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Space The Military United States Politics

Trump, Unveiling Space Force Flag, Touts What He Calls New 'Super-Duper Missile' (npr.org) 218

The Space Force, the newest military branch, now has an official flag. President Trump unveiled the flag at an Oval Office ceremony Friday where he also signed the 2020 Armed Forces Day Proclamation. NPR reports: The flag design comes from the seal of the Space Force, which was approved by the president in January. It sparked some Star Trek fan outrage for what some people have called its similarity to a logo in the science fiction franchise. According to the White House, the dark blue and white of the flag is meant to represent the "vast recesses of outer space" and includes a elliptical orbit with three large stars meant to symbolize the branch's purpose: "organizing, training and equipping" Space Force troopers, in the language of the Pentagon. The Space Force was created in part to protect strategic American space infrastructure, including communications, navigation and spy satellites, from adversaries such as Russia and China.

"As you know, China, Russia, perhaps others, started off a lot sooner than us," Trump said. "We should have started this a long time ago, but we've made up for it in spades. We have developed some of the most incredible weapons anyone's ever seen. And it's moving along very rapidly." Trump teased what he called a new weapon that could attack at such a high speed it would overwhelm an enemy's defenses. "We have, I call it the 'super-duper missile.' And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now," Trump said. It wasn't immediately clear what missile the president was describing, but the U.S. and other advanced powers are known to be developing new hypersonic weapons, designed to race at many times the speed of sound.

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Trump, Unveiling Space Force Flag, Touts What He Calls New 'Super-Duper Missile'

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  • He talks too much (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ruddk ( 5153113 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:14AM (#60066756)

    Loose lips sink ships

    • by Dr. Tom ( 23206 )

      I love it when he teases top secret information

      • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:57AM (#60066808)

        It's worse than that. What he is describing sounds a lot like kinetic bombardment weapons - big lumps of metal rod placed in orbit, ready to be de-orbited upon the head of your enemy. So either he just admitted that the US is developing a weapon that would trigger an arms race of a kind not seen since the cold war, or he is vaguely recalling something he half-remembers seeing on TV one time and claiming he made it real.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Very insightful. Revealing plans for orbital kinetic bombardment weapons would be just like something that happened in the cold war: the Strategic Defence Initiative. An impractical proposal that causes the other side to waste breathtaking amounts of money trying to counter it. SDI was a better concept though. It was more truthy.

          Rods from God is breathtakingly expensive, easy to track and disable, a PR nightmare, and really doesn't have any benefit except maybe allowing you to strike with less lead time, pr

          • and really doesn't have any benefit except maybe allowing you to strike with less lead time...

            Uh, how about the benefit of being fucking AWESOME?!?!?

            If I was president, within a year I'd be on a ship in the south pacific watching an orbital bombardment demonstration or heads would roll.

            I mean seriously. Our current rambling turd pontificator spends all his time golfing. Golfing! He could have ordered a demonstration where he watched the Space Force try to deorbit a tungsten telephone pole and sink a destroyer with it. But instead he chose golf. And has to cheat at it to feel good.

            FFS, what's the poi

            • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Lol. It does indeed make for some awesome sci fi stories. On the other hand, the cost of launching a tungsten telephone pole into orbit buys a *lot* of hookers and blow.

              What we need to do is convince Trump and US Space Force that the only way to make rods from god practical is to develop the infrastructure to manufacture them on the moon. Then we'd get something useful and awesome out of it.

            • FFS, what's the point of wanting to be president if you're just going to do the same boring shit you were doing before being president?

              It also gets you a lot of television time and cult followers, which are great for feeding your ego.

          • If I were in the DoD right now, I would purposefully up-sell Trump about the secret weapons which are completely infeasible and downplay the ones which may be practical so that his blabbering misdirects others: "President Trump, the military believes that we deploy Space Marines from orbital platforms to anywhere on Earth within hours. We should have that ready in a few years. Satellite jamming: oh that's old school tech that doesn't work that well. We still research that in case we come up with some better
        • Kinetic bombardment weapons may have occasional tactical use, but seem far to destabilizing. They are probably indistinguishable from orbital nuclear weapons. They are a variant of what I though counted as the "worst idea of the 90s" : using old ICBMs to launch conventional warheads for tactical use.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by whodunit ( 2851793 )

        What top-secret information? The Army and Navy publicly released images of their first boost-glide vehicle test back on March 20th. [thedrive.com]

        Oh, by the way? Boost-glide weapons are just a fancy glider vehicle that is accelerated up to speed by a ballistic missile. Ballistic missile velocities are pretty well fucking established, having been around for about seventy fucking years at this point. So no, this isn't a shock and there's nothing "classified" about this, unless you think Russia has not a single analyst with

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          "I hate you assholes so much it hurts"

          What does, your asshole? Stop voting Republican. That will help.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Boost-glide weapons are just a fancy glider vehicle that is accelerated up to speed by a ballistic missile.

