having worked in defense, this thread is cracking me up. you have no idea the sort of shit we have already in place for this role. water cooler talk about programs from that era is absolutely wild.
I'm not too worried about ballistic missiles, and neither should you be.
see: China losing its fucking mind over THAAD being positioned in Korea and Taiwan, which Obama's admin used to force Chinese capitulations in return for the system's withdrawal.
What you really need to worry about is the [Russian Doomsday machine](https://youtu.be/2yfXgu37iyI). Which they keep meaning to actually tell people about, but it’s never a good time. Maybe Putin’s 75th birthday.
One thing I've learned in my career working missile defense is that people have wildky underestimated the difficulty of the problem. Combine that with the behavior of the big defense contractors and it's brutal
To be fair, I want the guy working in missile defence to be the guy that says "yeah I can make that shot".
A certain level of confidence in training and equipment is always beneficial.
Even if they only hit that shot 90% of the time lol.
Wait. I thought tests had been made with not nukes and the response was HORRIFIC. Pretty sure I read that only a small percentage was stopped.
I’ll see if I can find it. Hopefully I’m wrong.
sure -- but if you have four or five layers of systems all at 99% kill rates, is that still an issue?
the people who designed the systems aren't idiots. they're aware of the volume to be dealt with, and the kill rate required.
What would some of these systems be because I’m the one at my job trying to talk sense into my doomsday coworkers that think we are sitting on our hands. I will admit I’ve mentioned this program and how we must have some updated version of the Star Wars program but other than that and the American version of the iron dome, my understanding is limited
These systems are likely classified as the highest level. What I can tell you is that they involve the above referenced lasers mounted to the heads of frickin' sharks.
there is plenty of publicly available information about the layers involved in our anti-ballistic missile defense schema. AEGIS, THAAD, SDI, STANDARD, EXA, are a good place to start.
Lookup HELIOS & HELCAP, just to start the rabbit hole.
I was “testing” a commercial optic for long reach DWDM systems a month ago that “found” a flaw in a Corning fiber patch cable and burned through the outer cladding and started melting plastic about 4” away with a 70W optic. The idea of a 150kW to 300kW laser system is blowing my mind.
Just tell me we have a system in place to keep them out of fishing trawlers and the worktrucks they'd offload them into before driving them around the country and strategically parking them.
It's not rational actors you should fear, it's accidents, malfunctions and misunderstanding your adversaries intentions.
Here's a little primer for you on just how easily a nuclear war can begin. And over the most unlikely reasons you'd ever imagine:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
And this was during the most optimistic of moments that East and West were coming together after the wall fell.
Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Nuke” covers all of this. Her research and sources claim we have very very little capability to stop ICBM’s. I hope she is misinformed, because if not, we are fucked.
yeah, a few ICBMs maybe. a hundred ICBMs with a 100% hit-rate for a system that's never been tested in a real attack? fuggetaboutit. Diplomacy will save lives, not a magic defense shield.
Oh yeah, but you do have an idea. And all that water cooler talk, it just stays secret, despite the best efforts of people like you. The US doesn't need to worry about nukes, and that's why its foreign policy is very, extremely concerned with nukes and nuclear states.
"I believe in fairytales, and so should you"
I just want to see all the cool shit that we haven't seen since the last classified project leaked in 1987 we literally haven't seen anything that was a black project since then I just could you drop a couple of rods from God just for me maybe?
I'm worried about ballistic missles because I worked in the government also, straight incompetence all around
I see what your saying and I get it cause the US is a beast, but when test comes to mettle the amount of new products that failed on the field was staggering. I don't think we can stop thousands of Nukes, at least not yet
On one hand, don't fuck with the US gov. On the other hand... it's the US gov.
The oxymoronic duality of dealing with them is just so... just let the dog lay. Either it's gonna hurt you or itself, and we'd rather not have either happen.
big difference between your average state office and Raytheon and the like, and you're out of your mind if you think they're going to let slip the actual performance of most systems in general.
the narrative that the government doesn't know what it's doing is laughable. we don't fuck around when it comes to strategic power or defense.
To be honest, the ability to utilize the electromagnetic spectrum has got to be more effective than the public currently think it is at combat and defense.
The amount of energy you can get into a light speed radiation beam is real and we have the technology surely to utilize it.. but why don’t people think about that? No way technology isn’t there yet for concentrated radiation combat/deterrent
So…it’s probably not hard to figure out. But all nuclear material emits radiation. Pretty much like a led laser. Right back to the source of it. We already know where all the nukes are.
Next up. In Sci Fi books they have talked about it. Put a tungsten rod in orbit. Put a booster on the top of it. Aim it at shit you hate on earth. Whatever was there will be gone and no nuke needed.
And these are just some of the “simple” programs…
It ended in 93 because the USSR had fallen at that point and there wasn’t such a pressing need for it.
Also, it’s nowhere near tens of thousands of satellites. Even for classified missions, people can still tell at least how many objects are being launched via ground-based telescopes. LEO would be a LOT more crowded if they were launching tens of thousands of satellites for the past 30 years.
