Comment Re:Is it worth it? (Score 1) 1039
Now then...I work on the missile defense project (read that comment as a statement of bias if you are so inclined, I will try to remain objective), A lot of your comments here are way off base. Understandably off base, since the media and folks not working on this stuff don't get most of the important information. I don't work on the existing system scheduled to go live, so I have no idea what happened on this last flight test. The thing is, they have these flight tests to make sure things work. They spent your money already, my money already, getting that system put together. I for one, hope that they spend whatever they need to spend to make sure that it now works properly.
Also, do you really think the government would just lob a big empty ICBM into space for target practice and not try to do more with it if they could? When they do one of these flight tests, they cram it full of experiments. The target ICBM is chock full of neat stuff, and they direct every available sensor to watch it and collect data. All of that is extremely useful information that gets folded into later revisions of the system. That data allows people working on future concepts to test those ideas on real data coming off real sensors, data that might be seen during a given scenario.
The "test" was not a failure. One part of the test was a failure, the fact that the interceptor failed to launch. (A significant part, admittedly. But you can be fairly sure you'll never know why. I will probably never know why.) The test was still extremely useful in that other experiments were conducted and data was recorded. They have tests like this with some frequency, tests in which they don't fire any interceptors. So in reality, this test was not so unlike any of those other tests. The costs were certainly similar. The point the media makes clear is "Oh no! The interceptor didn't fire! The government is wasting our money!" In all honesty, if some reason was detected by the missile that it shouldn't launch, I'm pretty glad we didn't shoot it off into nowhere land and thus add it to the cost of the mission.
There is a serious problem in this country where people who know nothing about a given subject feel they are experts on it because of what they read in the news. Sometimes you can really learn that much about a given issue from the news. Other times, you make yourself sound like an opinionated idiot to people who really have a clue. In this case, given that almost all of the interesting details are classified, people should probably relax a bit and have more faith in the government. I'm not trying to call people opinionated idiots here, because that would just be rude. But really , would you rather they didn't test the system? And that when someone did launch a nuke at us we found whatever this last problem was? No...clearly not. You may wish they didn't build the system, but given that they did (and continue to), they should certainly test it.
