Envisioning the world of 2100

[publiusr]

newtype_alpha wrote:

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Correction: the R-7 was funded by a military. Which means that unlike the Saturn-V and the shuttle, it had a continuing justification to exist irrespective of the nation's political will

That is a point I have to concede, only because of how The Air Farce robbed ICBMs from the ABMA. It wasn't just the USSR's military, but their Army. Until recently, artillerymen manned the R-7 pads because a missile is properly artillery.

Here, Our triad was made of an ICBM force with tiny warheads atop tiny solids. Titans Deltas and Atlas rockets only used for comsats and milsats. If you wanted more than this--you had to compete with fighter jocks for funding. Remember, Nikita wanted R-7 and missiles in that it provided him an excuse to not have to have a blue water navy like ours, or to match us bomber for bomber. Stalin before him wanted an ICBM pronto.

Here is where the chief designers cooked the books. They told their superiors not to wait until warheads had been shrunken--as we did. Their idea was to make the rocket bigger. Their military knew this and howled, but Stalin wanted his ICBM now--so the result was a space booster sold as an ICBM--rather than vice versa.

In other words, space advocates actually got what they wanted.

Over here our two greatest technocrats were not Korolev and Glushko, but Curtis LeMay and Adm. Rickover.

Von Braun had more money in absolute sense, but less real power in our military--so we had to have a strong NASA to bully up and be an institution all its own. Koptev on the other hand, had no real power angainst Semenov's Energia Crp--and Golden had to give him a bigger voice. Thus even in Russian now, the civilian space force has to have national support. Tough these days with Medvedev going off on them after Phobos Grunt. Not helping. As for me--we should have kept the Army model that worked well for the Soviets with ABMA and General Medaris--but he had no power to stand against Bernie Schriever.

newtype_alpha wrote:

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The EELVs all have a much higher flight rate than the shuttle o SpaceX too will have a "sure thing" fallback if space exploration bites the political dust and will continue in business through its military contracts.

Atlas V has a good flight rate. Delta IV is a worse pad sitter than shuttle and that was after Columbia. Right now, LockMart is working with ATK on Athena, and Antares is facing the ULA gang who want to prop up EELVs despite their rising costs. Here is what I see, EELVs will be kept around, but so will Falcon 9. SLS will be propped up--but so will (hopefully) MCT to replace Block II. Antares will die, and maybe Delta IV. The downselect will be to Falcon, Atlas and SLS. That is how it looks now because SLS is farther along than MCT

newtype_alpha wrote:

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I repeat that there are no military payloads being considered for the SLS at the current time..

Now all that is likely to change as such time as it is flying. Remember that space advocates in the Pentagon are on the outside looking in. With NASA picking up the tab on a larger LV, older items such as larger space-based radar and boost phase BMDO projects--depending on who is in the White House of course--may get a second look, especially with Griffin advising Romney and Obama (officially) committed to SLS. Coyote Smith wanted Space Based Solar power, and there are things being looked at that would have no chance from the bottom up with the USAF sitting on things.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/sbr.htm
www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/02/sls-dod-market-secondary-payloads-potential/
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2010/...sk-assessment/

Some arguements are being made pro-and-con..big pdf
http://timemilitary.files.wordpress....rt-2012-09.pdf

See Major Finding 8a

Now remember there is "no current market" for MCT either. Musk is hoping to start one. There are no payloads because there is no rocket. There is no rocket because there are no payloads. Chicken, meet egg. SLS and MCT are in R-7's shoes. The Russians could have waited until smaller solids and smaller warheads came along (Topol) but space advocates in being higher up the food chain made the rocket first, then the payloads followed.

Personally, I want large space based military assets for boost phase ICBM intercept. Right now, we have to have ships at sea with solids in a tail chase against liquid fueled ballistic missiles that can outpace them unless they are very close where the solids hard acceleration have a chance of catching them. other than that, ground based missile defense rely on drones shooting up at a bunch of targets already coming down.

