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kleinbl00  ·  3402 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I do not believe you, NASA

There's paranoia and there's reality.

The space shuttle is the size it is because of the NRO.

They built a launchpad at Vandenberg for military shuttle missions - IE, polar orbit. Fortunately, they had one roughed in for the Manned Orbiting Laboratory.

14 of 35 launches from Cape Canaveral were military. It would have been substantially more if it weren't for the Challenger; the Delta IV was developed specifically for heavy launch capability in the absence of the space shuttle.

I wasn't clear before. I don't think any of this is about going to Mars. I think this is entirely about "give us money so we can pretend to go to mars while developing better methods and payloads for spying on people." That's what it's been since Sputnik first gave Eisenhower an excuse to deprecate U-2 flights in favor of the CORONA program.