          Another way of describing them is a warhead that someone had the bright idea to stick some fins on so it could maneuver a bit.

        • I hate you assholes so much it hurts.

          You need mental help if you hate someone simply because they are of an opposite political view than you.

        • Well this just makes it even more stupid.
          If he's talking about a HGV, the only valid comparison is against a ballistic missile.
          A) an HGV isn't a missile. It's an RV that sits upon a missile,
          B) They're slower than a fucking conventional RV.

          Come on. It's ok to admit the guy is a fucking moron.
        • Your TDS is hyper biggly, get therapy.

        • Re:He talks too much (Score:4, Informative)

          by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @12:46PM (#60067680)

          Ballistic missile velocities are pretty well fucking established, having been around for about seventy fucking years at this point.

          Boost-glide designs are not. They're new, with the first military applications coming on line only now.

          despite the Keyhole bird's capabilities having long since been revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which is very obviously a KH-11 series satellite that was repurposed

          No, on several levels.

          - the HST didn't reveal KH-11 capabilities. Its images of galaxies far, far away don't tell you much about what a KH can do imaging through the atmosphere, dealing with much faster movement (of the telescope wrt its target).
          - no, the HST is not a repurposed KH. If it were, they wouldn't have messed up grinding the primary HST mirror because that error would have been caught long before.
          - no, the NRO didn't donate KH-11 mirrors. It donated mirrors that were made for the FIA project, which was cancelled before any satellites were launched.

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      Nah, he just whines....constantly....incessantly...."Nobody's seen the trouble I've seen...."

    • If it's true... No leader will base their defence strategies on what Trump says in public. It could be the new missile barely reaches the speed of other nations and Trump's public speeches ARE America's defence strategy and Trump is the new weapon. He does scare half of America.

    • But how will people know that he's the best commander? The smartest with the most strategery if he doesn't divulge everything?
  • 17x faster (Score:3, Informative)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:21AM (#60066764) Journal

    And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now,"

    If someone other than trump had said this then I might have thought there's a chance of it being true.

    Some speeds for reference.
    Speed of sound through air 767mph
    Bullets 1704 mph
    Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles 15600 mph
    Earth escape velocity 25000mph
    The speed electrons travel through a circuit 0.0022 mph
    The speed that new bullshit leaves the region know as Donald Trump, near infinite.
    The Speed of the library of congress, 514,000 mph

    There's a diagram on the following page that show how many false or misleading claims Donald Trump makes per week and month, should he be in the Guinness book of records? He lies so much it's laugh out loud funny but sad and scary at the same time. I fail to understand how anyone can take him seriously.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • by Dr. Tom ( 23206 )

      OK, so nothing you wrote there contradicts the claim. A missile going 17x faster than something we already have. Done. Doesn't even have to reach orbital velocity. What's your point again? Trump lies? Oh, he also can't keep a secret. Don't forget that one.

      • Typical LEO speed is around 28,000 kilometres per hour.

        Lets go for a nice sedate mach 3 capable missile - thats slow for an Russian R-77 air to air missile, but lets do it anyway. That missile can travel at 3,700 kilometres per hour.

        17 times 3,700 is 62,900.

        A missile capable of going 17 times faster than the a slow R-77 would be going well over twice the speed necessary for LEO. In fact, its 50% more than the Earths escape velocity from the surface.

        Now, lets talk about the S-400, which has missiles which

        • by Njovich ( 553857 )

          It's probably a cruise missile, so my money is on 17 times faster than a tomahawk.

          • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
            That would make sense - you would assume he's talking about something that can deliver a nuclear or large conventional payload onto a surface target here, so we're presumably talking about either a cruise missile like the Tomahawk or an ICBM.

            In the case of the Tomahawk, that would mean in the vicinity of Mach 15-20, or around 1/3 of GP's values, which is smack in the bounds of hypersonic missile territory and not sufficient for LEO, so it actually sounds like the numbers might make sense. It's also arou
        • thats slow for an Russian R-77 air to air missile, but lets do it anyway. That missile can travel at 3,700 kilometres per hour.

          Is that the average or top speed? Most AAMs to my understanding have this feature that after the boost phase, they rely on inertia and have a limited budget for maneuvering when approaching the target. So the advertised numbers, especially ranges, may be quite misleading in combat situations.

      • The speed isn't even relevant. He's referring to a hypersonic glide vehicle.
        It's a ballistic missile launched reentry vehicle that skips across the atmosphere making it immune to standard midcourse defense systems, but more vulnerable to conventional interception.
        It's basically a slower warhead that has a more chaotic route.
        The 17x number is referring to its velocity during reentry, which put in the context of a standard RV- it's around half as fast.
    • Re:17x faster (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:40AM (#60066780)

      A quick calculation shows this fake missile would have a speed of over 65,000 mph. At that speed it would take less than 2 seconds to go from Washington, D.C. to Moscow.

