Nasa star wars program

The full moon is seen from West Orange in New Jersey. Joey Roulette. Story continues. Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting. Recommended Stories.

Atlanta Black Star. Giants Wire. Roll Tide Wire. The Daily Beast. Miami Herald. The Providence Journal. Women's Health. Yahoo Life. Wolverines Wire. Delaware Online The News Journal. Read on to learn why SDI was bound to fail regardless of whether the initiative was technically feasible or not. He was right. Despite Reagan's repeated assurances that the defense system would only be used to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking rather than giving the U.

Within a year, the Soviets were directing 70 percent of their propaganda worldwide toward maligning SDI, despite finding the program not feasible to begin with [source: Lettow ]. The Soviets also pointed out that any ballistic missile defense system the United States could build would violate a number of treaties already in place. The Outer Space Treaty , signed by several countries including the U.

The firestorm of criticism for Reagan's plan kept burning. European allies were concerned about how the program would affect the precarious balance of power between them and the Soviet Union. These fears from home and abroad introduced some serious tension into negotiations among all parties involved. Still, despite serious pressure to put SDI on the bargaining table in an effort to get the Soviet Union to reduce its nuclear armament, Reagan refused to compromise the program.

Subsequent presidents, however, were quick to modify and cut the program. President George H. Bush initiated a review of SDI shortly after the start of his term, ultimately deciding to refocus the program and drastically cut back its scope. Granted, by this time the Soviet Union had collapsed, diminishing the threat of large-scale nuclear war.

Rapidly rising costs and relatively few tangible results had also made the program more unpopular than ever. President Bill Clinton further refined the scope of the project, and before long, the United States' missile defense programs looked very little like what Reagan envisioned when he announced the program.

Of course, things might have gone very differently for SDI had the technological aspects of the program not been so daunting. Read on to see exactly how SDI hoped to shoot down nuclear missiles, and how those hopes never quite turned into reality. The acronyms alone are enough to make your head spin and only hint at how complex and difficult building a missile defense shield truly was and is.

Not only did the system have to detect when a missile launch occurred, it also had to track the missiles in flight, communicate that information to the weapons poised to shoot down those missiles, and finally, aim and fire those weapons to score directs hit on fast-moving targets. To make matters even more complicated, the Soviets could add missile decoys, overwhelm the system by building more ICBMs or even take aim at the defense system itself, incapacitating it before launching a nuclear attack in the first place.

And finally, certain technologies were off the table from the start thanks to restrictions outlined in the ABM and Outer Space treaties. Still, scientists and engineers heading up SDI came up with several promising approaches shortly after the program received funding, and many of them lived up to the "Star Wars" moniker. The press particularly enjoyed focusing on the X-ray laser , a weapon seemingly ripped out of the pages of a science-fiction novel.

The laser, proposed by renowned physicist Edward Teller, was designed to orbit the Earth, where it could shoot down multiple Soviet ICBMs simultaneously using power generated by a nuclear blast. Initial testing of the technology provided disappointing results, however. By the late s, the X-ray laser was scrapped, but not before becoming a symbol for the impracticality and expense of the "Star Wars" program.

Other approaches to destroying Soviet ICBMs included so-called kinetic warheads that would collide with ICBMs in orbit and destroy them, satellite-mounted rail guns that were ultimately scrapped for requiring huge energy reserves to operate and the MIRACL laser that scientists hoped to shoot off of ground-based mirrors at moving targets.

Critics of SDI are quick to point out how few of these approaches amounted to anything, but in fact, SDI was set up to explore every alternative from the start and pursue only the most promising of the candidates. Unfortunately, even after billions of dollars were spent developing these technologies, SDI had yet to shoot down a single ballistic missile in flight [source: New Scientist].

And before the technologies could be refined and modified to take advantage of ever-increasing computing and tracking systems, the Cold War had ended and "Star Wars" was phased out for a new approach to missile defense.

This is an artist's concept of the fireworks that accompany the birth of a star. The young stellar object is encircled by a pancake-shaped disk of dust and gas left over from the collapse of the nebula that formed the star. Gas falls onto the newly forming star and is heated to the point that some of it escapes along the star's spin axis.

Intertwined by magnetic fields, the bipolar jets blast into space at over , miles per hour. As seen from far away, they resemble a double-bladed lightsaber from the Star Wars film series. But we are doing what we've done for over half a century -- sending spacecraft into our solar system and beyond, and peering with our telescopes into galaxies far, far away.

Remember me. Resend confirmation instructions. Log In Register Close. Toggle navigation. The "TIE-ins" go beyond casual resemblance to real engineering. In fact, Dawn goes one better with three ion engines.