I know it's a full moon, but holy hell................thanks for another Military/Government rant. At least you're consistent. And really I have no interest in your financial well being, your job history, your home mortgage, your vision issues, antennas and your long winded, disconnected, semi-incoherent personal dissertations on what you perceive as the Military industrial complex, taxes, waste of money, whatever. Perhaps you could seek a better platform for your obvious agenda.
BTW, Do you happen to know someone named Qutch or SkyRock? lol Considering how many pms you have been having on your second day here as a member, I don't believe that you came here by accident or out of boredom as you stated, either.
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No agenda here. And don't know any of those folks. But your paranoia is pretty funny. They must have been interesting characters.
I simply offered a pretty simple opinion about an overly expensive space toy in response to a post about it. I said that we once were at the pinnacle of manned missions, and now we watch the Generals play with space drones.
You're the one who engaged and wanted to know why, and started right off the bat with personal insults. Not I.
You're also the person who expanded the discussion into Orion and other projects. I'm just responding to your questions.
If you didn't want discussion about the silly thing and just wanted to rah-rah it, just say so. Sheesh. And if you didn't want a pilot and telecom guy, who's worked on a government boondoggle calling it like it is, well, okay.
I DGAF, really.
Spend more money on a few more of 'em. Why not? They're cute. Might as well get some use out of all that runway at the SLF... doesn't really bother me.
Stuff's just inanely expensive for whatever you think you're getting out of it. Send those checks.
I'm pretty much WYSIWYG, not political, think politicians spend a lot of money on stuff nobody actually needs, and not particularly impressed with the modern variety who act like they hate each other, while attending each other's dinner parties. Partisans today aren't the partisans of old, there're much more cult like now. It shows in your weird tangent into Alex Jones, of all weird things? (Is Alex involved in space weapons testing platform policy these days? He wasn't last I checked.)
Reigning in their spending on silly stuff like this space drone, appears to anyone with a personal budget, like it would be what intelligent people would do.
I'm an engineer and a pragmatist. I just say it's an expensive toy, when it's an expensive toy. Shuttle was too, and never really met its original sales pitch goals, but it ended up a workhorse for other things. It also inspired folks.
This thing? It won't be inspiring anyone who grew up watching manned missions. It's okay, we know those aren't possible anymore at those price points. It was fun while it lasted. Now we cheer the military space drone operators, I guess, and wonder who they're pissing off with it today.
Rah... rah... golf clap. Yay... Go team...
LOL!
Wake me up when we find something where a couple of folks like Crippen and Young actually have to strap in, sit in it and go somewhere again. Orion, at least will be that.
Send up some more folks like Story Musgrave, or Owen Gariott (or any others in a long list of names, but those two stand out for me personally) with the mega-bucks, not stuff designed mostly to antagonize other nations.
Human space flight is neat. Expensive AF, but neat.
Space war tech testing drones? Color me unimpressed. Mostly with the reasoning to even have one.
Not so much the tech. The tech, I'm sure, is wicked cool. They're not exactly going to be releasing any nifty engineering docs for any of us to go read. LOL.
Check out the repeated buzzwords in this puppy... mmm. Tasty marketing babble...
http://www.space.com/29479-x-37b-space-plane-s-capabilities-explained-by-boeing-video.html
Various sources estimate the average Boeing Director level salary at about $190,000/yr without bonus plan. I'd guess ol' Ken there easily bumps over that. He's been doing MILCOM for a very long time.
I'm sure he's a great guy and deserves every penny for the work he does. I'm just giving an example of one person in a cast of ... who knows ... as further evidence of the price tag.
Sounds like the little ship tested the new propulsion system for the next generation of higher bandwidth MILCOM birds. The last batch was estimated (low) as a $2 Billion dollar contract. We'll just assume the next ones won't be cheaper.
It always helps to write out all the zeros instead of saying "billion...
$2,000,000,000,000 or easier even that that to grasp...
A stack of $100 bills 136 miles long. Going to need a lot of duffle bags to carry all that.
It also did some materials tests.
(Or so they say... whatever.)
It's the "take this stuff up there and see if it works" ultimate RC airplane. Heh. Losing all those duffle bags of cash on orbit, would be a shame.