Space Based assets reverse that. Now such advocacy won't be easy in sequestration--but this allows big cuts to deadwood to be made, with outsiders perhaps using the chaos to their advantage. Khrushchev saw that space-arms was actually the cheaper way to go. I could argue that space based assets are cheaper than keeping this Cold War WWII era logistical nightmare Forget SPSS for power generation ofor civilian use--If I can have a handful of demonstrators keeping an electric drone cap up--then I can argue against carrier groups and endless airplane acquisitions. In other words, the logistics of bodies, bases, beans and bullets cost more than Falcon/SLS-launched rods-from-god.

This is why space advocates rank below the janitor in the Pentagon--they could make a lot of things obsolete.

[Crazy Eddie]

publiusr wrote:

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Here, Our triad was made of an ICBM force with tiny warheads atop tiny solids. Titans Deltas and Atlas rockets only used for comsats and milsats.

Eventually, yes. Solid boosters replaced the liquid ones only when the U.S. stopped using fixed missile silos to house the Titans; they switched, instead, to mobile launch platforms that could be moved just about anywhere, thus robbing the Soviets of any hope that they could cripple America's retaliatory missile arsenal by saturating known launched sites with bunker busters and the like.

The space shuttle managed to avoid cancellation by courting military objectives, resulting in its overly huge delta wing and overly huge payload bay, neither of which were ever used to their full capacity; it did briefly provide a useful vehicle for the deployment and testing of some military payloads until the Challenger accident brought that to an end; it was only then that the need for EELVs became apparent, at around the same time the Air Force started transitioning to solid propellants in ICBMs.

Here is where the chief designers cooked the books. They told their superiors not to wait until warheads had been shrunken--as we did.

We did WHAT now?

No, we didn't wait for the warheads to get smaller, we just accepted a missile with a shorter range until a larger version could be developed and mass produced. You may recall that that larger version was a missile called the SM-65 Atlas -- the forerunner of today's Atlas-V EELV.

Strictly speaking, since the Russians have stopped using the R-7s as ICBMs, that pretty much makes the Soyuz family the Russian equivalent of America's EELVs. In which case, it must be said that the Atlas has ALSO been in continuous service for over fifty years and has developed considerably over that time.

Von Braun had more money in absolute sense, but less real power in our military

Again, that's only half right. Ultimately, Von Braun's development of the Redstone missile -- and the now legendary Redstone Arsenal -- served the same purpose as Korolev's R-7 project: piggybacking an exploration program onto a crash course missile development program. Though their approach was slightly different (primarily due to the differing natures of the governments they worked for) the technique is ultimately the same: Come for the weaponry, stay for the spaceflight.

You may also recall that Von Braun did the exact same thing when he worked for Hitler. His designs for what eventually became the Saturn-V dated back to the original V-2 rocket program, and Von Braun was dabbling in concepts for manned spaceflight even then.

Here is what I see, EELVs will be kept around, but so will Falcon 9. SLS will be propped up--but so will (hopefully) MCT to replace Block II. Antares will die, and maybe Delta IV. The downselect will be to Falcon, Atlas and SLS. That is how it looks now because SLS is farther along than MCT

I don't see SLS surviving the downselect process, or really, even being part of it in any meaningful way. It's a political football with no actual utility attached, so it's in an entirely different ballgame.

What will probably happen is that Orbital Sciences will stop dicking around with the Antares and commission either Falcon 9s or Atlas-Vs -- or both -- for their CRS missions (why you insist on blaming the trouble with Antares on ULA is beyond me). Falcon Heavy will probably squeeze out the Delta-IV, which I think ultimately benefits ULA since they can focus on man-rating the Atlas-V. That benefits them because everyone who has ever looked at the SLS immediately realizes that it's much too large to be a practical launcher for Orion alone, and thus Orion is incapable of performing its secondary mission as a possible transport to and from the space station or rescue vehicle if the station has trouble. That, ultimately, would give NASA two or more options for crew transport: Falcon 9/Dragon, Atlas/MPCV, and possibly Atlas/Dreamchaser.

