Seems logical to me, I mean both industries are quite interested in lobbing large chunks of stuff around the place at high speed with some degree of accuracy.

<With apologies to Tom Lehrer>

Don't say that he's hypocritical

Say rather that he's apolitical

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down

That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun

Mine's the one with the cyanide coated peanuts in the pockets, heading in the direction of the park...

Historically, the correct means to spend your way out of a depression is to invest into infrastructure and R&D either directly or indirectly via investments into what is referred to as the "war machine". FDR did that for the US nearly years ago. He was not alone in this approach. Infrastructure, R&D (direct and indirect one via military) spending does a lot of rounds in the economy and provides a systemic boost top to bottom.

If the USA president elect will follow FDR (and other less politically correct examples) on how to get out of depression the budget is actually likely to be opposite to shoestring. In fact, in that case NASA better prepare technical, not financial reasons for the flight gap.

Will this result in some kind of merger between NASA and DARPA?

Mines the one with "My God, it's full of stars!" printed on the back in large friendly letters. It's pockets contents are classified!

What you'll get is a vehicle capable of carrying seven Astronauts plus cargo to orbit, but which has an additional design feature of being able to explode violently, destroying everything around it.

Oh, hang on a second......

> watcher satellites designed to spot attacks on existing US sats

Who, or, more realistically, *what*, will watch the watcher satellites?

Mine's the one with "Mine's the one with "Mine's the one with "Mine's the one with ... on the back" on the back" on the back" on the back.

...as long as no-one has a clear idea what to do with it in the first place. Well, if the US wants to splurge on stupid war gear, why not. Apparently these days gov. revenues are shat out by some pony in the basement of the Federal Reserve.

"Historically, the correct means to spend your way out of a depression is to invest into infrastructure and R&D either directly or indirectly via investments into what is referred to as the "war machine"."

This is also called "putting yourself out to pasture". This will actually prolong the depression as sparse resources (i.e. taxpayer monies) are redirected to useless sinks of stuff like warships or are applied where they should not be (building streets across the nation for cars that don't exist) on the say-so of well-meaning civil servants instead of where they should (private investment in new competitive industries producing goods that people actually want). Hoover and FDR did not get the US out of the depression, the US got out of it _despite_ these guys.

... maybe like that DIRECT project I read somewhere? You know, the competing project?

Still I wonder why NASA can't just do a reusable space plane; the reason the Space Shuttle is seen as a white elephant is because it is the equivalent of an 18-wheeler. Cut the "cargo bay", and you might get a nice, reusable orbiter.

Ok it *is* a good concept. You can then roll DARPA underneath them.

The reason it won't work is that you have a large diverse agency (NASA) which has major security leaks. The US will have to spend $$$$ money on security checks and implementing an IT lockdown.

BTW who do you think does all of the Chinese govt's research for them? :-)

The majority of NASA funding is for aerospace. Most of this is for LCA (large civil airliners) which subsidises a certain US manufacturer that also does a lot of defence stuff.

By making NASA part of the military all they are doing is hiding Boeing's subsidy from scrutiny.

ICBM launches are monitored from geo-stationary orbit, not low earth orbit so are perfectly safe. Further to that there are rumours that the latest LEO sats are stealthed and very difficult to map their orbits.

Finally the Shuttle did succeed in being a reusable orbiter, it just didn't meet the criterion of being cheap.

Give up now merkans, China gets there first cos they are the only superpower with enough resources to colonize space.

Time to pull out the English-Chinese phrasebooks.

that crashed UFO sitting around doing nothing... Modify it a little and bobs your uncle!

Makes you think they arent taking this whole space thing seriously though.. Or are they??

(Mines the coat with the ticket to the pleides star group in the pocket, ready to welcome our gray coloured - big eyed overseers)