Military
Recent Posts
- In 2015 a small, decades-old French submarine slipped undetected through the destroyers and helicopters screening the USS Theodore Roosevelt and “sank” the supercarrier in a war game — and a Swedish boat had already done the same thing to another US carrier
- The USS Gerald R. Ford is the most expensive warship ever built, a $13 billion supercarrier and the most advanced on earth — and after being kept at war for eleven months until a fire and 600 failed toilets drove sailors from their bunks, she may now sit broken for up to two years
- NASA test pilot Neil Armstrong was one of seven men secretly chosen to fly the X-20 Dyna-Soar, a reusable Air Force spaceplane cancelled in 1963 two decades before the Space Shuttle — and the orbital mission it was designed for is now flown by the Space Force’s X-37B and China’s Shenlong
- In 2004 a twelve-foot unmanned NASA aircraft hit Mach 9.6 and set an air-breathing speed record that still stands today — then America cancelled the Mach 15 machine meant to come next and spent twenty years watching Russia and China field the hypersonic weapons it walked away from
- The XB-70 Valkyrie was a Mach 3 nuclear bomber built to fly so high and fast that nothing the Soviet Union launched could ever reach it — and one of the only two ever built was destroyed not in combat but in a midair collision during a publicity photo shoot for an engine company