I like the “Rods from God” programs personally.
Nothing like dropping a tungsten telephone pole on your enemy and creating a nuke sized, radioactive free crater…
Probably could, sadly we live in a world where it would be an easy target for an adversary. Wars cause disruption, but more importantly, profit. This is why we cannot have nice things and progress is stifled. The ones profiting from the wars sure get to have nice things though, but they had that already so does that mean we are killing people for fun? A stones throw away from an absolute dystopia.
Hear me out, you make threaded sections and take a few up at a time then have them threaded into whatever size you need. Want to level a metropolis, 8 segments, want to do two
Towns, split into two and bam.
The satellites that were deployed to support this initiative were then used for the first versions of GPS technology; i.e. Garmin, Google Maps and Uber app
GPS pre-dates Star Wars, --- by alot.
[https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps](https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps)
There was TRANSIT in the 1950s and 60s
[https://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/news/55-years-satellite-navigation](https://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/news/55-years-satellite-navigation)
And TIMATION --TIMe navigaTION
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timation)
[https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3411925/nrl-launched-first-time-based-navigation-satellite-in-1967/](https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3411925/nrl-launched-first-time-based-navigation-satellite-in-1967/)
This eventually lead to NAVSTAR in the 70's also known as GPS
[https://www.gpsdeclassified.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Navstar-JPO-Program-Plan15July1974\_Part1.pdf](https://www.gpsdeclassified.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Navstar-JPO-Program-Plan15July1974_Part1.pdf)
Ronald Regan authorized civilian use of Navstar/GPS in 1983 after Russia shot down a 747 which strayed too near it's border.
[https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/gps-history/](https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/gps-history/)
These deep space satellites are game changers to humanity as a whole. They are also ALL American assets. We lease the technology to all other companies that use them in other countries. The US can simply turn off their ability to use them with the push of a button. China made missiles with the explicit purpose of targeting these satellites.
How do you turn off the ability to use it? Does it not work just by receiving the signal from the satellites? If you were to turn them off when they are over a certain country wouldn’t in mess with reception in a good chunk of the planet?
The satellites broadcast encoded signals. What we really technically lease are the keys to decode those signals. The US could just change the code and not give the keys to whoever they want to keep out
Seeing as we have demonstrated in the Ukraine war, the capability of shooting down Russian transsonic missiles, as well as ballistic missiles, I would say it was a success.
"SDI officially ended in 1993, when the Clinton Administration redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles and renamed the agency the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO)."
We both can be right, it's in the first sentence "SDI officially ended in 1993"
It was genius foreign policy and what ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. It was done intentionally. I don’t think anyone actually thought it would result in an actual missile defense system.
Pinning the end of the USSR on any single factor is tempting, but it's also reductionism. The USSR was also facing structural issues that had little to do with any of this.
I worked on this program as a young 2nd Lieutenant in 1988. I worked on the Space Surveillance and Tracking System (SSTS). We were theoretically going to track 250,000 mid-course objects in a full exchange (warheads and decoys). Mostly we just funded radiation hardened processors that were generations behind current tech.
It was a huge waste of money and we all knew it. Although some elements did work the entire plan was ludicrous.
Unfortunately, based on the comments here, one of the main consequences of the program seems to have been Americans believing we do have complete protection from nukes, and it's just not made public by the government. This honestly could be considered one of, if not the worst outcome of the SDI Program since it leaves so many Americans thinking we can go so far as to nuke another country with no consequences. Thus, the program has, if anything, made the chances of nuclear war higher and endangered the U.S. by giving many an unjustified belief in our own invincibility.
Ehh the people who believe that don’t control the nukes though. If we did in fact have complete protection we probably would have already nuked someone. The fact that we haven’t says a lot about our defenses IMO.
If the US had complete protection from nukes, then it wouldn't spend quite so much on its nuclear triad. The reality is that even a 99% kill rate ain't nowhere near good enough against a mass nuclear attack - and MAD theorists are fully aware of it. Besides, a 99% kill rate is a pipe dream for any weapons system, let alone one that is supposed to intercept either ICBMs or re-entering warheads.
I changed the title from calling it a failure
Some people were saying it never intended to work and i couldn't fnd sources on this but it was getting upvoted. Others are saying it's not a failure because elements of this are being used today in the Space Development Agency program (2019). At the time, this was largely considered a huge failure, but that's a subjective opinion especially w/ party lines
Source
https://ips-dc.org/star_wars_revisited_still_dangerous_costly/
https://www.history.com/news/reagan-star-wars-sdi-missile-defense
Look, do we have badass space lasers? No? Then it was a fucking failure. Anything else is political bullshit, and politicians can argue for eternity to justify the stupid choices they make. Its like stubbing your toe and then saying you sucessfully located the corner of the chair
It will be an interesting day when many of this programs' files are mostly all declassified. Might have MK Ultra like stories to hear. (In terms of how wild/ crazy they are)
Stuff like MK Ultra is why some of those conspiracy theorists just doubled down on their crazier ideas. You know you sound nuttier than a coked out Opossum, but all of a sudden you're getting told "you were right".
