Word: rocketings
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...cheap rocket could give the space business a boost...
Constructed of epoxy and graphite-fiber composites and crammed with advanced electronics, the DC-X was designed to take advantage of a burst of technological progress -- and it shows. Thanks to a skin as thin as a credit card, which replaces the heavy aluminum shell of conventional spacecraft, the rocket is light enough to leap into orbit in a single bound, avoiding the wasteful shedding of expensive booster stages. The DC-X is the world's first fully reusable spacecraft, and its myriad computer systems make it easy to launch and repair. It can be fired off by a crew...
There are still some obstacles to overcome. The rocket that flew last week is a prototype that is only one-third the size of the planned vehicle. Even if the DC-X continues to perform well (the next flight is scheduled for this week), it could take five years and at least $2 billion before a full-scale Delta Clipper is ready for business. But aerospace executives are already dreaming about the day when getting into orbit costs no more than a transatlantic flight. Among their pet ideas: nuclear-waste disposal, space- based advertising and low-earth-orbit tourism...
...night in June 1984, a test ICBM soared up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific, another rocket was launched on Kwajalein Island. It contained an infrared sensor powerful enough to detect heat from a human body 1,000 miles away. Closing at 15,000 m.p.h., the rocket locked onto the ICBM, intercepting it in midflight and destroying it by sheer physical impact. So devastating was the hit that the remaining shards of the ICBM's warhead measured less than an inch across...
Sources apparently within the SDI program told the Times that the 1984 launchings did not prove the efficacy of the heat-seeking infrared sensor. Rather, the target ICBM carried a beacon that guided the interceptor rocket toward a set-up collision. Officials involved with the test have vigorously defended the test results. Said General Eugene Fox, the retired Army missile- defense chief: "We didn't gimmick anything." William Inglis, the experiment's civilian test director, dismissed the accusations of an SDI hoax as "technical nonsense." There was indeed a beacon, but, said Inglis, it served only for "range safety" purposes...