Which means that while they're throwing money at their congressional mandate to build SLS, private companies can provide their short-range launch capability for Low Earth Orbit at a relatively low cost to NASA (like they already are in terms of cargo transport to the space station). SLS might be viable if NASA or the Air Force can think of something really interesting to use it for; if not, Falcon Heavy will steal its niche and further development will be stalled and/or cancelled beyond the Bloc I configuration.

Now all that is likely to change as such time as it is flying.

You're delusional if you really think that. Even the space shuttle never flew the military missions it was explicitly designed for; what makes you think the Air Force is going to pull a 70 ton payload out of their asses just because an HLV happens to exist somewhere?

Now remember there is "no current market" for MCT either. Musk is hoping to start one.

Which is exactly why Musk is likely to succeed where NASA is not. SpaceX has a REASON to develop the the Falcon Heavy and they have high hopes for the development of a self-recovering rocket stage. NASA has no reason to build the SLS; they're building it only because they were ORDERED to, and the only reason they were ordered to was because some congressman was worried about the high tech jobs at KSC.

The Russians could have waited until smaller solids and smaller warheads came along

No they could not, because the Americans had already begun to position the Redstone missile within striking distance of the Soviet Union. Recall from the Cuban Missile Crisis that the REMOVAL of those missiles from their positions in Western Europe was one of the concessions Kennedy made to have the Soviets pull their launchers out of Cuba; Kennedy was able to do this only because the U.S. was already close to developing a feasible ICBM anyway, and the Redstone arsenal was effectively obsolete.

Personally, I want large space based military assets for boost phase ICBM intercept.

In addition to being a massive treaty violation, that would also be of extremely limited utility. Not just because we're not currently in conflict with anyone who HAS ICBM capability, but because of the sheer number of platforms you would need to deploy in order to make such a thing even slightly feasible. More importantly, the low orbits and large size of those platforms would make them relatively easy targets for ASATs, and their destruction would flood low orbit with such massive clouds of debris as to make space exploration a thousand times more hazardous.

Right now, we have to have ships at sea with solids in a tail chase against liquid fueled ballistic missiles...

That's not how ABMs work. You don't know what you're talking about.

I could argue that space based assets are cheaper than keeping this Cold War WWII era logistical nightmare

No you could not. The Air Force already studied that possibility in absurd detail, first with the MOL program and later during the Star Wars initiative. The technology to make those kinds of platforms feasible is still in its infancy and maturing very VERY slowly, and this at a time when the types of adversaries that would make such a system useful have either vanished or were never in conflict with us in the first place.

[gturner]

Well Newtype Alpha, I'll go ahead and argue that an SLS supported moonbase as an ABM and ICBM platfom is critical, just because you're having so much fun shooting fish in a barrel.

Side note: The military at one point argued for a moonbase for nuclear ballistic missiles, until they realized that such missiles would only strike two or three days after the war ended and couldn't possibly be recalled, so conning them into a premature launch would itself be a a goal, making them the most expensive and useless weapons in the history of warfare.

[Crazy Eddie]

gturner wrote:

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Well Newtype Alpha, I'll go ahead and argue that an SLS supported moonbase as an ABM and ICBM platfom is critical, just because you're having so much fun shooting fish in a barrel.

Side note: The military at one point argued for a moonbase for nuclear ballistic missiles, until they realized that such missiles would only strike two or three days after the war ended and couldn't possibly be recalled, so conning them into a premature launch would itself be a a goal, making them the most expensive and useless weapons in the history of warfare.

Interestingly, the Pentagon did a study a few years ago examining potential strategies in the event of a war with a rogue lunar colony, including the technical, legal and political implications of nuclear and conventional strikes on those colonies and possible retaliatory measures.

The DoD sure loves their wargame scenarios.

[gturner]

One of the commenters at SciFi's BSG forum was an F-16 pilot who'd just returned from Iraq and whose rotation had him training new pilots. I talked up the idea of using a zombie attack as a planning exercise and he used it in class. Given the close proximity of civilians and zombies, strafing runs with the 20mm cannon was crucial.