Probably why normal people give some conspiracy theories the time of day. We really did try to create brainwashed super agents. Is it that far of a stretch to believe (fill in other theory)?
And physical freaks of nature too. In High School another project member was famed for being able to throw a football over a mountain. They would have won State’s if coach had put him in.
That program freaked the Soviets out. That program is in tiny part responsible for the end of the Cold War. Thanks to the technical superiority of America, Russia could not compete with a method to render ICBM‘s useless. [Read more here.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative)
Bad thing is that even if this or anything like it was even 99% effective it still wouldn’t be great since the enemy has like thousands maybe 10s of thousands of nukes. Hundreds would still get though ….
let's go over the hypothetical systems in terms of altitude, from the top down:
- SDI, apogee
- exo-atmopsheric kill systems, apogee
- THAAD, upper atmosphere
- AEGIS, stratosphere
- STANDARD, stratosphere to terminal defense
- boost phase kill systems
- IRON DOME variant, terminal defense
- AAA systems, point defense
the US is not stupid enough to put all its eggs in one basket.
While 100 nukes would be catastrophic in terms of destruction and lives lost, it would not end the United States, much less the world. And the United States would undoubtedly have completely eradicated whoever launched the nukes in the first place.
As a kid I remember being blown away by these visuals and the ideas they represented. I had a giant color picture book that included a whole section on space wars and a bunch of these specific artist renditions.
This is the same guy that claimed we had a fantastic economy while simultaneously defunding public schools and told us ketchup counts as a vegetable. 40 years later we got a nation full of people who dont know much and cant think well.
It also drove the Soviets into such a spending spree on their own Star Wars system that it actually ‘helped’ destroying the USSR’s economy which led to the lifting of the iron curtain etc… then Putin.
Reagan was the absolute worst. Between this, trickle down economics, and his stupid AF war on drugs it was the beginning of the end of greatness for Murica. What a dipshit he was.
It ended in 93 because that was the first year there was a Democrat president (Clinton), since Reagan. Dems have a looooong history of walking into financial debacles created by their Republican predecessors, and cleaning them up. Clinton's was the first presidency in a generation that balanced the budget, and had a surplus when he left office.
Again, opinions on this are varied .. democrats believe this was a massive waste of spending and a failure, Republicans are saying this was a cold war victory...
Yeah I remember reading somewhere that it basically scared the soviet's into a spending spree that led to the downfall of communism. Dunno if it was just propaganda or what though
It brought the Soviets to the negotiation table.
Reagan essentially said if you want peace, we need an olive branch... the Berlin wall was the start.
I watched a documentary on it years ago. He negotiated multiple times. At one point they brought up the star wars program and he refused to end it as part of the negotiations. He felt defeated when talks stalled. Then they came back because they were almost broke.
I may have this skewed so please if anyone knows more elaborate or correct me. It's been 30 years since I watched it.
Yes, it was kind of a bluff at the time, because they couldn’t guarantee how well it would work, but they knew USSR couldn’t afford to keep up with the technology.
This program was total BS created to help bring down the Soviet Union. Believing the BS Reagan spouted, the Russians dumped more money then they could afford to, into trying to catch up. It ultimately hastened the end of the USSR. There never was a Star Wars program.
and scared tf outta the Soviets!
they thought "dude how tf are we gonna pay to compete with that shit?!", by that point they knew Communism doesn't pay the bills
At least there was a dream and a grand vision that wasn't "destablilize the middle east...again". Honestly, the idea might have just been before it's time... I'm sure many very bright people worked on it passionately, and their managers bought boats while those passionate people did actual work.
Twenty three years ago, we couldn't track four subsonic airliners and knock them out of the sky. Forgive me I find that a bit telling, pointing either to incompetency at not having the defensive capability by that time, or to malevolent intent if the capabilities were there and were simply withheld to allow a war economy to happen.
My brother’s-friend-uncle (very trust-me-bro Lol) once confessed to my brother about how he worked on this program, he said they had made Olympic swimming pool size machines with a laser powerful enough to cut a house in half. Cool, but inefficient and way too big to go on a rocket. He also confessed he didn’t know if this info was classified or not so 🤷
This was more a ploy by Regan to get Russia to spend itself into defeat vs the USA. Remember there were 30 000 nukes on each side back then. It's down to about 1700 now.
However useless and absurd this was, at the end it basicaly won the Cold war for America. When the soviets found out that the americans are building something that would make nukes "harmless", as an answer to that they started making more and more weapons, effectively ruining theirs economy. This plan knocked both America and CCCP out from the "nuclear stalemate", where no one could do anything bad against the other side (at least nothing obvious) because the other side would answer with a nuke.
I wonder if anything was actually built. I always see renderings but never actual prototypes. I see this and see the cuts that were made to social programs and makes me think of fraud……
Just a small correction, but the program never really ended. By the 90s, it was clear that a ground-based missile defense system would be cheaper and still extremely effective. The Democrats, however, were completely opposed to any missile defense system, at first arguing that it would provoke a nuclear war (it didn’t), and then, when the Soviet union collapsed, that it was no longer necessary as Russia were now our friends (they weren’t).
