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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 08:44am Jul 26, 2002 EST (#3310 of 3327)

Economist

voters will receive their ravaged 401(k) pension statements in October will not help Mr Bush's troops

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1247449

the shift to bigger government ranges from prescription drugs to farmers

the impression is of a presidency on the defensive—and considerably smaller than it once seemed

The Bush presidency can cope with a little fading; it cannot cope with a general perception that it cares only for its own survival.

lchic - 08:51am Jul 26, 2002 EST (#3311 of 3327)

"" “Sonic Cruiser”. This aircraft, if it is ever built, would be a 200-250-seater jet that would fly just below the speed of sound.

Boeing's bosses expect QinetiQ's tests to confirm promising numbers that emerged from the computers that helped to design the Sonic Cruiser. These suggest that the plane would be neither a gas-guzzler like Concorde, nor too noisy for modern airports. In other words, it might be a commercial runner. The basic design has been altered. It now bears little resemblance to the sketches released when Boeing launched the concept a year ago, in order to disguise its retreat from the “super-jumbo” market. Those sketches owed more to public relations than to aerodynamics. The new shape should actually stay airborne.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1247382

the company turned to Cranfield University to help it design models of its revolutionary “batwing” passenger plane. Blended wing/body (BWB) aircraft, as they are more technically known, were first dreamed up 50 years ago. The best known is the B2 stealth bomber. But none has ever gone into commercial service.

Boeing's first scale-model, developed with NASA, had a five-metre (17-foot) wingspan, and took to the air two years ago. It flew well enough to demonstrate that the design was aerodynamically sound. Now, Boeing and Cranfield are working on a 6.3-metre wingspan version to test the concept further.

Like the Sonic Cruiser, a commercial BWB will probably face scepticism from airlines and passengers. But enthusiasts in Boeing claim encouraging results from trials of mock-ups of the aircraft's interior.

lchic - 09:03am Jul 26, 2002 EST (#3312 of 3327)

"Every day that passes, the spiked plutonium will be aging more than two weeks, compared to normal weapons plutonium," said Dave Olivas, the metallurgical engineer who is running the experiment with physicist Franz Freibert; both work in Los Alamos' Nuclear Materials Science Group. "When the samples have aged for the equivalent of 60 years, we'll measure all their properties." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/020725080951.htm

rshowalt - 10:14am Jul 26, 2002 EST (#3313 of 3327)

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1247382

"It now bears little resemblance to the sketches released when Boeing launched the concept a year ago, in order to disguise its retreat from the “super-jumbo” market. Those sketches owed more to public relations than to aerodynamics. The new shape should actually stay airborne."

The old shape was a horror, with the center of lift on the main wing so far back, and the front lift surface so small, that, though it might have stayed airborne - it would have been a very marginal airplane, by commercial safety and flexibilty standards - to either take off or land.

A difficulty with military contracting is that, far too often, "sketches that owe more to public relations than to engineering" - often very beautiful sketches - are the basis of promises made to military officers. These military officers accept these designs in good faith, and enthusiastically sell them. The history of military contracting after the 1960's is full of these stories - because engineering firms have been asked, again and again, to do jobs for which they've lacked basic analytical tools. That's a problem that the government used to be aware of. I was assigned to solve it - or find ways of making progress about it. The issue involves circumstances where multiple physical effects have to be accounted in the same equations, in terms representing the same time and space.

Military officers are "sold a bill of goods" by engineer-salesmen -- and so are Senators and Members of Congress.

( The military officers cannot be expected to be fully competent engineers by commercial engineering standards any more than commercial engineers could be expected to be good military oficers - and the commercial engineers have been engaged, too long, in a competition for who can make the most imaginative promises - and who can bluff with greatest facility -- a competition on which huge money flows rests.)

A lot of problems have built up, and a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, have shaded some inconvenient truths. Boondoggles like many of our "missile defense" programs have been the result- expensive, misleading, and dangerous to the country - wasteful in every way.

There are things to fix. So many people are involved, and there is so much context (some of it extenuating) that punishment ought not to be the point - at least not usually. But getting key problems fixed should be crucial.

Lies are unstable , and much too much of our current military-industrial complex is a "house of cards" because of that. There are things we need to fix.

Eisenhower would have known how. Casey, given some flexibility, might have known how. People should figure out how today.

Leaders of other nation states, who have a stake in how the United States behaves, ought to ask that this is done. If they did, I believe Congress might do the right thing here -- as it often, though not always does.

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