so good anymore. All of this is a longwinded way of saying that there is a lot of room for improvement with what we have than most people think - and the same economic forces that make an aircraft potentially attractive also function on ordinary rockets. Rockets are expensive today because of economic forces (low demand), not because it is a law of nature that rockets are expensive.
If your payload is fine with 9 gs, the rocket is the clear choice
The highest G levels in a typical rocket launch are during
Well, in this case, every one of them is going to fall into the category of those who play and buy video games.
An assumption, unsupported by fact. Even if it is true, you still face the same problem - gamers are not a monolithic bloc by any measurement. Not every eyeball is a potential sale... I'm a PC/MMO player, and utterly uninterested in console games, or FPS games, etc... etc... Even if I click an ad out of curiosity, as I sometimes do, counting me in the stats skews them.
To paraphrase Fezzik, "Advertising does not work the way you think it does".
Please make sure you know what you are talking about before reflexively posting a defense of whatever policy you espouse.
Advice you might consider as well.
"Willingness to invade" is classic hard power.
On the contrary. "Willingness to invade" is classic soft power - totally passive, inactive, and indirect. It's a cultural and ideological value. Of course, every so often you have to excercise hard power - and actual or positively threatened invasion to maintain the influence of the "willingness". But, that's true of every form of soft power - if you don't use hard power, the influence currency of soft power debases.
Another hint: Wikipedia is great if you know nothing. It's no so great to use as a reference when don't. It's an encyclopedia, not a treatise on the details of international relations.
It may just be me and my youth speaking, but planning out 28 years seems a little...risky. Who knows what the hell is going to happen tomorrow, let alone 28 years from now.
Well, you have to start somewhere. It takes years to get this kind of stuff into service, so you need to be thinking about employment modes before you sit down and start developing the thing. If you don't think and plan in the long term, you have nothing to base your R&D planning/projects on.
PLUS...what about technology advancements? I seriously doubt that in 28 years "stealth" will mean the same thing it does today.
Disruptive technologies come along but rarely in military science, and even more rarely are they widely deployed before you can start thinking about countermeasures. If you don't start planning and researching today because tommorow somebody might come up with a technological advance that makes your proposed equipment obsolescent if not obsolete - then the day after tommorow you end up even further behind because now you all you have is stuff from yesterday.
Aircraft capable of sustained speeds of Mach 6 doesn't just have to have military purposes. This research could be applicable well beyond, in space exploration and more. As a launch veichle, a reusable hypersonic design is one of NASA's prime goals.
No, hypersonic aircraft are one of NASA's goals because it is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA does keep looking at air launch, but pretty much in the same way you check the refrigerator hoping something tasty has magically appeared since you last looked - you don't expect to, but just maybe. NASA knows full well what the average fanboy doesn't... air launch simply doesn't work. The numbers don't add up.
Someday just maybe we'll find the key to making it work - but right now it simply doesn't. The need to go at high speeds deep in the atmosphere (by rocket standards even the SR-71 was a low flying aircraft) imposes high structural and weight penalties that aren't offset by the minimal performance gains achieved.
As an example, anyone who runs adds on a site like Penny-Arcade can be quite sure that any click throughs are exactly the type of people they want to reach.
That depends on how broadly you define 'the type of people you want to reach'. PA readers include both sexes, all races, all ages, all creeds, all walks of life - a pretty broad swath of humanity, and impossibly wide for assuming 'what type of people they are'.
As someone who has worked in and around certain aircraft projects a very long time ago, I can say for certain that this guy would've never even hoped to get near, say, an F-117 or B-2 project... there's too much compartmentalization (especially between NASA and the USAF/USN, for Hell's sakes...)
Guaranteed the USAF has it's John Walker or Aldrich Ames - they just haven't caught him yet.
Okay, on a serious note, this is 1976(?) tech here. I can understand wanting it real bad in 1979, but, err, 32 year-old-stuff is kinda dated when you consider that we routinely give China techonology that's a whole Hell of a lot newer.