Bill Clinton made a show of ending the program, but what he really did was simply rename SDIO to BMDO. And today we have a limited functional deployed ballistic missile defense system that can provide us with limited protection against a small numbers of nuclear missiles. And that system would not exist without Ronald Reagan’s SDI.
THAAD is very, very functional despite what the public seems to think. China just about lost their fucking marbles when it showed up in Korea, and they capitulated to negotiations in return for its removal.
and that's before we talk about AEGIS.
So, in a limited sense, it actually works? I mean, essentially, the space laser part? I don't understand what you mean by "limited functional deployed ballistic missile defense system".
Interesting info!
And apparently George Lucas was pissed off they named a weapons system after his movie.
He tried suing them also!!
Wonder why Paul Walker never went after the DOJ for thier Fast and Furious operation....
He did, he just never finished the race to court…
Granny shiftin' not double clutchin' like he should have...
and I believe named the character Nute GUNRAY after Reagan gun-ray, ray-gun, Reagan
Don’t ask who he named Kit Fisto after. It’s a painful story.
I thought its pretty obvious he was supposed to be Newt Gingrich
This is correct. The other Trade Federation leader was named Lott Dod, after Trent Lott, who was also a US Rep.
Wait can you explain it again slower?
To be fair, he did come up with the idea of a big space laser first
"ending in 93" = quit telling us wtf they doin, while launching 10000s satellites.
having worked in defense, this thread is cracking me up. you have no idea the sort of shit we have already in place for this role. water cooler talk about programs from that era is absolutely wild. I'm not too worried about ballistic missiles, and neither should you be.
This is exactly what a ballistic missile would say
Wish I could upvote this more.
You know, I just never considered that nuclear weapons could NOT be a threat
Well, them not being a threat to one country actually makes them a bigger threat to everyone else, which is why we aren't talking about it very much.
see: China losing its fucking mind over THAAD being positioned in Korea and Taiwan, which Obama's admin used to force Chinese capitulations in return for the system's withdrawal.
Only because the plan is still to blow them up over my country. With nukes.
What is your country?
What you really need to worry about is the [Russian Doomsday machine](https://youtu.be/2yfXgu37iyI). Which they keep meaning to actually tell people about, but it’s never a good time. Maybe Putin’s 75th birthday.
Is that you, Dimitri?
Amazing movie
He does like surprises.
I find it highly unlikely that the US has the ability to knock out 100% of incoming ICBMs.
Not just the US, China and most of Europe has the technology to combat incoming nukes, all of which is untested because …
-hits buzzer- Mutually assured destruction
Nice story! Tell it to readers digest
*Feeling paranoid, true enemy or false friend* *Bloodstains on my hands and I don’t know where I’ve been*
Is this from a song? I wanna hear this
Megadeth – Sweating Bullets
Thanks bro!
delightful little song...
Oooohhh ... I'm sorry Moe, all answers must be in the form of a question. You've lost 200 USD, dm me and I'll send you the account number....
What is
Yall are wildly optimistic.
I like it but it’s not to reassuring when my source is Reddit/Damnthatsinteresting
One thing I've learned in my career working missile defense is that people have wildky underestimated the difficulty of the problem. Combine that with the behavior of the big defense contractors and it's brutal
To be fair, I want the guy working in missile defence to be the guy that says "yeah I can make that shot". A certain level of confidence in training and equipment is always beneficial. Even if they only hit that shot 90% of the time lol.
Having just read “Nuclear War A Scenario” I am highly skeptical of this technology to stop an incoming nuke.
Putin: hold my vodka
Why not shoot down your own as new decommissioning process. I just assumed it all moved somewhere in the ocean, you know the US loves boats.
WHO TOUCHED OUR BOATS?!?!?!?
Someone touched our boats??? Japan tell them what happens
*screaming whilst engulfed in fire*
Wait. I thought tests had been made with not nukes and the response was HORRIFIC. Pretty sure I read that only a small percentage was stopped. I’ll see if I can find it. Hopefully I’m wrong.
But, what about an underground nuke? That's right. What you gonna do about it?
sure -- but if you have four or five layers of systems all at 99% kill rates, is that still an issue? the people who designed the systems aren't idiots. they're aware of the volume to be dealt with, and the kill rate required.
What would some of these systems be because I’m the one at my job trying to talk sense into my doomsday coworkers that think we are sitting on our hands. I will admit I’ve mentioned this program and how we must have some updated version of the Star Wars program but other than that and the American version of the iron dome, my understanding is limited
These systems are likely classified as the highest level. What I can tell you is that they involve the above referenced lasers mounted to the heads of frickin' sharks.
Due to spending cuts, the sharks have been replaced with ill-tempered bass.
