
Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow Raising Claims About Advanced Space Tech - clouddrover
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31445/recently-retired-usaf-general-makes-eyebrow-raising-claims-about-advanced-space-technology
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maxander
“Technology to get an individual from anyplace on Earth to any other place in
less than an hour” ... so, a mobile-platform-launched ICBM that you can climb
into. I’d believe that the military would have developed that for that sake of
some capability or other. It’s not relevant to any plausible civilian
application, however.

(The speculative SpaceX suborbital rocket thing, IMHO, is not credible
evidence against my point. :) )

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steve19
The problem is that you can't just launch a ICBM without risking Russia or
China lobbing a few (hundred) back, regardless of the destination.

It is less a tech problem than a political one.

A stealth ICBM on the other hand... now that is a scary. If any other nations
got wind of that we would have another nuclear arms race.

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justin66
ICBM launches are detected via satellite primarily based on the extraordinary
infrared output of a powerful rocket motor. A "stealth" ICBM would not really
get you much, would it?

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CharlesColeman
> A "stealth" ICBM would not really get you much, would it?

Stealth may help avoid interception during the midcourse phase, though:

[https://media.nti.org/pdfs/10_5.pdf](https://media.nti.org/pdfs/10_5.pdf):

> Midcourse Phase – “Largest Intercept Window”

> The midcourse phase allows the largest opportunity to intercept an incoming
> missile. At this point the missile is no longer under power, so it follows a
> more predictable path. Depending on the interceptor launch location,
> multiple interceptors could be launched, with a delay between them to see if
> the first ones were successful. Since the interceptor has a longer time to
> engage, fewer interceptor sites are needed to defend larger areas.

> Unfortunately, a longer period in space provides an attacking missile the
> opportunity to deploy countermeasures against a defensive system. However
> the defensive system also has more time to observe and discriminate
> countermeasures from the warhead.

But I think you're right that it a stealth ICBM wouldn't achieve as much as
one would naively assume, and boost-phase detection would still invite
retaliation.

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justin66
When it comes to clever hypothetical changes to ICBMs, I remember one of the
options floated late in the cold war was using a highly reflective coating
that would hopefully ameliorate the effects of lasers (since we were taking
interdiction with high-powered lasers more seriously then). I bring it up
because I'm pretty sure it would be at cross purposes with a stealth coating.

I bet that given sufficient satellite coverage and image processing, ICBMs
might remain _visible_ throughout most of their flight, making radar stealth a
moot point. I hope the world will not go too far down the road of building out
measures and countermeasures to update our nuclear weapons systems, but I
think you'd have to add that possibility to the long list of possible
countermeasures when doing your planning.

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sneak
With SpaceX doing booster landings now in full view and ICBMs and their ilk
being well known for 50 years, is the claim that the tech to transport a
person from any terrestrial A to B in under an hour being non-developmental
(i.e practically feasible) really eyebrow-raising? I personally would be
surprised if several ICBM-having militaries have not quietly developed
something along these lines in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.

There is even tech flying today to make it relatively practical/economical now
that the boosters are being reused, as we always speculated was technically
feasible.

What’s the big news here? Am I missing something?

I also assume that with the SR71 being as old as it is, the USAF has to have a
couple of secret hypersonics by now that can get from any A to any B in the
upper atmosphere in a few hours even non-ballistically.

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nradov
Modern military ICBMs are solid fueled and thus can't really be used for human
launches. They cause too much oscillation and vibration, and would effectively
shake the crew to death. Some human rated spacecraft use solid fuel rockets as
boosters only; the majority of thrust is delivered by liquid fuel engineers.
So just having ICBMs doesn't really get you anywhere for delivering people.

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jessriedel
What a horribly written breathless article. Does anyone know if a simple
summary of the lecture available?

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gremlinsinc
Wow.... this reads as an amateur trying to clone Buzzfeed, and marry it with
the enquirer...while only hiring writers from fiverr.

No organization, jumps all over the place. Very hard to get through, and my
god the hype...it's everywhere.

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lykr0n
"...United States military and its industry partners may have already
developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically
change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever..."

I believe it. I remember how the Bin Laden raid was executed with stealth
helicopters- low noise and radar profiles. Came out of nowhere. And wasn't
there a report on how the Navy hinted at all the UFO sightings were from tech
they had to make ghost jets?

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dogma1138
They didn’t came out of nowhere.

The US used “stealth” helicopters in Vietnam nicknamed the quiet one

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_helicopter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_helicopter)

It allowed them to send covert missions into north Vietnam, ironically it was
initially developed for commercial civilian purposes as a quiet helicopter can
be used for helicopter taxis and inner city travel more easily.

The US having stealth versions of the Blackhawk has been rumored since the
90’s it was less about if they can make them but if there’s an actual
budgetary justification for them.

For the bin laden raid they used what essentially was scrapped prototypes and
one of them crashed on landing during the raid.

RAM, low signature composites and acoustic improvements are hardly
technologies that can described as which will drastically change the aerospace
field.

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wil421
I don’t believe the helicopter crashed due to its stealth features. It was too
close to a wall and had problems with lift.

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dogma1138
It crashed because it was a prototype with stability issues, quite likely tied
to some of its stealth characteristics including the muffling of the blade and
it’s weight distribution due to the use of composites.

The scene in the movie where one of the SEALs breaks through the fuselage when
walking on top of the downed helicopter to plant the demo charge was taken
from the redacted after action report and interviews with the team members so
it’s quite possible that a normal Blackhawk might have managed to perform a
hard landing instead of a crash.

