Prompt Global Strike

The NYT has an interesting article about a new weapon system.

WASHINGTON — In coming years, President Obama will decide whether to deploy a new class of weapons capable of reaching any corner of the earth from the United States in under an hour and with such accuracy and force that they would greatly diminish America’s reliance on its nuclear arsenal.

Yet even now, concerns about the technology are so strong that the Obama administration has acceded to a demand by Russia that the United States decommission one nuclear missile for every one of these conventional weapons fielded by the Pentagon. That provision, the White House said, is buried deep inside the New Start treaty that Mr. Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev signed in Prague two weeks ago.

Initially I thought this was a pure kinetic energy weapon, but on closer reading its a very large "conventional warhead." The hypersonic glider is very cool though.

NYT on Constellation's and NASA's future...

The NYT has caught up with the rest of the crowd in producing articles questioning Constellation and NASA's future. In summary it discusses cost, weight and vibration problems with Ares I, some complaints about "a my-way-or-the-highway attitude that stifles dissent and innovation" that supposedely exists at higher levels in the program, and briefly rehashes some of the claimed conflict between the Obama transition team and NASA head honcho Michael Griffin.

Perhaps the most surprising (and scary) aspect of the article to me was that it claims that the Obama transition team also questioned the 5 year gap in US manned space flight capability that will exist between when the Shuttle is retired Old Yeller-style and Ares I would supposedly start flying astronauts. Supposedly the transition team asked question about how much it would cost to narrow this 5 year gap and/or the cost of retaining one or two shuttles in flying order (see pages 1 and 3 of the NYT article).

To me this is more worrying than the claims that the Ares I program is in trouble. Previous coverage of this issue gave the impression that Obama's team was pragmatic and fiscally responsible and wanted to avoid cost overruns and potential white elephant programs. This article gives exactly the opposite impression... scary!

Yet narrowing that 5 year gap by speeding up Constellation development will cost a lot of money. Keeping any shuttles going will cost even more. Where is that money going to come from?

The shuttles have only ever been useful for one thing: Hubble servicing missions. The space station is a 20 billion dollar waste that does nothing. Together the ISS and the Shuttles have squandered vast amounts of money without producing a sustainable manned space program, or indeed may have prevented there from being a sustainable manned space program. Lets ditch the shuttle and the ISS ASAP. So what if there is a 5 or even 10 year gap in launching astronauts into space, if at the end of it you end up with a sustainable space program?

There is also a reasonably interesting slide show of images of a J-2X engine, an Ares upper-stage mock-up and an Orion capsule mock-up (although later slides are mainly artists impressions or unrelated SpaceX stuff) and a multi-slide interactive (flash) graphic of the Constellation program that nicely illustrates the proposed Ares I and Ares V rockets.

BBC article on origins of WWII German rocket program

Anatoly Zak has an interesting and detailed article at the BBC on the origins of the German rocket program in the 1930's. This was a military program that ultimately lead to the V-1 and V-2 rockets used against Britain in the second world war, although the factories that made the weapons were staffed with slave labor. (For documentray lovers, The Reich Underground [Netflix] shows the underground Nazi rocket factories such as Mittelwerk -- ~20,000 concentration camp inmates were killed in forced labor at Mittelwork alone.)


Later the victorious Allies collected all the German rocket engineers they could get their hands on and put them back to work, so sadly the successes of the US and Russian space programs owe much to this tainted knowledge.

This is not to say that home grown efforts on rocket propulsion by people like Goddard in the US and Korolev in the USSR were not significant - merely that the Germans devoted significantly more state funding to developing practical military rocketry than the US and USSR of that period did.

[Both images are WWII-era photos of the underground V2 factories at Mittelwerk, Nordhausen, taken from Geoff Walden's fascinating "Third Reich in Ruins" site.]