And Ronnie Raygun Simply Smiled

[Weatherman2020]

His Star Wars is the real deal now.

US warship shoots down missile in space with ballistic ‘kill vehicle.’

 

[P@triot]

Only an idiot leftist would scoff at something that was so obvious. We put a man on the moon and we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Of course those two would intersect for defense. A child knew that technology was coming.

 

[Mushroom]

We have had this capability for many years now.

One of the greatest legacies of "Star Wars" is that most people never understood it. And while most actually involved in the R&D aspect knew it would take decades to make anything concrete from it, it was pushed as something which would happen in the next few years after it was announced.

And the Soviets spent themselves bankrupt trying to catch up, and achieve things that we knew were impossible.

As they spent billions of rubles trying to increase and improve their LASER capabilities, we put all of our effort into things that actually got results. GPS, a new generation of digital communications, small aperture satellite communications, and kinetic kill vehicles.

We knew since 1991 that Star Wars would succeed, we saw that in the Gulf War with the PATRIOT missile. And that was with a very preliminary "proof of concept" code that was only designed for test use, with missiles that were never designed to take out other missiles.

At that point, it was only a matter of upsizing it into the SM2 and SM3 series missiles of today. And we have actually had this capability for over 15 years now.

I actually had a conversation with somebody about this over a year ago. He claimed that Star Wars was a boondoggle, and never accomplished anything. I pointed out THAAD, PATRIOT, SM2 and SM3 and he admitted he had only heard of one of those. But he still insisted SDI was a waste of money and accomplished nothing.

 

[Oddball]

Only an idiot leftist would scoff at something that was so obvious. We put a man on the moon and we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Of course those two would intersect for defense. A child knew that technology was coming.

I don't even know what this post is supposed to mean.

Landing on the moon required a purpose-built vehicle - Saturn V....The vehicles used for the orbital Mercury and Gemini missions were already existing ICBM platforms....If there was any "intersection", it was the aftermarket (so to speak) rigging of military Atlas and Titan II ICBM for manned flight.

 

[Mushroom]

I don't even know what this post is supposed to mean.

Landing on the moon required a purpose-built vehicle - Saturn V....The vehicles used for the orbital Mercury and Gemini missions were already existing ICBM platforms....If there was any "intersection", it was the aftermarket (so to speak) rigging of military Atlas and Titan II ICBM for manned flight.

Well, not really.

The 2 rockets used for Mercury were the Redstone I and Atlas III. The Redstone was a short range ballistic missile (range of 200 miles). The Atlas series were indeed ICBMs, but they only saw service for 6 years. However once decommissioned they were used for another 30 years to launch satellites. But the vehicles used for Project Mercury were all single stage rockets.

For Project Gemini, the multi-stage Titan II was used. This was indeed a variant of an ICBM, but one that was never widely activated. At the height of their deployment (1967) there were only 63 of them in service. They were designated in the event of war to be used against the launch complexes of other countries, since they were the only ICBM that could carry the 9Mt B53 warhead.

The Saturn V was actually built for a completely different purpose. It was originally designed to launch large satellites into space, but the realization that such large spy satellites would never be needed and the need for a multi-stage rocket for the Apollo mission caused it to be repurposed for that mission instead.

And it was not the only rocket considered for Apollo. Both a larger "Super Juno" (based on the Jupiter series) and an unbuilt "Titan C" were also contenders for Apollo. But Saturn was chosen, in large part because the program was already known to NASA-NACA as part of Project Horizon. Which would have had almost 150 Saturn A-1 launches used to construct a large space station, then a larger Saturn A-2 launched form that platform to the moon with 16 astronauts to construct a permanent moon base.

And the Saturn V was the last in a series of Saturn rockets. Saturn I was used to launch Pegasus, a satellite used to research micrometeorites. And many other variants were proposed and designed, but never used.

 

[P@triot]

Only an idiot leftist would scoff at something that was so obvious. We put a man on the moon and we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Of course those two would intersect for defense. A child knew that technology was coming.

I don't even know what this post is supposed to mean.

And that’s exactly why you should stay quiet while the adults are speaking...

 

[Crepitus]

His Star Wars is the real deal now.

US warship shoots down missile in space with ballistic ‘kill vehicle.’

View attachment 226160 View attachment 226161

Where's the ray gun?

 

[Oddball]

Only an idiot leftist would scoff at something that was so obvious. We put a man on the moon and we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Of course those two would intersect for defense. A child knew that technology was coming.

I don't even know what this post is supposed to mean.

And that’s exactly why you should stay quiet while the adults are speaking...

 

[Daryl Hunt]

Only an idiot leftist would scoff at something that was so obvious. We put a man on the moon and we developed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Of course those two would intersect for defense. A child knew that technology was coming.

I don't even know what this post is supposed to mean.

And that’s exactly why you should stay quiet while the adults are speaking...

You are trying to bring in Politics into an area that is about the least political place here. The Military is essentially neutral. It has to be and you will find that most of these people try to stay that way. Now, I suggest you bounce your butt back to the political areas since you don't seem to be able to behave yourself.