"jonathan" wrote in message
...

You mean the Pentagon black budget?
The whole point of this thread is to figure out what happened to
/decades of effort/ to build reusable or SSO vehicles. Has it
actually been abandoned, or merely moved to the Pentagon?

The evidence is pretty clear it's been moved to the Pentagon.

Only in your dreams. The only evidence I see of reusable launch vehicle
development is the very *low level* development seen with vehicles like
X-37b. Again, if this was a *priority*, they'd be spending 10's of billions
of dollars and would be doing more than tiny research projects and a little
X-vehicle.

We've got precious little to show for our efforts in this area from the 60's
(lifting bodies, ASSET, X-20, and etc.) to today. And it's my opinion that
a lot of that is due to lack of priority and lack of funding.

In that time period we've fielded new bomber types (B-1, B-2), new air
superiority fighter types (F-15, F-22), and numerous other extremely high
price tag manned vehicles, but have yet to develop and field a single,
dedicated, military, reusable, launch vehicle or space vehicle.

For starters, the AFSPC plan I posted essentially says
to take the technology of the two scale demonstrators and use
them in the next step, a full scale military space plane. And
the plan was clear they thought the X-37 was the better of the
two. And here we see the X-37b is about to launch. So it's
rather logical to assume that 'plan' is proceeding just as
it's written.

Else why bother with the X-37b???

The US military invests in *a lot* of low level (i.e. relatively cheap)
technology development programs. But it doesn't necessarily mean that
operational (i.e. extremely expensive) systems are "coming soon". Come back
to me when there is a commmittment to develop and field an operational
system.

So I conclude this country is still trying to build the next
generation of space plane. Something that will help
fullfill the long sought promise of low cost to orbit.

But post 9/11, it's also clear such a capability is a the
next military high ground. Just as the first jet, the sound
barrier and the fastest have always been military secrets.
A space plane should be a highly guarded secret also.

And having the Pentagon and NASA continue to
share a black budget project to completion doesn't
really make any sense.

You're missing the obvious. Many at NASA doesn't care about this technology
either. Witness the tens of billions of dollars in planned investment to
create a "shuttle derived" launch vehicle to maintain the status-quo. This
line of research was dropped from NASA because there wasn't a concensus
within NASA that this technology was worth developing.

If the US military really is *very* interested in these sorts of
technologies, why don't we see them spending the money to make them a
reality? The answer is they're interested, but not *that* interested.


How can we know how much the Pentagon is spending, or at
what level their latest technology has achieved? If it's a military
capability, we're not going to get any real details.

I call b.s. You can't keep launch vehicles hidden that easily. Unless the
military has invented *several* new cloaking technologies for launch
vehicles (visual, thermal, acoustic, radar, and etc.), every amateur
launch/satellite tracker on the planet would know about the program the
first time it was launched into orbit.

What's next out of you, evidence of alien built flying saucers secretly
operated by the military? Come back later when you have real evidence of
*significant* levels of funding going into reusable launch technologies.
All I see are a few programs which are funded at a very low level,
especially by DOD standards.

Jeff
--
"Many things that were acceptable in 1958 are no longer acceptable today.
My own standards have changed too." -- Freeman Dyson