A US military exercise to launch a satellite on short notice(arstechnica.com) |
A US military exercise to launch a satellite on short notice(arstechnica.com) |
Soon I'll be seeing a sign for a "Joe's Satellite Repair Service" shop right next to the local autobody shop.
https://www.mos.org/article/space-news-deep-dive-saving-swif...
Just one year
It would be AMAZING
Or even what we fund Israel's 2/3 of all their weapons are bought by US
We'd have 10% speed of light probes going outside of solar system already
Well at least Nancy Grace Roman L2 Telescope is launching, hope it goes perfectly
Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.
I think it’s fun to think about it in this way. I personally spend hundreds of dollars a month on war.
There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't
The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles
TWENTY-ONE TRILLION DOLLARS since 9/11 spent on defense 2001-2021
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy
we'd have humans on Mars already with that budget not even knowing now how to stop space-blindness and bone-loss
Using the theorized maximum of 31km/s exhaust velocity of project orion (much higher than any current high impulse propulsion technologies) you'd need to have thrown out something similar to 10^42 times the probe's mass out the back at that 31km/s velocity.
That means to accelerate a 1kg probe to 1%c you'd need to start with a spacecraft holding a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass.
Hardly seems worth it.
It's all about exhaust velocity - increase that and it scales down quickly. Using the theoretical max of 500km/s of VASIMIR for example means it's only 400x the mass of the probe of reaction mass - but that's still theory and max thrust limits means it'll take the order of millions of years to reach that sort of speed.
Related, but not exactly what I was thinking of: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/05/a-rotating-probe-... The original source I'm thinking of may be lost to time :( I'll keep hunting.
edit:found!
It would be nice.
There is a pretty well known interview of Admiral Grace Hopper by David Letterman, where she talks about her famous "nanosecond" and explaining (to Generals) why it takes so long to get a message to a satellite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU (As an aside, Grace was a name she lived up to in a way few others could, if you have never seen that interview it is well worth a watch!)
The valuable and well understood lesson is that latency is tyrannical, and unavoidable. The only real customer for "data centers in space" is spacex for war fighting. You don't want that data, and it's analysis going back around the world. You don't want to put compute close to the front lines, and you certainly cant deploy it for the kinds of "special operations" that the US has been doing for the last two decades.
Is there a civilian use? Maybe. Ships, oil platforms, and remote locations could all see a use for this, but it isnt going to be that impactful.
Realistically, getting military spend back to more "dual use" applications would be great. We have a LONG history of this in the USA. Tons of Army core of engineers projects. The interstate highway system was born out of a need for better logistics. NASA was about missiles, space was incidental. The US computing industry's foundations fell out of the navy code breaking efforts of WWII. The internet (ARPANET) was a DARPA project to start with. Spread Spectrum and its roots in Torpedos (navy again). GPS, the auto injector (epi pens).
Most of these are far in the past, recently the biggest thing we have gotten out military investments is TOR (and one could argue its in decline).
I think we don't see as much coming out of the modern military because it is grossly mismanaged. It's become reliant on private industry to "innovate" and that has a relentless focus on the bottom line.
Yes it would be nice if we did that spending swap, but it will never happen realistically. I think a change of leadership, of intent could result in far less waste and much more benefit for the American public. We have proof we can, we just need to figure out how and make it happen.
And all of the money the US gives to Israel is earmarked for American products.
But by antisemite math and logic says we’ll get 10% light speed.
US has given Israel over $20 Billion directly since 2023 alone
Since 2023 NINETY THOUSAND TONS OF WEAPONS
Enough already
Israel has universal health care, let them buy build their own weaspons
US must only sell Iron-Dome ONLY, defense only, they are warmongers
President LBJ proposed his Great Society agenda, which he defined as “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” At the same time, the country also increased its defense spending due to the heightened tension in the Cold War and the Vietnam War. The country can really do both.
NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility.
OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them.
10% of C is theoretically possible with a space sail, and lasers.
Will it work? Well we don't know cause we haven't tried.
So by the time they're theoretically close to the desired speed they'll be on the other side of the galaxy at least, even if it took millions of years to get there at the much slower average speed.