Yes, we will be paying the Russians to send people and equipment to the Space Station. But that’s like paying Lufthansa to carry our boys’ mail cargo to Afghanistan. No big deal.
Now, space superiority and space exploration are a different matter. There, America must lead to stay atop of the world’s technological economy.
OK, what do we have going already that I can talk about? (And please excuse me for those things I cannot talk about but saw flying even in the 1980s.)
The picture you see here is the X-37b (11,000 pounds, 30 feet long and 15 feet wide), which has flown many times and can stay aloft for about a year. The Air Force, which just inherited it from super-secret DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Agency), which may, ahem, have been flying it or something like it for 20 years, professes that it does not carry astronauts. That’s all they will say.
Maybe they call them spacenauts. I’m waiting for the journalist who has the gumption to get them on record as saying it does not carry humans, ever. That won’t happen (and Congress danced around the issue as well).
Whatever it carries, it is in orbit as you read this. It’ll land automatically. And the only other thing we know is that it is related to “warplane needs� according to the Air Force.
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OK, what else have we got? Well, there’s a space plane we took out of service last year. Never admitted to exist, someone in the Pentagon goofed when they released a statement that the Blackstar space plane was now retired. Congress asked, “Whadda you mean, space plane?� And they went into closed session.
For 16 years, there have been loads of sightings (at Hurlburt Air Force Base, Florida; Kadena Air Base, Okinawa; and Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico) of a two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small military space plane in orbit.
OK it is a highly classified system, and top Pentagon officials have hinted that it’s “out there.� What can it do? It can launch satellites and weapons, carry items to orbit and it lands almost anywhere the runway is long enough. They built three C5 Galaxy planes especially enlarged to carry the space plane back to base from any runway.
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Of course, none of these programs were charged to a visible budget and the whole thing was run by defense contractors so that generals could swear before Congress that they had no oversight or knowledge of any space plane. How’d they get payment? Well, seeing at it was made at McDonnell Douglas in the early 1990s, workers there typically logged their time against a specific competing program Lockheed charge number associated with another defense program. But their time was also charged to the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP, which never got off the drawing board, $1.2 billion later) and the Navy’s A-12 fighter accounts.
Both multibillion-dollar programs were canceled with little but technology development gains to show for massive expenditures. In other words, the NASP and A-12 were a huge cost overrun for nothing in return.
And before that, Kennedy’s space plane? Well, started as the X-20 Dynasoar, it was “canceled� during Vietnam but somehow, like the XB-70 Valkyrie (which the mother ship of the Blackstar seems identical to), it somehow got money from somewhere. What, you really thought they needed $2,000 for toilet seats on new aircraft carriers? And everyone knows there was a third Valkyrie, somewhere.
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Now, here’s the kicker: The defense boys never, ever end a program until they have something — or things — better already running, already proven and capable.
So, while you see the X-37b being launched, you can be sure there is an X-37c already flying in secret, as well as a space plane, a space truck, a space fighter and, definitely, something so cool and advanced we’ll be amazed when details are released — in about 20 years from now. It’s a game they play, figuring the public and Congress are too stupid to understand the value for these achievements. Instead they snow the public with Teflon and Velcro. Meanwhile, we’re still a space-faring nation, don’t you worry.
Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.