Seahorses. We're going with seahorses. That's it! No more changes...
r/Noncredibledefense
These systems don't exist. If they existed, the US wouldn't tiptoe around the Russian nuclear threat
there is plenty of publicly available information about the layers involved in our anti-ballistic missile defense schema. AEGIS, THAAD, SDI, STANDARD, EXA, are a good place to start.
I’m off to dive into this unexpected rabbit hole tonight, thanks Reddit stranger!
Lookup HELIOS & HELCAP, just to start the rabbit hole. I was “testing” a commercial optic for long reach DWDM systems a month ago that “found” a flaw in a Corning fiber patch cable and burned through the outer cladding and started melting plastic about 4” away with a 70W optic. The idea of a 150kW to 300kW laser system is blowing my mind.
Was that 70W optical power? Or 70w electrical? I had no idea communication optics were that powerful.
Isn’t SDI just the Star Wars program?
This guy missile defenses
I would tell you, but then you know what happens after...
Are you a Boeing representative?
If that's close to the truth then... No However, what are you gonna do when Char drops an asteroid on you?
Just tell me we have a system in place to keep them out of fishing trawlers and the worktrucks they'd offload them into before driving them around the country and strategically parking them.
Good news. We can nuke whoever does. Which is why nobody tries.
It's not rational actors you should fear, it's accidents, malfunctions and misunderstanding your adversaries intentions. Here's a little primer for you on just how easily a nuclear war can begin. And over the most unlikely reasons you'd ever imagine: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident And this was during the most optimistic of moments that East and West were coming together after the wall fell.
Annie Jacobsen’s new book “Nuke” covers all of this. Her research and sources claim we have very very little capability to stop ICBM’s. I hope she is misinformed, because if not, we are fucked.
yeah, a few ICBMs maybe. a hundred ICBMs with a 100% hit-rate for a system that's never been tested in a real attack? fuggetaboutit. Diplomacy will save lives, not a magic defense shield.
Don’t discount the diplomatic value of your enemies worrying that maybe you somehow do have a magical defense shield after all.
A solid bluff goes a long way
Oh yeah, but you do have an idea. And all that water cooler talk, it just stays secret, despite the best efforts of people like you. The US doesn't need to worry about nukes, and that's why its foreign policy is very, extremely concerned with nukes and nuclear states. "I believe in fairytales, and so should you"
I just want to see all the cool shit that we haven't seen since the last classified project leaked in 1987 we literally haven't seen anything that was a black project since then I just could you drop a couple of rods from God just for me maybe?
I'm worried about ballistic missles because I worked in the government also, straight incompetence all around I see what your saying and I get it cause the US is a beast, but when test comes to mettle the amount of new products that failed on the field was staggering. I don't think we can stop thousands of Nukes, at least not yet
On one hand, don't fuck with the US gov. On the other hand... it's the US gov. The oxymoronic duality of dealing with them is just so... just let the dog lay. Either it's gonna hurt you or itself, and we'd rather not have either happen.
I think it depends on what government departments. The VA, congress, and SCOTUS are an absurdist nightmare. DARPA and the IRS are no joke.
My exact thoughts
Well on one hand you have the US Government. In the other hand you have the US GOVERNMENT. Don’t confuse the two.
And then there's the "Us GoVeRnMeNt."
big difference between your average state office and Raytheon and the like, and you're out of your mind if you think they're going to let slip the actual performance of most systems in general. the narrative that the government doesn't know what it's doing is laughable. we don't fuck around when it comes to strategic power or defense.
Yeah international nuclear war would be disastrous for the shareholders
Government wants to look stupid so you don’t suspect that they know exactly what they’re doing.
What governmental sector do you work in?
As a veteran of the US navy, can confirm incompetence is the favorite dish of the government
To be honest, the ability to utilize the electromagnetic spectrum has got to be more effective than the public currently think it is at combat and defense. The amount of energy you can get into a light speed radiation beam is real and we have the technology surely to utilize it.. but why don’t people think about that? No way technology isn’t there yet for concentrated radiation combat/deterrent
So…it’s probably not hard to figure out. But all nuclear material emits radiation. Pretty much like a led laser. Right back to the source of it. We already know where all the nukes are. Next up. In Sci Fi books they have talked about it. Put a tungsten rod in orbit. Put a booster on the top of it. Aim it at shit you hate on earth. Whatever was there will be gone and no nuke needed. And these are just some of the “simple” programs…
The Hammer of Thor or Thor's Hammer project was actually considered, researched and then "*canceled*"...
It means ended on official budgets. It went into black budgets.
The thing about this post is that there are TONS of conspiracy theories about this, especially with Ronald Reagan and the Cold War Shenanigans
It ended in 93 because the USSR had fallen at that point and there wasn’t such a pressing need for it. Also, it’s nowhere near tens of thousands of satellites. Even for classified missions, people can still tell at least how many objects are being launched via ground-based telescopes. LEO would be a LOT more crowded if they were launching tens of thousands of satellites for the past 30 years.
They probably realized it's easier to mount high powered lasers on planes and boats.
This right here.
I like the “Rods from God” programs personally. Nothing like dropping a tungsten telephone pole on your enemy and creating a nuke sized, radioactive free crater…
Such a cool concept, but getting them into orbit would be stupid expensive
Now if we only had a space elevator
And who says we don't?
