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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

fredmoore - 09:55am Oct 16, 2003 EST (# 15143 of 15146)

'But 'who are you' ... what's your status ... why should anyone listen to your opinion and what you have to say?'

The same question could be asked of anyone on this thread ... except of course Gisterme, who we KNOW is GWB ( or someone very close).

Lionel Brockman Richie, Jr. ....

""Music can help bridge the gap between people in conflict." "I remember I was in Germany at a UNESCO dinner and the next day I was invited to a tea with members of the Israeli, the Palestinian, the Egyptian and the Chinese delegations and they said, 'Last night Lionel, we were watching you perform and we realised something - we don't agree on anything, but last night we all agreed that we like you. So we thought we'd have a tea today to just celebrate that we like something together.""

Tudor-Bill

gisterme - 09:58am Oct 16, 2003 EST (# 15144 of 15146)

wrcooper - 11:25am Oct 15, 2003 EST (# 15093 of ...) http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.iFYhbEo6Ope.2794193@.f28e622/16805

Will -

Your response to: "...It is a developmental system. Technical failures are the way that you learn to achieve technical success..."

This is hardly a convincing reason to field a system whose components have not been proven in tests..."

BMD flight testing which has already been ongoing for years. Individual tests in a program such as the one that has been ongoing for those years are designed to try out and/or prove certain features of the system. Many parts of that system such as airframes, tracking systems, the interception vehicle and etc. are all studied during testing. When the scale of the project is one that is "globe spanning" as this one is, sometimes the only way to test is at the "real" scale. There's no way to do that in a lab.

A lot of the work being done in Alaska right now with this "deployment" is on systems and components that are long lead, low risk things like launch structures and thier logistical support bases. A lot of holes are being dug and concrete poured. None of that is anything much new or technologically challenging. It does take time.

Consider this, Will. If all the lab testing necessary to convince you that the BMD system were finally done and you gave your thumbs up saying "okay it's ready", how long do you think it would take to build the bases necessary to support the system? The answer can only be "years". What it seems that the administration is doing by "deploying" now is making sure that there isn't a "years long" vulnerablility gap between the time that the BMD components are considered "ready for prime time" and the the time that they can be effectively deployed.

"...Would you have supported fielding the Space Shuttle before all its working elements had been vetted thoroughly in lab trials or field studies?..."

Anybody who supported the Space Shuttle program in the first place has already done that. Until the Columbia flew for the first time, the orbiter, main fuel tank and SRBs had not been tested together as a structure. They were tested subsystems of an untested whole. Thanks for the excellent example of what I meant by testing at the "real" scale.

Do you think shuttle testing should have continued prior to the first flight until potential problems that destroyed Columbia and Challenger were discovered? I hope not. The shuttle would never have gotten off the ground.

Ultimately, the only way we can find out what "full scale" problems might be is to work at full scale. To learn such things in a lab or by computer modelling is way beyond our current ability. Lab data from the shuttle development didn't predict the failure mechanims that destroyed either space shuttle orbiter. Even during a doomed Columbia's final hours lab models predicted that it couldn't have been severely enough damaged by a foam strike to cause it's destruction. In my view, full scale testing is the test of the lab models.

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