Dear Daniel Schuh:
You forget that every development project has its failures. When you push the envelope, failure is a probability, not a remote possibility. Success is usually only guaranteed for the tried and true. During the race to the moon, Werner Von Braun had rockets blow up on the pad, fall over and blow up, rise a little and then fall and blow up, rise but go off horizontally and blown to prevent disaster, rise and blow in mid air, and all other sorts of ways. You would not want to be riding one of those rockets. You would have stated "What a Harebrained Idea, money being wasted on this Screwed Up Pork Barrel Project", and on, and on, etc.
Well you would have been wrong, they got to the moon, six times. They had only one fatal accident during a mission (Challenger) in the boost phase and one during ground tests (Apollo Capsule Fire). It returned to date at least 15 times what the government paid on it. That kind of ROI does not occur for such things as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, and all those liberal wealth redistribution programs you support so much. Many things you would rather not do without, came from that project.
In addition, some failures have led to some remarkable things, like the famous Michaelson-Morley Inferometer Experiment. Their goal was to measure the movement of the ether, and it failed miserably. They kept trying and it kept failing. The final verdict was, to their surprise, that there was no ether at all to measure. Their apparatus has also been used to make highly accurate measurements of distance ever since.
So get your head out of the sand, and stop thinking that it can't be done. Just because we can not do it now, does not mean it can not be done. The research, development, and testing is far cheaper than deployment of an untried system. SDI tried to find if there was a good method of interception beyond building a missile for each warhead to be destroyed. If some of the more exotic interceptors would have worked (and we did not know until we tried (blind alleys are easy to find)), the cost of building an interception system would be cheaper than the building of weapons being defensed (a skewed to defense system would have made scaling work to the defenders advantage (the thing most wanted for any defense system)).
So the money was not wasted by eliminating these more scalable concepts, and it showed that the best is still a smart interceptor with a kinetic weapon to weed out decoys from the true warheads (like using a rifle to shoot possible tanks and those where the bullet bounces off are then blasted with anti-tank weapons (the decoys just let the bullet pass through)). A limited ICBM defense could eliminate the need for the kinetic weapon to weed out decoys making far simpler system (find a target, track it, and send an interceptor to kill it). Once a system is found to work, it can be made more robust, simpler and cheaper through further testing.
Pete |