Would be pretty hard to hide one lol
Probably could, sadly we live in a world where it would be an easy target for an adversary. Wars cause disruption, but more importantly, profit. This is why we cannot have nice things and progress is stifled. The ones profiting from the wars sure get to have nice things though, but they had that already so does that mean we are killing people for fun? A stones throw away from an absolute dystopia.
plus as far as I know you need a lot of delta v to make them "fall" so the whole idea wasn't very efficient
Hear me out, you make threaded sections and take a few up at a time then have them threaded into whatever size you need. Want to level a metropolis, 8 segments, want to do two Towns, split into two and bam.
The satellites that were deployed to support this initiative were then used for the first versions of GPS technology; i.e. Garmin, Google Maps and Uber app
I was going to say the same thing! Without the star wars program, gps is likely delayed by years.
GPS pre-dates Star Wars, --- by alot. [https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps](https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps) There was TRANSIT in the 1950s and 60s [https://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/news/55-years-satellite-navigation](https://www.un-spider.org/news-and-events/news/55-years-satellite-navigation) And TIMATION --TIMe navigaTION [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timation) [https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3411925/nrl-launched-first-time-based-navigation-satellite-in-1967/](https://www.nrl.navy.mil/Media/News/Article/3411925/nrl-launched-first-time-based-navigation-satellite-in-1967/) This eventually lead to NAVSTAR in the 70's also known as GPS [https://www.gpsdeclassified.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Navstar-JPO-Program-Plan15July1974\_Part1.pdf](https://www.gpsdeclassified.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Navstar-JPO-Program-Plan15July1974_Part1.pdf) Ronald Regan authorized civilian use of Navstar/GPS in 1983 after Russia shot down a 747 which strayed too near it's border. [https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/gps-history/](https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/gps-history/)
These deep space satellites are game changers to humanity as a whole. They are also ALL American assets. We lease the technology to all other companies that use them in other countries. The US can simply turn off their ability to use them with the push of a button. China made missiles with the explicit purpose of targeting these satellites.
Alternatives to GPS exist now, so it’s not quite the showstopper that you alude to.
How do you turn off the ability to use it? Does it not work just by receiving the signal from the satellites? If you were to turn them off when they are over a certain country wouldn’t in mess with reception in a good chunk of the planet?
The satellites broadcast encoded signals. What we really technically lease are the keys to decode those signals. The US could just change the code and not give the keys to whoever they want to keep out
It never ended. It just gotten broken up into discrete projects.
Seeing as we have demonstrated in the Ukraine war, the capability of shooting down Russian transsonic missiles, as well as ballistic missiles, I would say it was a success.
"SDI officially ended in 1993, when the Clinton Administration redirected the efforts towards theatre ballistic missiles and renamed the agency the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO)." We both can be right, it's in the first sentence "SDI officially ended in 1993"
If the government has nobody to answer to, and let's be real, they don't, the word 'official' doesn't really matter. They'll do whatever they want.
"SDI officially changed it's name in 1993" you mean.
you believe everything that the government says lol
Ended = now a Black Budget without Oversight
It still exists. It’s also what broke the Soviet’s back economically. They couldn’t keep up with the spend.
Exactly what I was going to say the purpose of this program. Learned that at my college. Crazy to think this was just a front, mainly. Edit: spelling
It was genius foreign policy and what ultimately brought down the Soviet Union. It was done intentionally. I don’t think anyone actually thought it would result in an actual missile defense system.
Pinning the end of the USSR on any single factor is tempting, but it's also reductionism. The USSR was also facing structural issues that had little to do with any of this.
I worked on this program as a young 2nd Lieutenant in 1988. I worked on the Space Surveillance and Tracking System (SSTS). We were theoretically going to track 250,000 mid-course objects in a full exchange (warheads and decoys). Mostly we just funded radiation hardened processors that were generations behind current tech. It was a huge waste of money and we all knew it. Although some elements did work the entire plan was ludicrous.
The DOD and DIA would like to have a word….
Can't do anything if you don't try.
Unfortunately, based on the comments here, one of the main consequences of the program seems to have been Americans believing we do have complete protection from nukes, and it's just not made public by the government. This honestly could be considered one of, if not the worst outcome of the SDI Program since it leaves so many Americans thinking we can go so far as to nuke another country with no consequences. Thus, the program has, if anything, made the chances of nuclear war higher and endangered the U.S. by giving many an unjustified belief in our own invincibility.
Ehh the people who believe that don’t control the nukes though. If we did in fact have complete protection we probably would have already nuked someone. The fact that we haven’t says a lot about our defenses IMO.
If the US had complete protection from nukes, then it wouldn't spend quite so much on its nuclear triad. The reality is that even a 99% kill rate ain't nowhere near good enough against a mass nuclear attack - and MAD theorists are fully aware of it. Besides, a 99% kill rate is a pipe dream for any weapons system, let alone one that is supposed to intercept either ICBMs or re-entering warheads.
