Hmmmmm…..

Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget Estimates

Page 215

Title: Rocket Cargo

Description: The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to developthe largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AFcargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity. The Air Force is not investing in the commercialrocket development, but rather investing in the Science & Technology needed to interface the capability with DoD logistics needs, and extend the commercial capability to DoD-unique missions. Provides a new, faster and cheaper solution to the existing TRANSCOM Strategic Airlift mission. Enables AFSOC to perform current Rapid-Response Missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement. Rocket Cargo uses modeling, simulation, and analysis to conduct operational analysis, verify military utility, performance, and operational cost. S&T will include novel “loadmaster” designs to quickly load/unload a rocket,rapid launch capabilities from unusual sites, characterization of potential landing surfaces and approaches to rapidly improve those surfaces, adversary detectability, new novel trajectories, and an S&T investigation of the potential ability to air drop a payload after reentry. This is not a rocket engine or launch vehicle development program. It is an S&T effort to leverage the commercial development into a novel new DoD capability.FY 2021 Plans:Utilize modeling, simulation, and analysis to conduct operational analysis of Rocket Cargo concepts, trajectories, and design considerations and verify military utility, performance, and operational cost. Gather operational data from on-going commercial large-scale, instrumented, reusable launch events.FY 2022 Plans:Mature effort in leveraging commercial space launch to create military capability in Rocket-based Cargo delivery. Complete S&T testing leveraging the current commercial prototype testing. Perform site measurements needed to integrate the capability onto DoD missions including plume-surface physics and toxicity, loads, detectability, and acoustics. Also, complete initial AFRL wind tunnel testing to assess novel trajectories needed for air-drop capability, and high-speed separation physics. Under contract and CRADA, partner with Commercial to test and demonstrate an initial one-way transport capability to an austere site. Seek to perform an early end-to-end test to fully identify the technical challenges. In addition, complete Industry outreach for load master concepts including novel container designs, load/unload concepts, and testing the compatibility of AF cargo with rocket launch and space environments. Issue solicitation and award contracts.FY 2021 to FY 2022 Increase/Decrease Statement:FY 2022 increased compared to FY 2021 by $38.169 million. Funding increased due to planned program requirements and the development and maturation activities described above.

HMMMMM….

Sounds vaguely familiar. I wonder where I’ve seen ideas kinda like that before.

I’ve had them quite recently, and fairly often:

@kristinadaniellez

Tell me you had bad day without telling me you had a bad day #amazon #hopeheisok

♬ original sound – Kristina Danielle Zagwyn

The last few seconds here are *spectacular.*

Interesting news out of Britain…

Short form: one Nicholas Brock has been sentenced to five years in prison for owning three books that are legal to own. There were apparently no indications that he had plans to commit criminal acts, but off to prison he goes.

Honestly, this one baffles me.

So Demolition Ranch shoots some oxygen tanks with armor piercing rounds. The results, while not a shark-kerploding-detonation, are fairly impressive.

It is, I believe, satirical. But how long before something very much like this is Official History, taught as such in schools?

schadenfreude

[ shahd-n-froi-duh ]

noun

satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else’s misfortune.

Example:

Atlanta councilman Antonio Brown, who voted to defund police, has car stolen

An Atlanta mayoral candidate who voted to sequester $73 million from the city’s police department budget reportedly had his car stolen by a group of young thieves this week — and wound up thanking the cops for their help.

But wait! There’s More!

Brown — who is under indictment on several federal fraud charges related to alleged incidents that occurred years before he took city council office in 2019 — launched his mayoral run on the platform of “reimagining” public safety and policing in Atlanta

Who better for crime to happen to?

Oy.

Graffiti Artists Defaced Soviet-Era Buran Space Shuttle At Russian Space Center

There are always people who want to trash things just because they can. Seriously: if the Air and Space Museum was left unguarded for ten minutes, do you think that the Wright Flyer would somehow escape being splashed with BLM, Antifa or gang crap? Or just simply burned to ashes?

The gene pool needs a good cleaning.

Buran was an ill-conceived notion. A bad copy of the US Space Shuttle, somehow made *worse:* it was a pointless reusable payload shroud, it didn’t even bring the main engines back. Still… leaving such things to be turned to garbage by collapsing buildings and garbage humans is just insane.

Military recruitment commercials, on one hand, say nothing about the actual capabilities of the militaries in question. On the other hand, they give insight into the mindsets of those who approved those commercials. And thus, we have a bit of a problem in the US:

Wars are won in the will. Seems we don’t have the will. When Japan tried to take Hawaii from us, we opened up a can of nuclear whoopass on them, unleashing weapons the like of which had never been seen on this Earth. In a few years when China tries the same thing, will the US under President Harris just slink away and congratulate ourselves for our sensitivity?