Future
It has been said that the B-2 bomber was originally intended to use directly down-linked targeting data from Lacrosse satellites in order to aid it in its role of hunting down and destroying Soviet mobile ICBM launchers. It had been anticipated that the Lacrosse satellites would be replaced by the radar component of the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA). The severe program problems encountered by FIA in the early 2000s (decade) appear to have led to off-loading of radar reconnaissance to the Space Based Radar, later simplified to Space Radar, with initial launch anticipated around 2015. This program itself was axed by Congress late 2008. The launch of NROL-41 (USA 215) in September 2010 has all orbital characteristics of a radar remote sensing platform (see FIA) and could be the first of a Lacrosse follow-up program. Its orbit is a retrograde version of the "frozen" Lacrosse orbit, the choice for a retrograde orbit itself indicating a SAR role.
Read more about this topic: Lacrosse (satellite)
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it, but at
cyclical turns
There is a change felt in the rhythm of events:”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“But I choose to think he is escaped from the possibility of falling into any future afflictions, and that neither the malice of his pretended friends nor the sufferings of his real ones can ever again rend and torment his honest heart.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“If nations always moved from one set of furnished rooms to another—and always into a better set—things might be easier, but the trouble is that there is no one to prepare the new rooms. The future is worse than the ocean—there is nothing there. It will be what men and circumstances make it.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)