I was reading ‘Blogs of War‘ tonight and happened across this note about ‘project Falcon’:
The Pentagon is developing a suborbital space capsule within the next five years that would be launched from the United States and could deliver conventional weapons anywhere in the world within two hours, defense officials say.
This year, the Falcon program will test a launcher for its Common Aero Vehicle (CAV), an unmanned maneuverable spacecraft that would travel at five times the speed of sound and could carry1,000 pounds of munitions, intelligence sensors or other payloads,The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
(More here on Xinhua)
I found some more info on it over at military.com:
You’ve got less than 2 hours to strike an HVT 9,000 miles away. Who are you going to call? How about the FALCON program? Initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force, the program hopes to give the U.S. a global prompt strike capability by using hypersonic sub-orbital vehicles — autonomous, remotely operated and reusable — to deliver its payload to targets worldwide.
(full text here: CRUISING IN OVERDRIVE: The FALCON Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle)
I’m going to group this into the same category as the new land robots with firearms mounted on them. It is something that if used for good could keep balance in the world, but if used for evil or against the common good, it could really screw up the planet. War should never become an easy option for anyone, but what can you do? Technology marches on, I can only hope that we gain the wisdom of the past so we can safeguard the future.
By the way, the flight opperations sound a lot like the old Dynasoar program on the ’50s. Up to 60km, glide and drop to 35Km and then boost up to 40Km and repeat until the target is reached.
If you ask me, getting 12,000 pounds of cargo 9000 miles in two hours would be the ‘killer app’ of the package delivery business. FalconFedEx anyone? (But then it wouln’t kill anyone and could never get the deep pocket funding that the military has. Baka.)