Pentagon Developing Hypersonic Space Bomber

Time for yet another attack on my favorite adversary: The Pentagon. Their new project is not quite as silly as their numerous others. This one represents a legitimate and serious threat to the survival of the species. According to a new story carried here by the Washington Post, the Pentagon is ready to test a launcher for;

an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry 1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads.

The story goes on to say;

The use of space “enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation,” says the Pentagon’s national defense strategy, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed on March 1. Among the key goals in the strategy paper are “to ensure our access to and use of space and to deny hostile exploitation of space to adversaries.

That sounds like a ‘space war’ to me. There’s virtually no way to shoot something like this down (The US may already have a hypersonic spy plane called the ‘Aurora’. If so, it would have been in service for at least a decade without having been shot down.). Five times the speed of sound? And in sub-orbital space? Put yourself in the position of one of the US’s ‘enemies’; You have to find some way to defend against this thing. Now suppose that this hypersonic space glider is armed with nuclear bombs or tactical missiles. How can the Bush administration’s systematic militarization of space fail to start a new and fantastically dangerous arms race?