A real crapping away of money for you, folks!
"In Death of Spy Satellite Program, Lofty Plans and Unrealistic Bids"
"By May 2002, the government’s effort to build a technologically audacious new generation of spy satellites was foundering.
The contractor building the satellites, Boeing, was still giving Washington reassuring progress reports. But the program was threatening to outstrip its $5 billion budget, and pivotal parts of the design seemed increasingly unworkable. Peter B. Teets, the new head of the nation’s spy satellite agency, appointed a panel of experts to examine the secret project, telling them, according to one member, “Find out what’s going on, find the terrible truth I suspect is out there.”
The panel reported that the project, called Future Imagery Architecture, was far behind schedule and would most likely cost $2 billion to $3 billion more than planned, according to records from the satellite agency, the National Reconnaissance Office.
Even so, the experts recommended pressing on. Just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and with the new satellites promising improved, more frequent images of foreign threats like terrorist training camps, nuclear weapons plants and enemy military maneuvers, they advised Mr. Teets to seek an infusion of $700 million.
It took two more years, several more review panels and billions more dollars before the government finally killed the project — perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects. The story behind that failure has remained largely hidden, like much of the workings of the nation’s intelligence establishment.
But an investigation by The New York Times found that the collapse of the project, at a loss of at least $4 billion, was all but inevitable — the result of a troubled partnership between a government seeking to maintain the supremacy of its intelligence technology, but on a constrained budget, and a contractor all too willing to make promises it ultimately could not keep."
Good thing you didn't need any of that money for anything, Amurka!
Teets is an interesting character:
"Air Force Seeks Bush's Approval for Space Weapons Programs" by TIM WEINER/New York Times May 18 2005
The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush's approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.
He's already approved it all!
The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.
A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites' support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.
Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.
A presidential directive is expected within weeks, said the senior administration official, who is involved with space policy and insisted that he not be identified because the directive is still under final review and the White House has not disclosed its details.
With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.
Pete Teets, who stepped down last month as the acting secretary of the Air Force, told a space warfare symposium last year:
"We haven't reached the point of strafing and bombing from space. Nonetheless, we are thinking about those possibilities."
This is insane and horrifying!
In January 2001, a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, recommended:
"[The military should] ensure that the president will have the option to deploy weapons in space. Explicit national security guidance and defense policy is needed to direct development of doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space."
The Air Force has sought a new presidential policy officially ratifying the concept of seeking American space superiority.
Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently:
"[The Air Force believes] we must establish and maintain space superiority. Simply put, it's the American way of fighting."
Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.
And the world isn't supposed to be upset by this?
The mission will require new weapons, new space satellites, new ways of doing battle and, by some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. It faces enormous technological obstacles. And many of the nation's allies object to the idea that space is an American frontier.
Capt. David C. Hardesty of the Naval War College faculty, in a new study:
"There seems little doubt that space-basing of weapons is an accepted aspect of the Air Force [and its plans for the future]."
A new Air Force strategy, Global Strike, calls for a military space plane carrying precision-guided weapons armed with a half-ton of munitions. General Lord told Congress last month that Global Strike would be "an incredible capability" to destroy command centers or missile bases "anywhere in the world."
Pentagon documents say the weapon, called the common aero vehicle, could strike from halfway around the world in 45 minutes.
General Lord: "This is the type of prompt Global Strike I have identified as a top priority for our space and missile force."
What, an orbiting DEATH STAR?
The Air Force's drive into space has been accelerated by the Pentagon's failure to build a missile defense on earth. After spending 22 years and nearly $100 billion, Pentagon officials say they cannot reliably detect and destroy a threat today.
While the Missile Defense Agency struggles with new technology for a space-based laser, the Air Force already has a potential weapon in space.
In April, the Air Force launched the XSS-11, an experimental microsatellite with the technical ability to disrupt other nations' military reconnaissance and communications satellites.
Another Air Force space program, nicknamed Rods From God, aims to hurl cylinders of tungsten, titanium or uranium from the edge of space to destroy targets on the ground, striking at speeds of about 7,200 miles an hour with the force of a small nuclear weapon.
Are you frikkin' kidding me? AmeriKa sucks!
A third program would bounce laser beams off mirrors hung from space satellites or huge high-altitude blimps, redirecting the lethal rays down to targets around the world. A fourth seeks to turn radio waves into weapons whose powers could range "from tap on the shoulder to toast," in the words of an Air Force plan.
They've already got those now!
Despite objections from members of Congress who thought "space should be sanctified and no weapons ever put in space," Mr. Teets, then the Air Force under secretary, told the space-warfare symposium last June that "that policy needs to be pushed forward."
Last month, Gen. James E. Cartwright, who leads the United States Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services nuclear forces subcommittee that the goal of developing space weaponry was to allow the nation to deliver an attack "very quickly, with very short time lines on the planning and delivery, any place on the face of the earth."
But we are all about peace and freedom and democracy!
WHAT HORSESHIT!!
This is your GLOBAL DOMINATION PROJECT right here!
Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama who is chairman of the subcommittee, worried that:
"[The common aero vehicle might be used in ways that would] be mistaken as some sort of attack on, for example, Russia. They might think it would be a launch against them of maybe a nuclear warhead. We want to be sure that there could be no misunderstanding in that before we authorize going forward with this vehicle."
General Cartwright said that the military would "provide every opportunity to ensure that it's not misunderstood" and that Global Strike simply aimed to "expand the choices that we might be able to offer to the president in crisis."
Can you guarantee it, sir?
Senior military and space officials of the European Union, Canada, China and Russia have objected publicly to the notion of American space superiority.
Teresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a policy analysis group in Washington that tends to be critical of the Pentagon, told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting last month:
"[They think that] the United States doesn't own space - nobody owns space. Space is a global commons under international treaty and international law. [No nation will] accept the U.S. developing something they see as the death star. I don't think the United States would find it very comforting if China were to develop a death star, a 24/7 on-orbit weapon that could strike at targets on the ground anywhere in 90 minutes."
International objections aside, the Air Force does not put a price tag on space superiority.
Yeah, fuck the international community and what they think!
Published studies by leading weapons scientists, physicists and engineers say the cost of a space-based system that could defend the nation against an attack by a handful of missiles could be anywhere from $220 billion to $1 trillion.
Good thing you don't need that money for anything, Amurka!
Richard Garwin, widely regarded as a dean of American weapons science, and three colleagues wrote in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, the professional journal of electric engineering:
"A space-based laser would cost $100 million per target, compared with $600,000 for a Tomahawk missile. The psychological impact of such a blow might rival that of such devastating attacks as Hiroshima, but just as the unleashing of nuclear weapons had unforeseen consequences, so, too, would the weaponization of space."
That's disgusting, even the thought!
Surveillance and reconnaissance satellites are a crucial component of space superiority. But the biggest new spy satellite program, Future Imagery Architecture, has tripled in price to about $25 billion while producing less than promised, military contractors say. A new space technology for detecting enemy launchings has risen to more than $10 billion from a promised $4 billion, Mr. Teets told Congress last month.
That's what the above article refers to!
But General Lord said such problems should not stand in the way of the Air Force's plans to move into space.
Lord told an Air Force conference in September:
"Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
Talk about delusions of grandeur!
This is DOWN RIGHT FRIGHTENING!!!
That general is INSANE!!!!!!