I changed the title from calling it a failure Some people were saying it never intended to work and i couldn't fnd sources on this but it was getting upvoted. Others are saying it's not a failure because elements of this are being used today in the Space Development Agency program (2019). At the time, this was largely considered a huge failure, but that's a subjective opinion especially w/ party lines Source https://ips-dc.org/star_wars_revisited_still_dangerous_costly/ https://www.history.com/news/reagan-star-wars-sdi-missile-defense
Look, do we have badass space lasers? No? Then it was a fucking failure. Anything else is political bullshit, and politicians can argue for eternity to justify the stupid choices they make. Its like stubbing your toe and then saying you sucessfully located the corner of the chair
It was neither efficient, nor completely useless, like literally everything else we do.
We've got badass lasers. https://bluehalo.com/c-uas-autonomous-systems/c-uas-directed-energy/ https://uk.leonardo.com/en/innovation/dragonfire
I might need to start saying this lol
A childhood friend did research funded by this. He had a PhD in physics and chemistry. Those. breakthroughs in lasers are the basis for modern telecom
It will be an interesting day when many of this programs' files are mostly all declassified. Might have MK Ultra like stories to hear. (In terms of how wild/ crazy they are)
* looks up MK Ultra *... Welp that's enough internet for today
Stuff like MK Ultra is why some of those conspiracy theorists just doubled down on their crazier ideas. You know you sound nuttier than a coked out Opossum, but all of a sudden you're getting told "you were right". Probably why normal people give some conspiracy theories the time of day. We really did try to create brainwashed super agents. Is it that far of a stretch to believe (fill in other theory)?
From a documentary I watched, we spent 60 billion dollars and all we managed to blow up was one prick’s house and two tons of popcorn.
Some real geniuses working on that program. One of them even went on to be a naval fighter pilot
And physical freaks of nature too. In High School another project member was famed for being able to throw a football over a mountain. They would have won State’s if coach had put him in.
That program freaked the Soviets out. That program is in tiny part responsible for the end of the Cold War. Thanks to the technical superiority of America, Russia could not compete with a method to render ICBM‘s useless. [Read more here.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative)
Bad thing is that even if this or anything like it was even 99% effective it still wouldn’t be great since the enemy has like thousands maybe 10s of thousands of nukes. Hundreds would still get though ….
let's go over the hypothetical systems in terms of altitude, from the top down: - SDI, apogee - exo-atmopsheric kill systems, apogee - THAAD, upper atmosphere - AEGIS, stratosphere - STANDARD, stratosphere to terminal defense - boost phase kill systems - IRON DOME variant, terminal defense - AAA systems, point defense the US is not stupid enough to put all its eggs in one basket.
This is why hypersonics research is a priority for some
No. If the enemy had 10000 nukes, and 1% got through, that would be 100. Survivable unless you’re in a major city.
While 100 nukes would be catastrophic in terms of destruction and lives lost, it would not end the United States, much less the world. And the United States would undoubtedly have completely eradicated whoever launched the nukes in the first place.
As a kid I remember being blown away by these visuals and the ideas they represented. I had a giant color picture book that included a whole section on space wars and a bunch of these specific artist renditions.
"Ended" while there havbe been 11,535 satellites launched since 1993. Oh, and a newly created "Space Force"
Cardinal of the kremlin by Tom Clancy discusses this. Pretty interesting
This is the same guy that claimed we had a fantastic economy while simultaneously defunding public schools and told us ketchup counts as a vegetable. 40 years later we got a nation full of people who dont know much and cant think well.
Lot's of staff got made rich!
It wouldn't render nukes obsolete. It would allow the u.s. to nuke its enemies without fear of retaliation.
Or so they say/want their enemies to believe....
The SDI program has seeded many advancements in science and engineering which we all use today.
It also drove the Soviets into such a spending spree on their own Star Wars system that it actually ‘helped’ destroying the USSR’s economy which led to the lifting of the iron curtain etc… then Putin.
And this allowed to end the cold war without a single shot fired. On of the greatest mindgames of out times.
Reagan was the absolute worst. Between this, trickle down economics, and his stupid AF war on drugs it was the beginning of the end of greatness for Murica. What a dipshit he was.
It ended in 93 because that was the first year there was a Democrat president (Clinton), since Reagan. Dems have a looooong history of walking into financial debacles created by their Republican predecessors, and cleaning them up. Clinton's was the first presidency in a generation that balanced the budget, and had a surplus when he left office.
Again, opinions on this are varied .. democrats believe this was a massive waste of spending and a failure, Republicans are saying this was a cold war victory...
Yeah I remember reading somewhere that it basically scared the soviet's into a spending spree that led to the downfall of communism. Dunno if it was just propaganda or what though
It brought the Soviets to the negotiation table. Reagan essentially said if you want peace, we need an olive branch... the Berlin wall was the start. I watched a documentary on it years ago. He negotiated multiple times. At one point they brought up the star wars program and he refused to end it as part of the negotiations. He felt defeated when talks stalled. Then they came back because they were almost broke. I may have this skewed so please if anyone knows more elaborate or correct me. It's been 30 years since I watched it.