I recently read an interesting article on how the zombie genre was born from terrifying rabies outbreaks that once afflicted major cities like Paris, where you could be walking down an alley, get attacked by a rabid animal, and get turned into a mindless, vicious monster. It made sense.

[Robert Maxwell]

gturner wrote:

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I recently read an interesting article on how the zombie genre was born from terrifying rabies outbreaks that once afflicted major cities like Paris, where you could be walking down an alley, get attacked by a rabid animal, and get turned into a mindless, vicious monster. It made sense.

I've heard the same. It does make a lot of sense. The way zombification and rabies work are too similar to be a coincidence.

[sojourner]

Rabies has also been linked to vampire myths as well.

[Crazy Eddie]

Ghostavo Fring wrote:

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I've heard the same. It does make a lot of sense. The way zombification and rabies work are too similar to be a coincidence.

Actually, Zombie mythology in general comes from certain voodoo legends. It's a spin on the Christian revelation mythology: on the day when God resurrects the dead from their graves, there comes a reckoning where the resurrected slaves rise up and seek revenge for being mistreated by their former masters. That's why the ORIGINAL zombie movies and folklore always involve the "undead" rising from their graves and seeking mayhem; this was originally a dig against slave owners, basically warning them "You'll get yours, buddy!"

Morphing into the "bite you/rabbid creature!" thing probably does derive from rabies panic, but that's really just a new spin on a 300 year old myth (much like sparkly vampires and witches that don't have sex with Satan).

[gturner]

Well that would've meshed with the European paintings of skeleton armies eating the living (that famously graced a bunch of Black Sabbath album covers), so the return of the hungry dead had been a theme for a while. As best I can remember, Night of the Living Dead didn't even have the second element of the theme, that getting bitten turns you into a zombie, just that the dead rise from the grave and start eating brains.

This of course applies to the SLS, which had been killed and buried as Ares, which had been killed and buried countless times as Shuttle-C variants, and had been killed as and buried as dozens of Saturn derived variants. Yet it walks again, eating all the funding, stalking all the NASA centers for the brains of any engineers not yet assigned to it. It was even born in a Senate demand that we find a way to re=use bodies instead of laying them off.

[Crazy Eddie]

^ </thread>

[Ian Keldon]

One thing that I think few people take seriously enough regarding technological development is the costs involved. I could easily see us going through a sustained period of essentially stagnation in terms of technology simply because we have more pressing needs for what funding we have.

Right now, NASA should be concerning itself with watching for Earth-Impactor asteroids, and supporting sattelite launches, and that's it. NO space-stations, no Mars probes, no shuttles, etc, which have never proven out to be to our benefit.

[sojourner]

Ah good, I was just thinking it had been too long since we'd had a short sighted opinion of NASA in this thread.

[Ian Keldon]

Space has nothing we need if we just get our own house in order. It will still be there when that is accomplished and we have the luxury of wasting money on "we'd like to" stuff instead of "we have to" stuff.

[Crazy Eddie]

Ian Keldon wrote:

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Space has nothing we need if we just get our own house in order. It will still be there when that is accomplished and we have the luxury of wasting money on "we'd like to" stuff instead of "we have to" stuff.

1) We will pretty much never get our "house" in order, so waiting for that day is a waste of time.

2) Throughout history, industrial powers have always -- repeat, ALWAYS -- expanded into new environments as a way to solve their domestic economic troubles. This strategy has the threefold advantage of reliving population pressure (especially the underclass, who can be cheaply exported to the frontier), providing access to new resources, and stimulating growth in new technologies and new industry needed to support the colonization efforts.

The second point bears repeating, because lots of people forget this: colonization is expensive and time consuming, but it pays HUGE dividends economically. Colonization of space is the kind of operation that, once it begins, will invigorate mankind's combined industrial capacity for at least a century.

[sojourner]

Ian Keldon wrote:

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The americas have nothing we need if we just get our own house in order. It will still be there when that is accomplished and we have the luxury of wasting money on "we'd like to" stuff instead of "we have to" stuff.

Imagine where the world would be if this were the majority opinion in europe for the last 600 years.