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Cost didn’t stop the US from rapidly building several dozen new silos for GBI; the last couple are still being worked on in Alaska. GBI only costs about IIRC 30 million dollars too, and yet this was seen as worthwhile to do. An X-37B orbital booster is bound to be more expensive, and thus more worthy of passive protection.A new silo doesn’t have to be hardened as much as an ICBM silo, the GBI silos sure aren’t, and are tightly grouped together so one nuke can kill them all out of hand. A new silo can just be a concrete lined hole in the ground with a roof strong enough to prevent a cheap kill by a small UAV or a anti tank missile or a mortar round landing on it. No complicated suspension system to withstand nuclear earth shock or high end 11,000psi concrete required. Changes like that make for a lot cheaper of a structure, and frankly if the US military is going to field anything like conventional weapons this expensive then no one is going to care how much it costs to base it.It’s also possible that a semi hardened surface structure could be used, in which the rocket rolls out and then elevates to fire. This was used for the earliest Atlas missiles, and proposed repeatedly as a means of basing MX. By being above ground but mounded over with earth not only makes construction much cheaper, maintenance is also much cheaper since water doesn’t try to leak in so much. The only downside is many booster rocket designs may not be able to be stored horizontally in a fueled condition, so the firing cycle would be more protracted. So some kind of low end silo is a lot more likely.
Cost didn’t stop the US from rapidly building several dozen new silos for GBI; the last couple are still being worked on in Alaska. GBI only costs about IIRC 30 million dollars too, and yet this was seen as worthwhile to do. An X-37B orbital booster is bound to be more expensive, and thus more worthy of passive protection.
A new silo doesn’t have to be hardened as much as an ICBM silo, the GBI silos sure aren’t, and are tightly grouped together so one nuke can kill them all out of hand. A new silo can just be a concrete lined hole in the ground with a roof strong enough to prevent a cheap kill by a small UAV or a anti tank missile or a mortar round landing on it. No complicated suspension system to withstand nuclear earth shock or high end 11,000psi concrete required. Changes like that make for a lot cheaper of a structure, and frankly if the US military is going to field anything like conventional weapons this expensive then no one is going to care how much it costs to base it.
It’s also possible that a semi hardened surface structure could be used, in which the rocket rolls out and then elevates to fire. This was used for the earliest Atlas missiles, and proposed repeatedly as a means of basing MX. By being above ground but mounded over with earth not only makes construction much cheaper, maintenance is also much cheaper since water doesn’t try to leak in so much. The only downside is many booster rocket designs may not be able to be stored horizontally in a fueled condition, so the firing cycle would be more protracted. So some kind of low end silo is a lot more likely.