I discuss the potential value of 1970's era technology in another comment.
Are the designs to the Space Shuttle even worth stealing? It's thus far proven to be an expensive and unreliable launch platform.
Expensive, yes. Unreliable? No better and no worse than any other launcher.
Even ignoring all that, it's still 1970s technology.
Except of course, for all the parts that aren't - which is virtually every piece of major electronics on the Shuttle, most of which dates from about the mid 1990's. Now, this sounds horribly old to the typical American consumer, but in the real world hardware remains in service and completely functional for decades.
Even something that is obselescent here (if not obsolete) can be valuable elsewhere. Firmly in the former category is the MK5 Guidance Computer and associated firmware for the recently retired Trident I missile (which I worked with in the Navy). It's 1970's technology - but you won't be finding pallet loads of these sitting around to be auctioned off along with other DoD surplus. The stellar navigation algorithms, the MIRV algorithms, the 'gold registers'[1]... All quite valuable to the Chinese or anyone else developing an ICBM.
[1] An official, unclassified, term for a classified portion of the hardware.
"Utilization" is a perfectly good word, and perfectly clear in usage and meaning to any educated person. I can't believe that on Slashdot a comment complaining a word was 'too big' would get modded up.
Slashdot Mirror
The part where she indicated de facto that she accepted it by donating it charity. You can't donate what you don't own.
Because that is much, much easier on TV than it is in real life. (And expensive as hell and requiring technologies we don't have to boot.)
The space junk issue is being vastly over hyped. I discuss why in this post.
For a supposedly technical site, it seems very few Slashdotters are familiar with the tecnichal issues - or even bother to try. Rants before facts seems to be the motto.
This is very unlikely to add to the space junk problem - because this bird is in a decaying orbit. You further reduce the chances by waiting as late as possible (when the bird has been greatly slowed). You further reduce the risks by arranging your intercept geometry such that few (or no) pieces are boosted towards or into stable orbits.
It's not nearly as simple as "oh n0es, bl0w1ng stuffs up 1n spac3 m3ans mor3 spac3 junk !!11!!!1111!!111".
Ah yes - the military has finally bought the birds Hollywood has been offering them for years.
Or in other words, you vastly overestimate the capabilities available. (The same as the knee jerk tinfoil hat crowd here on Slashdot vastly overestimates the uses to which they can be put.)
Yes, really. To start with, the SR-71 doesn't operate anywhere near 100km altitude. Secondly, orbital velocity is a vector quantity, not a linear one. Something launched from an SR-71 has no vertical velocity.
This goes back to the bit above about orbital velocity being a vector quantity... When the SRB's separate, the Shuttle hasn't completed pitchover - the bulk of the velocity in the first stage is in the vertical plane, not the horizontal, and a medium portion of it [the vertical velocity] is shed to gravity as the Shuttle pitches over into and accelerates in the horizontal plane.
Altitude doesn't help much - you still have to get that vertical velocity from somewhere.
Um, yeah they were. SR-71 engine production didn't cease until the early 1980's.
Materials science isn't a working engine.
The F-22 exceeds Mach 2 at an altitude far lower than the SR-71 flew Mach 3. You are talking wildly different engine designs.
Not really. Ramjets have been a dead issue for over thirty years. Maybe a little academic research here and there, but no full scale operational engines. At any rate, ramjets are precisely the wrong engine for this kind of mission - because they want to keep accelerating, when what you want for this mission is a stable (albeit very high speed) cruise.
Scamjets, like fusion reactors, have looked promising for nearly fifty years. I'm not holding my breath.
ROTFLMAO.
Except you didn't place that 'fact' (whichever handwaving you are referring to) into 'relation' (whatever the hell that means). In fact Hubble is a unique accomplishment - for several reasons that either didn't list or are unaware of. (For example, on orbit servicing. Or the number of different optical instruments. Etc.. etc..)
Yes - she did accept payment, the gift certificate. That she donated it to charity is irrelevant.
