I can't wait to see Bruce's loony take on this:
Star Wars Redux: Democrats to Gut Missile Defense/Bush To Announce "Orbital Battle Station"

Pajamas Media has learned that the Bush administration is going to ask Congress for funding to begin development of an “orbital battle station” that will be able to attack enemy missiles in their vulnerable boost phase.

Each Battle Station would be a fairly large satellite that carried a number, perhaps 40 to 50 infrared guided “kill vehicles.” On orders from the ground, the battle station would launch these kill vehicles, roughly about the size of a loaf of bread, at incoming missiles. Professor Everett Dolman of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama and the author of Astropolitik - Classical Geopolitics in The Space Age, says that space based systems are “the only viable option for global defense against the most likely threats, such as an attack by Iran against Israel or by Pakistan against India.”

“The technology,” Dolman said, “for a basic orbital interceptor that could hit an ICBM in mid flight has been available to the U.S. for at least two decades. Indeed should the U.S. dedicate itself to a fast track development and deployment of several dozen networked anti-missile satellites, it could have a baseline capability in place within two years.”

While it sounds like it would be a big new project within missile defense, "orbital battle platform" is really just a new term for the space-based interceptor that has been talked about over the past couple of years (I'll leave it to the reader to puzzle out why a new term -- and why that particular term -- is being used now). But even if it is a resurrection of previous efforts -- Brilliant Pebbles, etc. -- expecting a baseline capability to be ready in two years seems a tad optimistic, unless work has quietly continued along this avenue since its 1994 cancellation.

Keith wonders if this won't bode ill for the VSE, but I'm not sure I see a strong enough connection between the VSE and missile defense to worry about them being lumped together effectively. Which is not to say that supporters of the VSE shouldn't be on guard against that happening, but it seems more likely to me that the VSE will be challenged by the Democrat-controlled Congress on its own, as a Bush-initiated program, regardless of what the Democrats do to missile defense.

In either case, though, the survival of the VSE will depend on NASA's getting its act together with regards to the "Stick" and Orion. Cost overruns and schedule slips cause by the political need to make bad technical decisions work, by constantly changing major requirements, and by shoehorning in each center's stovepiped "great ideas" without regard to system-wide impacts will be more of a threat to Congress' continuation of the program than the support and encouragement from space advocates will be able to overcome.

Posted by T.L. James on December 2, 2006 01:35 PM | TrackBack