So sick of this dumb conspiracy theory. The whole theory boils down to 'many people have worked in the US space industry since the 80s'. It very fucking dumb.
The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.
Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.
NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.
As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.
Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.
This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.
The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.
Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.
The 'Mars concept' by SpaceX was not grounded in the same 'strategic goals' as anything NASA or DoD were planning at the time.
NASA at the time primary was doing a moon program called Constellation. And DoD was not really thinking much about deep space at all.
If you are talking about the other Mars program then I don't why that would be relevant in this context.
> Many forget the DC-X.
Not sure what you are implying here. NASA and DoD had periodic programs to do various things and test various things, including reuse. See X-33 and Rotary Rocket. But all those concepts involved Single Stage to Orbit and were arguably pretty dumb and incredibly unlikely to ever work.
If the question were about, did SpaceX invent re-usability or vertical landing then your point might be relevant, but it isn't.
Even if it was true that DC-X is the pure expression of some kind of missile defense obsessed deep state, then this would still be irrelevant for SpaceX.
Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting which is needed for a robust Golden Dome architecture (immune to comm link jamming, terabit image sensor processing)
> Space datacenters have the dual-use of tracking and weapons targeting
Space datacenters aren't going to be equipped with military infrared sensors. They stick out like a sore thumb on the electromagnetic spectrum and the second you test it every peer-power would know it's a military platform. Nevermind the fact that the satellites don't transmit to American C2, so they'd need laggy ad-hoc networking to reach STRATCOM over on Link 16.
> Musk is involved in every aspect of Golden Dome.
SpaceX is the only firm on the planet produces a booster stack with the throw weight to put a usable kinetic weapon in orbit. It's not their first military contract, Musk has been sticking his nose in the NRO projects for years now.
SDA’s “Battle Management Layer will provide automated space-based battle management through command and control, tasking, mission processing and dissemination” to support time-sensitive kill-chain closure. https://www.sda.mil/battle-management
Golden Dome and future missile tracking and ISR will depend on real
-time insights, which requires Edge Computing on orbit, running advanced AI/ML algorithms.” https://unibap.com/news/defense-in-the-foreground
That sounds like a product manager's perspective, but I think the falls apart in deep space. When the feedback loop is 2 light-days long and hardware is irreplaceable. The original planned lifespan of Voyager was just 5 years.
>> We reliably produced distinct scents such as a campfire burn or fresh air!
These are exactly the types of smells people report when they get head CT scans (I've experienced it myself). Always thought it was ozone forming but perhaps it's more interesting than that.
In case people don't know the Collatz Conjecture, It's based on a simple rule: take any natural number n. If it is even, divide it by 2. If it is odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. The conjecture states that no matter what number you start with, you will eventually reach the number 1.
It would seem simple, but many simple iterative calculations get us to Turing machine territory regarding computability.
Launch cost was already a single digit percentage of total cost when using Falcon-9s. Reduction in launch cost doesn't really change anything at that point.
Ignoring that weaponizing space would backfire badly (you want hundreds of nukes in orbit? yeah actually let's just not do that) and thus no one considering it either.
If you think about that, a lot of fuel for in-space nuclear reactors will already have been launched, so, if a new peace treaty outlaws them, it'll be a boon to whoever operates fission reactors in space. Or wants to use them for propulsion.
Once in space, they can't be disposed of - deorbiting is a big no-no, as it's blowing them up.
If one is using a nuclear reactor for long term power or propulsion you shouldn't need to be disposing of it in the Earth's vicinity anyways - there is plenty of solar in Earth orbit. Not that peace treaties around nukes will inherently ban reactors.
If the nuke is already in orbit, harvesting it for fissile fuel seems like a sensible way of decommissioning it. They you can power your NTR (or RTG if you must) from its fuel. It'll require some in-orbit metallurgy work, to get it in the proper shape and composition.
Shh. Forget the physical limits. Just tell him that everyone is working on his golden hat idea. Thats what everyone did the last time an old man demanded space lasers. In a few years, one way or another, someone new will come along who might understand math well enough that we can explain why it wont work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...