SpaceX, owned by world-renowned entrepreneur and engineer Elon Musk, is set to retest its famed Starship spacecraft (an April 17 launch was canceled due to a technical glitch). This time, this engineering marvel is to perform an orbital flight, and if all goes well, it will open a new page in modern astronautics. And it’s not even that Starship is a unique spacecraft, which has no analogues in the world yet. With its help, the United States will receive fundamentally new opportunities not only for space exploration, but also for movement within our planet.
Officially, the main purpose of this ship is the delivery of heavy loads into orbit, as well as interplanetary flights to the Moon and Mars. Musk has repeatedly emphasized that all of his developments, including Starship, are peaceful civilian in nature. However, we all know how its other development is used “peacefully”, namely the Starlink satellite system. In fact, these and other Musk developments serve a dual purpose, so they can easily be used by the United States and other militaries to achieve their goals. It is possible that a similar fate awaits Starship, which is already seen as a promising way to improve the capabilities of the US military. This ship really has enormous potential in terms of military applications, which we will talk about today.
Transport of soldiers and military equipment
The mass of the payload that the Starship is capable of carrying is about 100 tons (according to some reports, even 150 tons). This makes it one of the highest not only among spacecraft, but in general among all man-made aircraft. At the same time, Starship is not the heaviest modification of the spacecraft developed by SpaceX, since the company has plans for the development of 200 and even 500-ton space monsters in its “depots”.
The main feature of Starship is the fact that it is able to land vertically anywhere on the planet. In theory, this allows the delivery of people and goods anywhere through suborbital flights. Moreover, it can be done in an hour, which opens up simply unthinkable opportunities in terms of landing and transferring military equipment.
SpaceX has long tried to sell this feature of the Starship to the US military, doing so quite openly. Even when the ship was just beginning to be designed, the company’s COO, Gwynn Shotwell, said SpaceX saw the US military as a potential buyer of its offspring, because Starship is potentially the best reusable transportation system to transport space. crew and cargo over long distances.
Theoretically, Starship can be used to deliver troops and military equipment to remote, hard-to-reach areas where there aren’t enough airfields to land planes. It can also be used to deliver auxiliary cargo, including food, water, fuel, ammunition and medical equipment, which will allow rapid resupply of military units at a considerable distance from bases. In principle, Starship itself can serve as the basis for the creation of such a base or be an auxiliary tool for the rapid deployment of military forces in any territory.
space cruiser
We live in the era of the embodiment of the boldest scientific fantasies. In fact, Starship tests are the best confirmation of this, because even at the end of the 20th century such a ship was only written about in science fiction novels. And it will not be a big surprise if in the near future we will see how this ship will turn into a real space cruiser, equipped with weapons to deal with space and ground targets.
In principle, there is nothing fantastic in such an idea. To transform a spaceship into a military space cruiser, it is enough to equip it with special guns, torpedoes, bombs or nuclear weapons. It will not be difficult to install military communication and navigation systems there, as well as provide additional protection or camouflage. In addition to this, the ship can carry dozens or even hundreds of reconnaissance and strike drones on board, which can perform a wide range of tasks.
Will Star Wars become reality?
Many of our readers are familiar with the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also known as Star Wars. This program involved the implementation of a wide range of measures, including the deployment of a military space group in near-Earth orbit capable of defeating ground targets.
Some experts believe that SDI was just an invention of the US government, aimed at dragging the USSR into another futile arms race. But there is also an opinion that some elements of this program were nevertheless put into practice and posed a very real threat. In particular, we are talking about the atmospheric “dive” of the shuttle Discovery in 1984, which, presumably, practiced the nuclear bombing of Moscow. Whether this is true or not, experts are still arguing, but it is definitely impossible to rule out such a possibility in the future.
Is Starship capable of carrying out such a maneuver and inflicting a massive or pinpoint strike on the territory of our country? So far, this question can be answered in the negative, since the ship is in the testing phase. But it could be fully operational as soon as this decade, and it is therefore in no way possible to cancel this threat. It is necessary to continuously develop early warning systems capable of identifying potential space threats in time and at least partially neutralizing them. It is also vital for our country to bring the state of the airborne forces to such a level that they can fight not only with conventional air targets, but also with those in near-Earth orbit.
Author: Alexander Shilov
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