nice fact finding on your part, but way to dam long.

to be brief, look at the movie "wag the dog"

i think the tag line is "if its fed to the media, it must be true"

my point is, take what they give you in these instances as a primer.

is this nonsense or a shadow of whats really goin on? to be blunt. things are often far more sinister then anything you can find in a official press release. but since people are often formed to believe but not to imagine. ones own ability to explore the possibility's is often stunted.

or maybe they really are just building a death star...

the people who start these companies have seen the same movies you do. That is where the names come from.

NASA was just brought under the military banner pretty much completely last year. Why it wasn't before baffles the hell out of me.

Weaponization of the upper atmosphere is probably not going to be stopped.

The group that can get up and weaponize first controls the In-And-Out privileges of the whole planet, and their access to the infinite resources thereof.

These plans are not ten year plans. These plans are thousand year plans.

While many will scream bloody murder at nations trying to do this, ask yourselves something important. Knowing that it will happen, would you prefer a coalition of groups forced to work together cooperatatively with some views to fairness.

Or would you prefer one of the groups that is distinctly and proudly biased to their own, and would gladly see everyone else perish or enslaved?

Knowing that it WILL happen - something that has been conceived of doesn't just go away because it isn't nice - which system do YOU prefer.

I know which one I do.

"The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth" is not a recommendation. It is a warning.

[edit on 2009/9/1 by Aeons]

All in all, when I first saw the Terminator movies, I thought they would seem to be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy...

Now, it's seeming even more so to be true.

Skynet... Cyberdyne... AI... Think about it... if a military AI were to gain access to the internet, it would only be a matter of time before it came across the premise of the Terminator movies (not to mention the Matrix series), Realizing just how horrible the human race is towards itself, and our own environment, and proceed to attempt to put these movies/ideas into play... Or at least the possibility is always there...

Right??

Great post! You get my first S & F.
And by the way we are the Empire lol, so yea we are building the Death Star.

I really hate to rain on a conspiratorial parade, particularly one that's been heavily researched...but the vast majority of the 'classified' Shuttle flights were nothing more than reconnaissance platforms or communications birds. I'm fairly certain that NASA and the military were being (relatively) truthful about that. Let's take a quick look at the exotic weapons that have been suggested.

For a directed-energy weapon (hereafter, 'beam weapon') the limiting factors are power and heat dissipation. The solar panels on satellites simply don't generate sufficient power to energize a beam weapon, and even if silicon panels did make good radiators (they don't), they aren't big enough to cope with the heat from a weapon if we assume that some other (presumably nuclear) power source is available. The ISS has even bigger problems, since it would not only need to hide a large power source (and some fairly big radiators over and above the ones needed for the habitat) from ground observers, but also from a crew whose members come from several countries.

As an aside in the 'beam weapon' department, the Oklahoma City bombing took place before the ISS was even under construction, so I think we can rule it out as a cause.

For a rail gun, you've got power and heat problems similar in magnitude to a beam weapon, with the added problem of physical strength (magnetic forces tend to put hideous twisting forces on a rail gun), the resulting high weight (always frowned upon in a space application) and the additional weight and complexity of a magazine...that rail gun has to have something to shoot, after all.

In short, I don't think we have a baby Death Star under construction..and if we do, it's not aboard the ISS, and it's not neatly tucked away in anything that would fit in a Space Shuttle or an X-37's cargo bay.

The "rods from God" idea dates 'way back...it looks good on paper, but has severe problems in implementation....you have to orbit a LOT of the things to make sure they're available when and where they're needed, and they're going to play merry hob with radio astronomy. If they were up there, somebody would notice.


As for the use of Trident in a precision global strike role, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really, seriously, and sincerely consider the use of precision-guided conventional warheads a vast improvement over the use of thermonuclear devices....that's a point in favor of the Global Strike concept. On the other hand (and it's a *big* 'other hand'), how does the target country know that what's coming in on that Trident SLBM is a precision-guided conventional package, as opposed to a 475Kt express delivery of Instant Sunrise? Simple answer - they don't, and they'll probably assume the worst, and respond accordingly. Major downside to the concept.