Rods from God

Apparently, our good friend and favorite village idiot, Mr. George W. Bush, will soon be giving the go ahead to start development on fancy-schancy space weapons. I'm sure that many of you will see what a horrendously ridiculous scheme this is.

There's been talk about several different types of space weapons. There are plans to build giant space lasers to blast enemy cities. There are plans to put giant mirrors in space to focus sunlight. There are even plans (and this is my personal favorite) to send 'Rods from God'.

Lasers in space? Get real Bush! I wonder how many Star Wars episodes the pentagon engineers had to watch to come up with this idea. While Bush is at it, why doesn't he just fly his Super-Star-Destroyer to the Hoth system and ride a Taun-Taun to the Rebel Alliance base. Obviously this is a terrible idea, and it would take decades to get such a system working correctly.

Giant mirrors? Okay, Bush, now you're just a kid with a magnifying glass. This idea is slightly better, but it still stinks. For this to work, they're going to need a lot of mirrors, spread over a wide area in order to focus enough light. Sounds expensive.

'Rods from God'? For those of you who don't know, this involves dropping large metal beams (made of hardened uranium, or a similar metal) from space onto unsuspecting cities. How unbelievably primitive. Sure, it might cause huge amounts of damage, but think of what would happen if one fell off the satelite by accident. What if there was a space collision? Innocent lives would be lost.

Granted, such a defense system would certainly give rise to some superb political threats. Watching the news would become funnier than most Saturday Night Live episodes:
Random Arabic Nation: "Leave us alone, we want to be peaceful"

Bush: "Look at me, I'm from Texas. You sand people better give me your oil, or else I'm going to be forced to drop my rod on you."

Random Arabic Nation: "You can't do that. We haven't done anything wrong, and we always tell the truth."

Bush: "The Americans are a peace-loving people, and we're going to show you by destroying your city if you don't stop developing the nuclear weapons that we're not even sure you have. Prepare to taste death at the hands of my giant mirrors."

Random Arabic Nation: "...."

Bush: "You are part of the 'axis of evil'. I'm going to fry your cities with giants lasers like I saw on Star Wars. You, and all your camels are going to die. Americans are a peace-loving people, and I'm from Texas, and that's why we want to kill all of you, so that you can have freedom to. I want a happy meal."

I'm sure all of you can see the humor in all of this.

All of these space weapons have some common problems about them. I'm not even an engineer, and I can figure out why these the Americans will never get these systems to work.

Problem 1: Space is a really really big place. How are they going to move the satelites between targets quickly?
Bush's Probable Solution: Simple. Just put a weapon over every probable target. Or in other words, over every city where Arabic people live.

Problem 2: Space weapons are expensive. Not like Donald Trump expensive, I mean really really expensive. Expensive enough that the U.S. will go bankrupt long before they ever get the weapons off the ground (no pun intended).
Bush's Probable Solution: Simple. Just attack some countries and steal their oil and use the proceeds. That's not illegal.

Problem 3: Shooting down a space weapon would be 1000 times cheaper, easier, and more practical than putting one up.
Bush's Probable Solution: That will never happen. Everyone loves America, and they want us to have weapons in space. We're the world's police. I want a happy meal.

Bottom line: Fools! Ditch the program before you piss away more money on doomed projects.