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04/16/2001 Archived Entry: "Venturestar"

Earlier on this weblog I mentioned that NASA's next-generation Space Shuttle project, Venturestar (or X-33) had been cancelled by George Dubya. Unsurprisingly, for a project that has already had over $1.3 billion poured into it, it still isn't quite dead: the US military want to pick up the project and turn the X-33 into the world's first military spaceplane, capable to destroying any target on Earth in less than an hour.

While the sci-fi fan in me thinks this is a rather cool thing - for example, they propose using kinetic missiles which would carry no explosives but due to their incredible speed produce an explosion equivalent to a nuclear warhead - I still think it's a sad but telling fact that America's first fully re-usable spacecraft will have a primary mission of blowing things up.

As a military vehicle though, it's hard to fault it. It's out of the reach of any offensive system that any country, including America, can field due to its altitude and speed. Furthermore, it wouldn't cost that much compared to developing a new line of bombers and it could run unmanned.

On a lighter note, here is the Mars Society UK Development Website that I've been working on and off for a fair while now. It's looking fairly respectable now (i.e. not like the monstrosities that are Slashdot and Kuro5hin) and has a good chunk of added user interaction and functionality (there's that catch-all term again). Most of the work on it has been finished now and it'll probably be moved over to the proper Mars Society UK site in a week or two.

The site is running on PHP-Nuke, a Slashdot-style website engine that is good enough and easy enough to use for our purposes; I personally prefer PHP to anything else since it's more of an intuitive language (ASP, from my very limited experience, isn't bad either but it's not as widely supported), but we won't be using their horrible kludge of a forum system, we'll plug in the Ikonboard system that I'm using for this site.