Israel deploys 'Star Wars' missile killer system

[Igel]

17. Took years to develop fixed-wing aircraft.

Quite a while to develop helicopters.

Supersonic flight was a massive impossible boondoggle. Then it happened.

And we'd never put a man on the Moon. Some still believe that's the case.


I remember a friend working on the jitter-error correction system necessary for the first drone prototypes back in the late '70s. He said it was a tough problem and nobody would solve it. Mostly said by those who hadn't been able to solve it.

I can go and by the results of the research on that "unsolvable problem" for a few hundred dollars now. It's not 1979 any more.


Star-Wars had a political antipathy to it, fact-based opposition with a decided agenda: If Reagan was right, it would mean the zombie apocalypse was upon us, An MIT guy even said it was impossible, and everybody glommed onto what he said. He was wrong, mostly: Given the technology then, no, it wasn't possible. That was then, this is now. His agenda blinded him. His faith was in failure, and that's where all the facts ineluctably led.

It's not the early '80s anymore.


It's worth pointing out that those failures mostly weren't a problem. They weren't testing the entire system. It's a complex set of problems. You don't put it all together and expect it to work the first time. Most of the failures were testing components. Many "failures" were successes. Even actual failures gave information on how to fix the problem.