      So yeah, spoken like the true two year old he is. Super-duper?

    • Now I understand the relationship between speed of sound and various weapons with that helpful Libraries of Congress metric!

      You're the best!
      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Good, I derived the LOC metric from our solar systems speed going around with the galaxy, but I'm sure you already knew that since you're way smarter than me. A US powered by Trump could no doubt go anywhere very fast.

    • The question is, 17 times faster than what?

      Currently, the standard long-range weapon in the US inventory is the Tomahawk cruise missile, which flies at Mach 0.75. 17 times faster than that gets you Mach 12. The US has several [popularmechanics.com] weapons in this speed range in development.

    • I am truly shocked Wikipedia allows such a page to exist.

      I'm no fan of Trump, but Wikipedia openly hosting partisan content is a sure-fire way to bring it into political crossfire, which ultimately threatens its very existence. *Every* politician lies through their teeth constantly, and I don't see pages like this for any others.

      They should leave hit lists like this to Vox and stick to stuff encyclopedias are supposed to be covering.

      • Re:17x faster (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @08:52AM (#60067084) Journal

        No, most politicians don't lie/mislead/deceive/be wrong roughly ten times a day.

        It would be flat out censorship to remove that wikipedia page, is that what you want, censorship? A quick search for Obama lies shows no similar behaviour, Trump is a compulsive liar, an overt liar and a bad liar. Or to put it another way he constantly makes shit up all day long, other politicians aren't quite that bad.

      • Yeah, fuck Wikipedia and their facts that make your guy look like the fucking incompetent moron he is. They should have a page with all the degrees he got from all of the universities he went to, all the trophies from his sports wins, the crowns from his pageant wins, and the speedos from his body-building competitions.

        Look, if you're a private swindler and even if you're a reality TV star, you can lie and bullshit and make shit up all you want. When you voluntarily choose to enter politics, you're voluntee

      • "Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
    • Could you translate that parsecs for me?

      Han Solo claimed that his Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs". A parsec is a unit of distance, not time. Solo was not referring directly to his ship's speed when he made this claim.

      See: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/... [wired.com]

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Yeah, he did the run in under 12 parsecs because he took a different route - around the 'Maw black hole cluster'.

        A parsec is 19 170 000 000 000 miles, so just divide any speed mentioning miles by that number.

    • You haven't got "super-duper missile" on that list....
    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      It's typical Trump listening to only part of what he's being told and then spouting what his brain thinks about it without actually asking questions to people who could correct him on a misunderstanding before he says something publicly about it and makes himself look like a complete moron.

      It is fairly obvious to me that they probably told him something like "it goes 17 times the speed of sound", and that they also probably mentioned it's "far faster than what they have". His brain somehow merged the tw

    • by gtall ( 79522 )

      There is a book on golf and Trump. I heard the author give a talk and answer questions. One time, Trump hosts Lee Travino, former professional golfer, and Trump is shepherding him around like trophy to his pals. Every time he introduces Travino, he claims he shot some odd number under par. The number under keep getting larger the more pals Trump runs into. Lee said, I had to leave before I set a course record.

      I'm guessing the alleged president heard talk of a missile. He corners the Joint Chiefs and asks ab

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:42AM (#60066786)

    They have developed ultra amazing new super duper missiles in just a couple of months of Space Force operation. This could never have been done without Space Force, definitely wasn't an existing multi-year program, and is all thanks to Trump.

    All hail Trump!

  • by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @05:59AM (#60066812)
    Generally weapons are given aggressive sounding names (part of the willy-waving?) like "destroyer" or "reaper".

    It would seem that Trump is going down the BFR route and prefers ones that he can better relate to. What can we expect next? The "kerpow!" bomb or the "splat" anti-tank munition?

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @06:00AM (#60066814)
    Dr. Strange Trump
  • Like clockwork (Score:5, Informative)

    by whodunit ( 2851793 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @07:07AM (#60066906)

    It's always fun watching the shitheads who don't follow defense-related topics showing up for their two-minutes-wank.

    The fastest existing conventional standoff strike weapon the US military has at present (range > 100 nautical miles) is either the JASSM, JASSM-ER or Tomahawk, all of which are subsonic missiles making about 480 knots at best. Hypersonic weapons fall into two categories - air-breathing designs that utilize scramjets (which are very hard to engineer,) or ballistic missiles tipped with a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle, which are relatively straightforward - the US tested one in March. [thedrive.com] The Virginia-class Block III submarines substituted the traditional Tomahawk-sized VLS launching tubes for a single, larger tube which can either hold multiple Tomahawks in a rack (like the converted Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, which inspired them,) or can hold a single, larger missile - such as a boost-glide ballistic hyper-sonic weapon.

