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Shanahan officially establishes the Space Development Agency
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan on Tuesday officially established the Space Development Agency as a separate organization within the Department of Defense that will be led by Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin.
"A national security space architecture that provides the persistent, resilient, global, low-latency surveillance needed to deter or, if deterrence fails, defeat adversary action is a prerequisite to maintaining our long term competitive advantage," Shanahan wrote in a March 12 memo obtained by SpaceNews.
"We cannot achieve these goals and we cannot match the pace our adversaries are setting if we remain bound by legacy methods and culture. Therefore, effective immediately, I establish the Space Development Agency as a separate defense agency," the memo said, noting that the agency is being created under existing legal authorities and will be under the "direction and control of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering."
[...] It is likely that resources from other agencies or military departments will transition to the SDA in the future. The undersecretary for research and engineering will work with the Pentagon comptroller to "determine any realignment of FY19 and FY20 resources." The SDA will transfer to the U.S. Space Force once approved by Congress. The Pentagon requested $149.8 million for the new space agency in its budget for fiscal year 2020.
Previously: U.S. Vice President Pence Details Plan to Establish a Space Force by 2020
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:15PM (11 children)
By spending a ton of money on a "Space Force", the US government can successfully divert cash from things that might actually help its citizens to things that are almost certainly useless. This will prevent the citizens from getting too uppity and wanting, you know, a decent standard of living or something.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:22PM (5 children)
I agree in its uselessness. However, with 322.7 million adults as of 2016 the $149 million advertised as first year costs could give every resident of the United States a whopping $2.16. That'll get us all a decent standard of living!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:31PM (4 children)
I agree it's not much right now. I fully expect Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, etc to start lobbying for more "procurement" on the Space Force, and they'll get it because Congressman Blowhard can say it brings jobs to their district while pocketing substantial "campaign donations" for their cooperation.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:38PM (3 children)
If Skunkworks completes their fusion reactor in the next five years using small reactors with four new reactor iterations a year it will fully justify any of that black budget spending they have been getting for the past few decades. I say that as someone who hates defense contractors.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:51PM
Meanwhile, if SpaceX completes their big effing rocket within the next five years, Lockheed Martin Space Systems should be at least partially defunded.
Lockheed is not the only group trying to build a small fusion reactor:
https://lppfusion.com/ [lppfusion.com]
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/08/nuclear-fusion-updated-project-reviews.html [nextbigfuture.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 14 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)
And if not?
The decades of fusion research and tech suggests that bigger is better when it comes to fusion reactors. So there's a good chance they'll fail to produce a compact one.
Meanwhile, $37M produced a 5e7K H-plasma for over 1 minute in 2017 and a 1e8K one in 2018 [wikipedia.org].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @04:12PM
I agree that fusion research is a chancy bet, and we don't know the odds. That said, "larger is better" is not proven. It's better in some ways, e.g. it makes it easier to heat, but it's worse in other ways, e.g. flow instabilities are harder to control. And it also depends on the approach. Tokamaks, Stellerators, etc. will need to be large if they are to be successful. Laser implosion needs powerful lasers, but bigger isn't necessarily better. And there are other approaches. None have really worked so far, but it's possible that several will when all the engineering is worked out.
I find it promising that now they're talking about fusion reactors in 5 years rather than 20, but I don't KNOW that this is actually because they're getting closer to delivery. Any of them.
OTOH, the potential payoff is immense. A good working fusion reactor is one of the things needed to make slow transit starships feasible...and the only one that's been dubiously possible.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @10:20PM (3 children)
Good thing we're getting something of value [soylentnews.org] out of those tax dollars! At the time, I wrote:
Good thing I was wrong, eh?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:36PM (2 children)
Some of government spending is valuable. Some of it is useless. Your error was concluding it was all useless.
The Space Force is intentionally useless: There's neither a known threat of space aliens, nor a known threat of enemy space forces.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:08AM
Somewhere between 10 and 50% of what they spend ($2000- $400 billion/yr) is probably not wasted.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 15 2019, @02:55AM
Nobody made that "error" either in this thread or in the thread that I linked to.
Yet. It's not like the rest of the world is going to remain at the present state of marginal presence in space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @10:40PM
FTFY
They used to pay me to walk up and down a mostly deserted half-mile long hallway for 3 hours a day. Now they pay someone else to do that. In a sane organization the two common tasks could have been put next to each other, but there we had stuff like coming to work and the locks were changed because a work order from a decade earlier finally got to the top of the pile.