An aircraft with merely SR-71 performance adds so little speed or altitude that it practically vanishes in the rounding errors. OK, that's exaggerating a little bit, but only a little.
An assumption utterly unsupported by facts. (Among many other things - there isn't anyone building engines for that speed range for example.)
Try 'under 1%'. There's a reason why [orbital] rockets go more-or-less straight up before starting to pitch over.
It's not even clear that high tech works all that well - because what you gain by not having to carry some of the fuel [in the rocket] is the requirement to add weight (in the form of structure) to support the rocket against lateral loads as it hangs under (or sits on the back of) the launching aircraft and to handle the transient loads of launch.
I guess I need to point out the obvious - a golf ball is quite a bit smaller than 6", let alone 2'-6".
I don't think it's safe to say - but then I've actually studied the issue.
Folks claim all manner of things - some of them are even true.
ROTFLMAO. At six inch resolution the smallest printing you can read are letters about two feet tall (under ideal conditions). Something a foot tall is just a blobby handful of pixels.
Sorry, I get my information from actual sources - not random webpages.
I held a clearance in the USN during the 80's - so what? Having a clearance doesn't mean the USAF can violate the laws of physics.
This doesn't even pass the giggle test. A bird that high up can't see an entire state (unless it's one of the tiny ones in New England), let alone the entire continental US.
We didn't have that level of sophistication in the 60's, nor do we today - because it violates the laws of physics. (Atmosphere scatter alone limits resolution to a few centimeters - you'd barely be able to see the ball.)
If there are - they aren't much bigger. We don't have an operational launcher that can hoist anything much heavier.
That's the thing - we would hear something. It's impossible to hide a launch of a booster big enough to hoist a surveillance bird of any size. We might not know the exact orbit (though that can be found by other means. We might not know the exact purpose - but we can get pretty close once we know the orbit. (Photo recce birds tend to end up in specific orbits, different from the specific orbits of a ferret for example.)
Sure, from a theoretical viewpoint air launch is quite reasonable. The problems start when you shift from pure theory into the the real world.
Sure, in a world in which an aircraft with those performance numbers doesn't need heat shielding. We don't live in that world.
25% of orbital velocity at 100KM is well into the realm that needs some form of heat shielding, not as much as orbital re-entry but still a decidely non trivial amount. Assuming of course that someday we develop a propulsion system that will perform at those speeds and altitudes - currently those numbers are science fiction, with nothing on the horizon to make one think otherwise. Even scamjets (no that is not a mispelling) don't even theoretically approach that level of performance.
Realistically, any aircraft with sufficient performance to serve as a reasonable orbital launcher is going to require some form of heat protection and rejection system. The problem is, it has to be both reuseable and economical... Something we don't know how to do, and there really isn't anything on the horizon.
True - lets examine the economics.
You have to understand one thing - any airlaunch aircraft is going to be big, scary big. A C-5A will support a ton or two to orbit - useful commercial payloads start at around 5 tons, but realistically you need to figure on being able to launch payloads in the 10-25 ton range to be commercially competitive. (Or even bigger if historical trends hold, as there is every reason to suspect they will.) So what you end up with is a very large, very high performance aircraft - which means expensive. In all likelyhood, you are talking either a unique aircraft at worst or a very small production run at best. This means very, very expensive once you amortize program costs across the limited number of airframes. (Think on the order of several tens of billions per aircraft for a production run of five or so. That's enough aircraft to cover roughly ten times the current commercial flight rate.) This means individual flights are expensive, very expensive.
But wait - it gets worse. Far worse.
Once your flight rate gets high enough to reduce the idea of air launcher to merely insanely stupid - it starts becoming very smart to invest in mass production equipment for conventional stages (which are currently handbuilt). This means that conventional stages (which are already pretty cheap) start to drop in price steeply. Long before you reach that point it starts to become economically attractive to increase launch and processing automation. (Which is the real cost driver currently - the sheer number of manhours involved in a launch.)