    Given the political issues about basing land-based IRBMs in Asia to deter China, [thediplomat.com] and the decades-old Prompt Global Strike program - [wikipedia.org] with the stated goal of striking targets anywhere in the world in one hour or less, which is half the time a Tomahawk takes to reach half its potential range - it is abundantly clear to anyone who's paid attention to defense topics that this hyper-sonic boost-glide weapon is intended to be a functional Tomahawk replacement for time-critical targets requiring a conventional warhead.

    The speed of the Tomahawk is 480 knots. Multiply by 17 and that is 8,160 knots, or about Mach 12.2, which sounds just about right for a smaller, shorter-ranged boost-glide hypersonic weapon that would fit into a VPM tube. The United States, unlike Russia and China, does not currently operate a conventional ballistic weapon larger than an SRBM. Thus, the only possible point of comparison that any briefing officer would make to illustrate the utility of the new HGV would be to a sub-sonic weapon like Tomahawk or JASSM. The point here is that every shit-flinging simian in this thread who jumps to thermonuclear-tipped ICBMS for the "fastest missile" and then giddily extrapolates to speeds of electrons as they stroke off to Orange Man Bad reveal nothing more than their own ignorance and inability - or unwillingness - to apply the briefest brush of critical thinking skills. Kindly shut the fuck up and leave discussion of military matters to people who actually expend the minimal effort to keep up with developments in the field.

    • But, I feel way more smug posting Orange Man Bad and getting voted up by other ignorant dumb asses in my echo chamber than taking the time to show some intellectual curiosity and do some math by looking up what he might be talking about. Please kindly take your facts and pro-Trumptard attitude to some place else; we're here busy masturbating about OMB in front of our equally ignorant buddies.

      Thank you.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      The problem with this huge ass masturbatory rattling off of military strike weaponry, is that it was 100% irrelevant, because Trump didn't say it was 17x faster than anything we had. That would make sense. And people clearly wouldn't make fun of him, since that would put it clearly in the realm of hypersonic weaponry.

      I understand the sweat of your furious... information gathering... may have obscured your vision, but the fact that everyone else caught, and that you missed, was that Trump said it was 17x f
  • Super Duper Missile?

    The successor to the following:

    1. The original: "It just went bang"
    2. "The big belly"
    3. "Things that make you go boom"
    4. New Coke
    5. Pointy Boom Thang
    6. Saddammite
    7. Radationator
    8. Neutroniunite
    9. The Great Water Heater Explosion
    10. Fertilized!

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @08:00AM (#60066986)

    There is also absolutely no need for them. Even with MAD (the name says it all), you only need to be sure enough of your missiles reach the other side, "fast" is not needed. What "fast" does is that it massively amplifies the risk of errors having catastrophic effects by reducing or eliminating time for analysis and human interaction. The cold war had several events where this whole completely insane system very nearly exterminated human civilization due to technology behaving in a faulty way or due to human error (training-tape forgotten in the productive system and then played...) The only reason we are still here is that the humans in the loop had time to find out what was actually happening and to stop the lethal response.

    Personally, I think everybody pushing for a fast nuclear capability should treated like an extreme threat to all of humanity and should directly be shot like a rabid animal.

  • by cats-paw ( 34890 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @10:09AM (#60067248) Homepage

    the "military weapons experts" and trump fluffers can complain all they want but

    Trump is an idiot. This is the insight of the command in chief of the armed forces:
    We have, I call it the 'super-duper missile.' And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now
    And if you think he understands what his "amazing" Generals are telling him you are just being completely ridiculous.

    Trump is about Trump. Complain all you want about misinformed comments about military weapons systems, but WTF is he doing even talking about this now ? Why is he not talking about his national plan to test and trace ? He's not because he's trying to change the subject.

    Finally, this is the internet. People making stupid comments about things with minimal to no understanding of them is par for the course. i have seen, in these very hallowed halls of slashdot, calm, informative responses to those comments. But heaven help you if you made a dumb comment and insult Trump at the same time, then you get a shit ton of the the faux outrage.

    Trump is a fucking idiot but a genius manipulator of people that kind find the worst, most ethically challenged people in the world. EVERYTHING he says should be assumed to be a ruse or a con or an effort to deflect and embellish his own status. Just because he might say something that makes sense every once in a while does not change that. He's bringing this shit up now as a distraction. He couldn't fucking care less what our military capabilities are and absolutely does not understand them other than in the context of how he can use it to his advantage.

  • The space missile that unfurls a flag that says "Bang you're dead".
  • We have officially jumped the shark.

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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