Free Republic

A mysterious light was spotted in China last night, leaving residents baffled. Witnesses shared pictures and videos of an identified object appearing to light up the night sky like a massive torch, seen above the regions of Beijing, Chongqing, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia at about 6:45pm local time. A UFO expert claimed that the footage looked like the trail of a rocket motor. … A military magazine editor and blogger by the name of Weaponmagazine-Xiaoning said the footage could be of Chinese military testing a top secret hypersonic aircraft, DF-ZF. The hypersonic glide vehicle was previously known by the Pentagon...

U.S. Air Force scientists have performed their own rocket propellant test without contractor assistance and eye continued in-house experimentation. The Armed Forces News Service reported that officials at the Air Force Research Laboratory said the 3-second, 15-pound Ballistic Test and Evaluation System, in which a small-scale apparatus is used to test rocket propellant and designs in a standardized rocket motor casing, yielded extraordinary amount of data due to new high-speed digital video cameras used for recording it. "What's special about this test is that it was entirely in-house," said 1st. Lt. Rob Antypas, the AFRL program manager and a developmental...

Butler of Aviation Week & Space Technology reported last week that the super-secret National Reconnaissance Office will be launching new spy satellites over the next two years at the highest rate since the Reagan era. Butler quotes NRO director Bruce Carlson as stating that several "very large, very critical" spacecraft will be sent into orbit by his agency -- presumably systems that collect imagery of surface targets or eavesdrop on the radio-frequency transmissions of potential adversaries. Combined with impending launches of new military-communications and missile-warning satellites, news of the spy-satellite payloads will come as welcome news to the nation's endangered...

Industry advocates are voicing concern with U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel NASA’s Moon-bound Constellation program and the threat it poses to America’s aerospace work force and U.S. strategic missile arsenals, but Defense Department officials said the two agencies are forging a plan to sustain the nation’s solid-rocket motor industrial base. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is among those railing against Obama’s proposal to scrap NASA’s plan to replace its space shuttle fleet with new rockets and spacecraft in favor of relying on commercial crew taxis to get astronauts to the international space station and back. “This is not money-saving....

Excerpt - EAST CAMDEN, Ark. (AP) - A rocket motor at the Aerojet plant in south Arkansas exploded and caught fire today, and one worker was missing. Company spokesman Glenn Mahone says workers were involved in routine work at the 1,200-acre company compound when a large motor caught fire. He said the company was investigating, but did not know what caused the explosion. ~ snip ~