The C-5 Galaxy which dropped that 43 ton missile is now headed to a museum. Pics and links to the video at the source.
Here's the video. [wyt=Minuteman Air Launch]It7SQ546xRk[/wyt] I have to wonder, though, how much accuracy a missile launched in such a way would lose. Remember, back then (I don't know about now) ballistic missiles only had gyroscopes to calculate their position in flight and their path to the target. I imagine such a system would be very sensitive to any instability of the platform at launch; a little bit of "noise" in the calculated starting position caused by the missile swaying as it descended on the parachute might've been magnified into many miles of inaccuracy over the missile's flight time. Still, way cool. I wonder if anyone's considered something like this for space vehicle launches? Imagine a C5 taking a launch vehicle up to 45,000 feet and dropping it in similar fashion. If the vehicle was able to launch by 35,000 feet, it would be starting above most of the atmosphere, allowing a smaller amount of fuel to be carried...
Sure, Pegasus (which is dropped and launched horizontally) is good for small things. I was thinking about a manned vehicle.
You mean like SpaceShipTwo? Rutan's planning on pushing the tech into orbital flights at some point. If you saw the Discovery special on him winning the X-Prize, you'll see that he's got some long term goals mapped out of even building a space station using that method. His flight cost estimates seem a lot more realistic to me than Musk's do.
I guess the thought might have been that our strategic bombers could not reliably penetrate Soviet air space. It wouldn't be too many more years before the B-1 and then B-2 programs might have changed that calculus. Mainly, though, I suspect the demonstration was for propaganda purposes.
I remember seeing pictures of this. It led to the suggestion to air launch the MX missiles (even those the MXs were far, far larger). Personally, I was more impressed when they landed a C-130 and a U-2 on a carrier (at different times of course)
There was also the idea of 747s filled with cruise missiles: http://www.g2mil.com/bm747.htm http://snafu-solomon.blogspot.com/2011/12/blast-from-past-cruise-missile-carriers.html http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=11470
Depends on what you're trying to hit. A city? A couple miles error isn't that big a deal. If you're trying to take out a missile silo or other hardened target, even a nuke needs to land pretty close to it.
The Russians have a spaceplane design called MAKS that is intended to be pigybacked on top of the An-225 and released at high altitude, in a 45 degree climb attitude. It would be capable of lofting 18 tons to LEO or 5 tons to GEO. There are two proposed configurations - unmanned cargo setups for maximised payload, or a manned spaceplane for satellite service and repair in orbit. They actually worked out the design as far back as the late 80s, but they've just never got the money to build it. It's one of those projects that's always "going to be done at some point" as it were - but never is. Yet, anyway.
Even cities a nuclear warhead landing a couple of miles off target could result in a couple of hundred thousand fewer killed.
Most warheads are not "dial a yield" IIRC. And I assume if variable yield warheads are being used against soft targets like cities then they are already set a maximum yield for maximum effect.
Four things: It's not really a goal to kill as many people as it is too fuck up a city. More people being alive would be a bigger strain on a system already strained to the max. Fallout will get most in the cities since so few know what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion nor will they be able to get out of the area without running into fallout or into other nukes going off. Most cities are targeted with more then one warhead. A lot of cities are simply too large to really be taken out with just one. You're going to hit them with more then one and at opposite ends of the city. Take a city like Los Angeles. It's pretty damn big. You're going to need a lot more then one nuke to really destroy it.
I remember reading but I'm not able to find it now that one of the things to do when hitting a city is to hit it with five or more at the same time so the blast effects all interact and become more powerful and act as if one giant bomb had gone off.
Cities are attacked with airbursts. Airbursts generate just a small fraction of the fallout that ground bursts do.
In any situation a nuke was launched like this I doubt the required accuracy would have been much more than somewhere in the USSR. This isn't a strategy for tactical knocking out of enemy infrastructure, it's part of a Mutually Assured Destruction end game.
You do know that there are many places in the U.S.S.R where you could detonate thousands of nuclear weapons and not actually kill anyone or destroy anything significant. People live on Nova Zemlya right now.
I know that, but it wouldn't be a single missile, it would be one of hundreds if not thousands. And the important part isn't to have 100% accuracy, but to merely make the enemy see you have a significant chance of hitting them.
There were 550 Minuteman III missiles with 1,650 warheads and 450 Minuteman II missiles with 450 warheads deployed at one time. And I doubt the Soviets were ever deterred by "a significant chance".
I'm reminded of the scene in The Hunt for Red October where Jack Ryan visits Skip Tyler to show him spy photographs of the new Soviet Typhoon-class submarine in hopes of discovering the purpose of the odd doors positioned fore and aft on the boat...
We're still doing stuff like this, except with C-17s. In May. The photo below is from 2006 as is this article.
