Overnight delivery is amazing. The thought that I can finish a drawing here in New York, drop it off at a FedEx office at 5pm and have it show up first thing tomorrow in L.A. is pretty neat.
A far superior delivery system is the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. It takes about five minutes to boost itself into suborbital flight, where it then cruises for less than a half-hour, and then spends just two minutes plummeting down to its target more than 7,000 miles away. And even small ICBMs can carry half a ton of cargo. Of course, since that cargo is usually a nuclear device, we think of ICBMs as deliverers of death.
Huai-Chien "Bill" Chang, a doctoral candidate in Space Architecture at the University of Tokyo, however, has a different idea for what ICBMs could be used for: Long-range disaster relief. Should a natural calamity strike in a region of the globe that's difficult to access, Chang posits, an ICBM somehow modified for a soft landing could be loaded up with supplies, and quickly delivered where it is needed. And with the dearmaments following the end of the Cold War, there's no shortage of mothballed missiles.
"These rocket engines are still functioning. If we could use these engines, the cost would be very much reduced," Chang told science and astronomy enthusiast website SPACE.com, following a recent presentation of his idea at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space 2013 conference. "I'd like to see something like this happen before the next big disaster hits."
Here's Chang himself explaining the concept at a TEDxTokyo "audition:"
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the idea of these relief vehicles being re-repurposed back into weapons is kind of ridiculous, too, since it's probably cheaper just to buy an actual black market missile and not modifying it, or to resort to normal terrorist tactics and not blowing a ton of money on something we've been ready for for years, and will leave no question about who fired it.
decommissioning removes the warheads, but leaves us with several thousand missiles (and their sexy engines) that taxpayers would be paying to keep in storage. finding something to do with them not only reduces the cost of keeping them around, it also makes this guarded technology available to the world and advancing the collective technology of man ever so slightly. also he gets points for being probably the only person who's thought of repurposing nuclear missiles into something other than a different kind of weapon, and more importantly something that will actually be doing good for man when it's launched. or at least the only one who knows what he's talking about. this isn't a plan of how to creatively reuse those pesky nukes cluttering up your garage, this is a plan of how to repurpose the single deadliest weapon in human history into something designed to help people across the world, not kill them. it's one of those idealistic, alter the human condition, strengthen the global community, change the freakin' world ideas, that we're supposed to at least consider if there's any chance it can be made into reality.
The difference being that you would have to design a capsule that could hold supplies and do a precision landing, and preferably be reusable. This also assumes that the government controlling the missile will provide the missile for free and subsidized operator support.
All in all, there's only so many mothballed missiles, and it would be way cheaper to just load up a cargo plane and send it over.
Maybe after the collapse of our currency Iran will be so kind as to fire one of these mothballed former Soviet missiles at us with "relief supplies" in it. Give me a break.