All of the sudden aircraft don't look so good anymore. All of this is a longwinded way of saying that there is a lot of room for improvement with what we have than most people think - and the same economic forces that make an aircraft potentially attractive also function on ordinary rockets. Rockets are expensive today because of economic forces (low demand), not because it is a law of nature that rockets are expensive.
The highest G levels in a typical rocket launch are during
An assumption, unsupported by fact. Even if it is true, you still face the same problem - gamers are not a monolithic bloc by any measurement. Not every eyeball is a potential sale... I'm a PC/MMO player, and utterly uninterested in console games, or FPS games, etc... etc... Even if I click an ad out of curiosity, as I sometimes do, counting me in the stats skews them.
To paraphrase Fezzik, "Advertising does not work the way you think it does".
Advice you might consider as well.
On the contrary. "Willingness to invade" is classic soft power - totally passive, inactive, and indirect. It's a cultural and ideological value. Of course, every so often you have to excercise hard power - and actual or positively threatened invasion to maintain the influence of the "willingness". But, that's true of every form of soft power - if you don't use hard power, the influence currency of soft power debases.
Another hint: Wikipedia is great if you know nothing. It's no so great to use as a reference when don't. It's an encyclopedia, not a treatise on the details of international relations.
Well, you have to start somewhere. It takes years to get this kind of stuff into service, so you need to be thinking about employment modes before you sit down and start developing the thing. If you don't think and plan in the long term, you have nothing to base your R&D planning/projects on.
Disruptive technologies come along but rarely in military science, and even more rarely are they widely deployed before you can start thinking about countermeasures. If you don't start planning and researching today because tommorow somebody might come up with a technological advance that makes your proposed equipment obsolescent if not obsolete - then the day after tommorow you end up even further behind because now you all you have is stuff from yesterday.
No, hypersonic aircraft are one of NASA's goals because it is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
NASA does keep looking at air launch, but pretty much in the same way you check the refrigerator hoping something tasty has magically appeared since you last looked - you don't expect to, but just maybe. NASA knows full well what the average fanboy doesn't... air launch simply doesn't work. The numbers don't add up.
Someday just maybe we'll find the key to making it work - but right now it simply doesn't. The need to go at high speeds deep in the atmosphere (by rocket standards even the SR-71 was a low flying aircraft) imposes high structural and weight penalties that aren't offset by the minimal performance gains achieved.
That depends on how broadly you define 'the type of people you want to reach'. PA readers include both sexes, all races, all ages, all creeds, all walks of life - a pretty broad swath of humanity, and impossibly wide for assuming 'what type of people they are'.
Yeah. To demonstrate nanowires of unlimited length - they've made one a whopping 40cm long along with a bunch of other nanoscale demonstrations.
Guaranteed the USAF has it's John Walker or Aldrich Ames - they just haven't caught him yet.
I discuss the potential value of 1970's era technology in another comment.
Expensive, yes. Unreliable? No better and no worse than any other launcher.
Except of course, for all the parts that aren't - which is virtually every piece of major electronics on the Shuttle, most of which dates from about the mid 1990's. Now, this sounds horribly old to the typical American consumer, but in the real world hardware remains in service and completely functional for decades.
Even something that is obselescent here (if not obsolete) can be valuable elsewhere. Firmly in the former category is the MK5 Guidance Computer and associated firmware for the recently retired Trident I missile (which I worked with in the Navy). It's 1970's technology - but you won't be finding pallet loads of these sitting around to be auctioned off along with other DoD surplus. The stellar navigation algorithms, the MIRV algorithms, the 'gold registers'[1]... All quite valuable to the Chinese or anyone else developing an ICBM.
[1] An official, unclassified, term for a classified portion of the hardware.
"Utilization" is a perfectly good word, and perfectly clear in usage and meaning to any educated person. I can't believe that on Slashdot a comment complaining a word was 'too big' would get modded up.
It's not as if the Wikipedia is a shining example of tolerance itself.
If it doesn't pay for itself, it is not efficient by definition.