Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the new warplanes would send a strong message about America’s commitment to remaining a global leader in military aviation.
The new fighter jet, he said, “sends a very clear, direct message to our allies that we’re not going anywhere.”
What allies? Russia and Hungary?
But more seriously, the last thing Boeing needs is another project to fuck up. Maybe once they’re able to reliably design and build a commercial airliner, this would make some modicum of sense. Thing is, drones are the future of war (inasmuch as we should even want that), not fighter jets.
If only someone had warned us about the military-industrial complex at some point. This is the most clear-cut example in recent memory, with a sprinkling of presidential narcissism on top.
I was referring to geostationary satellites. You get way more than once or twice a day.
You realize that even with a laws-of-physics-perfect-theoretical camera in order for a fighter jet to be even a single solitary pixel it would need a primary mirror well over twice as wide as the SpaceX “starship”, right?
Like launching a keyhole style satellite would require a Sea Dragon just for one pixel per ten by ten meter square.
I get that space is big and most people really don’t understand scale, but there is a reason that optical spy satellites are well below the ISS in some of the lowest stable orbits for such large satellites, about a hundred and twenty times closer than geostationary to orbit.
Suffice to say no one has come close to trying this, and it would be the wrong solution to the problem as compared to just throwing 100 times the money to the NRO and letting them throw up keyholes like they were cubesats, and that still would only get you limited areas every few minutes.
All of this doesn’t effect any of the other problems, like trying to get this imaging down to data centers, doing image recognition on such a massive data stream in near real time, or that it can be completely eliminated in a half hour with a few old fighter jets and some of the anti-satellite missiles everyone down to India has whole stockpiles of.
That’s fair. This is an area where I have no expertise, just the limited knowledge from online coverage of satellites. I’d been left with the impression imagery and transmission are more advanced than they are. I’ll stop talking out of my ass now!