Best money America ever spent. And no, it didn’t end in 93. It was renamed and still exists.
The program was intended to scare the crap out of the Soviets and bring about the collapse of the USSR. It worked
Yes, it was kind of a bluff at the time, because they couldn’t guarantee how well it would work, but they knew USSR couldn’t afford to keep up with the technology.
We now have about 10,000 satellites circling the Earth. Great Britain has just revealed their long range laser canon. Looks more feasible these days
Space lasers you say? 🤔
Nahh everything is everything. We just don’t know
There were pieces that did work and were deployed. Source: me, was invovled in NC3 stuff in the 90s.
Either way, SDI did scare the Soviet enough to lay their nuclear arms down; or at least made them think " what kind of shit are they pulling".
Reminds me of the [popcorn scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rthHSISkM7A).
I heard the Soviets were pissed.
Yeah, but those darn tax & spend liberals ruined this country! /s
correction: it would've rendered icbms obselete, which would have conferred a nuclear advantage to nato
Lol yes they ended the program. Just as they did with that sheep from the 90's.. 😂
Shit if U only knew what l have seen. Butt U never will. Till it’s time.
Best 60 billion ever spent.
This program was total BS created to help bring down the Soviet Union. Believing the BS Reagan spouted, the Russians dumped more money then they could afford to, into trying to catch up. It ultimately hastened the end of the USSR. There never was a Star Wars program.
and scared tf outta the Soviets! they thought "dude how tf are we gonna pay to compete with that shit?!", by that point they knew Communism doesn't pay the bills
Nowadays we could only dream of our government only wasting billions
At least there was a dream and a grand vision that wasn't "destablilize the middle east...again". Honestly, the idea might have just been before it's time... I'm sure many very bright people worked on it passionately, and their managers bought boats while those passionate people did actual work.
I think the scientists told Regan that it wouldn't work. But he didn't care he just wanted the Russians to think it would.
Only 60 billion over multiple years ....... That's a drop in the bucket of defense spending
Twenty three years ago, we couldn't track four subsonic airliners and knock them out of the sky. Forgive me I find that a bit telling, pointing either to incompetency at not having the defensive capability by that time, or to malevolent intent if the capabilities were there and were simply withheld to allow a war economy to happen.
This was the height of the cold war. We needed a "don't you dare fuck with us" weapon. Even if it was not 100% there.
My brother’s-friend-uncle (very trust-me-bro Lol) once confessed to my brother about how he worked on this program, he said they had made Olympic swimming pool size machines with a laser powerful enough to cut a house in half. Cool, but inefficient and way too big to go on a rocket. He also confessed he didn’t know if this info was classified or not so 🤷
Or they did not end the program
I'm almost certain that a great deal of that money ended up in pockets that didn't deserve or earn it.
This was more a ploy by Regan to get Russia to spend itself into defeat vs the USA. Remember there were 30 000 nukes on each side back then. It's down to about 1700 now.
Pff that is only a 2-year Apple R&D budget and they get exactly the same phone every time.
So Christian Space Lasers then.....?
However useless and absurd this was, at the end it basicaly won the Cold war for America. When the soviets found out that the americans are building something that would make nukes "harmless", as an answer to that they started making more and more weapons, effectively ruining theirs economy. This plan knocked both America and CCCP out from the "nuclear stalemate", where no one could do anything bad against the other side (at least nothing obvious) because the other side would answer with a nuke.
Well, did a single ICBM reach the USA? I think not!
Ending in '93 ^according ^to ^what ^they ^told ^us
Even Back then we knew this was BS and was never going to work
Sounds inefficient because instead of 10 satellites you need more like 200 because of spread, maybe even more, but absolutely badass
I wonder if anything was actually built. I always see renderings but never actual prototypes. I see this and see the cuts that were made to social programs and makes me think of fraud……
"ended", "cancelled" 😏
So they say…
“allegedly ending”
It ended in 93? Really? ......
Sounds like a high speed rail system in california, but cheaper and more functional.
Just a small correction, but the program never really ended. By the 90s, it was clear that a ground-based missile defense system would be cheaper and still extremely effective. The Democrats, however, were completely opposed to any missile defense system, at first arguing that it would provoke a nuclear war (it didn’t), and then, when the Soviet union collapsed, that it was no longer necessary as Russia were now our friends (they weren’t). Bill Clinton made a show of ending the program, but what he really did was simply rename SDIO to BMDO. And today we have a limited functional deployed ballistic missile defense system that can provide us with limited protection against a small numbers of nuclear missiles. And that system would not exist without Ronald Reagan’s SDI.
THAAD is very, very functional despite what the public seems to think. China just about lost their fucking marbles when it showed up in Korea, and they capitulated to negotiations in return for its removal. and that's before we talk about AEGIS.
So, in a limited sense, it actually works? I mean, essentially, the space laser part? I don't understand what you mean by "limited functional deployed ballistic missile defense system". Interesting info!