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I think that it's a matter of competing priorities. The current problem is conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq and space based systems aren't as cost efficient as jets and guided weapons. It takes a lot of money to put an object in space - thousands of dollars per pound. Each THOR projectile would weigh almost 2.5 Tons and could only be used once.

I think that you're correct about some people in the Air Force protecting the fighter pilots. I saw a lot of resistance to unmanned aerial vehicles when I was in. Some of it was justified, but a lot of it was fear of change.

I think that it would be very difficult to justify taking money from manned aircraft development and putting it into space-based systems without a clear objective for the space-based platform and a detailed cost-benefits analysis showing that it has some advantage over manned aircraft. Maybe a space-age Billy Mitchell is the answer.

Re: Each THOR projectile would weigh almost 2.5 Tons

Just off the top of my head . . .

Given a launch cost of 10,000 per pound to LEO and each THOR projectile being 5000 pounds, makes the price for *each* THOR projectile 50 Million dollars.

LEO (Low Earth Orbit) is interesting because it overflys very little of what we need to shoot at, so you would need a "constellation" (think GPS) of perhaps 20 sats each with 6 THOR projectiles, you're talking about 6 Billion dollars just to deploy the system.