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U.S. Air Force Plans for War In Space
arhca writes "Wired has an article about the U.S. Air Force's plans to put military weapons in outer space. Plans include firing hypervelocity rods from space to targets on the ground, space-based lasers and large mirrors to reflect the beams at targets on the ground, and a space-based radio frequency energy weapon to destroy or disable foreign satellites. The Air Force's PDF can be found here."
But wasn't that the plan of SDI back under Reagan?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Let's just hope that our own satellites don't get hacked and the weapon is used against us. I'm curious to know if this is just an extension of Ronald Reagan's plans of the space missile defense systems (which at the time people scoffed at).
The ability to take out enemy satellites is also interesting. As an American, I cant' help but notice that the rules of engagement have been as follows: "Foreign countries are allowed to have weapons, as LONG as they're not as powerful as our own." which is obviously okay with me, as an American, however, so much for a fair playing field.
I had a room mate who was in the military, as he worked for the New York City counter terrorist unit, and he used to bring home videos from work that showed how we were able to target individual people from miles above the air. I'll never figure out why we'll use a bomb which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to snipe someone... when a 10 cent bullet would do the trick just fine. Now we can do it from space?
Flame me if you like, my karma sucks anyway.
The United States signs treaties banning such things. ( ABM Treaty (1972) and Space Treaty (1967) ) Then they back out of it when THEY feel like developing/advancing the technology. Next, some country like France is gonna try the same thing and Bush will go in for the attack.
At least this way we can start picking off the alien invaders before they get too close.
Trust Your Technolust
Despite such technical hurdles, space-based arms are legal. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 only bans nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction from orbit.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
While I want to make cynical remarks about the Air Force getting funding for space-based weapons and NASA's research stuff (particularly the Hubble and the Space Shuttle) getting the shaft, I also hope that any advances that one makes gets spread around to the other...
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Im much more worried if the US have those kinds of weapons than if some broke desert shithole gets their hands on some mustard gas. What exactly is the US doing this arms race against? Aliens?
The US no doubt has the power to keep space off limits for anyone for military arms race. Why in gods name then do they push the envelope so that other countries has to follow?
Warmongers, thats what i see.
Lets hope the administration gets changed to something less warhappy and perhaps a it more interested in all US citizens than of enriching a few select people.
HTTP/1.1 400
Only if the projectile is the same mass as the cannon. If the cannon were to be, say, 100 times the mass of the projectile, and granted, IANAP(hysicist), I'd think that F=MA would only transfer 1/100th of the F into the cannon as it would the projectile, or something to that effect.
Ergo, small motors adjusting the position of the weapon should suffice...or, if you are shooting down, this would be an excellent way to maintain the altitude of the weapon without resorting to having large quantities of propellant on the weapon. Gravity will just pull it back down into position eventually...
This will be good against countries that have no space program. China, however, has already shown they have a space program that works. They've placed a man in space and were able to get him back to Earth. I think if China feels threatened by the measures that the U.S. is using here they too will work harder to place weapons into space.
Honestly, these weapons will only be good against countries that have no space program. Without one how will they be able to reach space to even stand a chance of taking these weapons out? On the other hand, new weapons that can reach space (ie. ground based lasers, missles) and destroy these targets might come into existance and will be what most nations will use if they can't afford to send people into space.
It may result to a new progression in the development of the military arsenals...
Posted in the press:
"
MOSCOW (AP) - Russia has successfully tested a hypersonic anti-Star Wars weapon capable of penetrating any prospective missile shield, a senior general said Thursday.
The prototype weapon proved it could manoeuvre so quickly as to make "any missile defence useless," Col.-Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, told a news conference.
He said that the prototype of a new hypersonic vehicle had proved its ability to manoeuvre while in orbit, thereby making it able to dodge an enemy's missile shield.
"The flying vehicle changed both the altitude and direction of its flight," Baluyevsky said. "During the experiment conducted yesterday, we proved that it's possible to develop weapons that would make any missile defence useless."
Baluyevsky's comment followed a statement by President Vladimir Putin, who said Wednesday after attending rocket launches from the Plesetsk launch pad in northern Russia that experiments conducted during the military manoeuvres had proven that Russia could build new strategic weapons that would be unrivalled in the world.
Putin said that the development of new weapons was not directed against the United States, and Baluyevsky reaffirmed the statement, saying that the experiment shouldn't be seen as Russia's response to U.S. missile defence plans.
"The experiment conducted by us must not be interpreted as a warning to the Americans not to build their missile defence because we designed this thing," Baluyevsky told The Associated Press.
In Washington, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by reporters about the Putin statement.
"If you're in that business - intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads - you want them to be survivable, and manoeuvrability is one way to increase their survivability against any potential defences," he said.
Putin said that Russia had no intention of immediately deploying new weapons based on the experimental vehicle.
Baluyevsky concurred.
"We have demonstrated our capability, but we have no intention of building this craft tomorrow," he said, adding that Russia had told the United States about its plans to conduct the experiment.
He said that the new vehicle had "ceased to exist" after the experiment, presumably burning up in the atmosphere.
Baluyevsky refused to comment on what kind of engine the vehicle had, how long its flight lasted and
02/20/04
"
To Quote the mighty Bill Hicks:
People are always asking me, "Bill, are you proud to be an American? Proud to be an American? Like I had a choice, proud to be an American, well my parents fucked there. I was a disembodied soul floating around going , "fuck in paris! fuck in paris!", but they fucked here. Ok I'm proud. Why don't they put that on the flag? It's hard to get some boot stomping rallying around a picture of your dad spanking your mom's 4 by 4 ass."
That was from memory, apologies if I got it wrong.
Anyone who has read sci fi knows that this stuff has been around for about 40 years. The principles haven't changed, and they're just being re-tread by the military.
The article seems woefully unknowledgeable about the physics of the situation. I'm only quoting the sci-fi authors who brought up these topics originally: (Larry Niven, A.C. Clarke, etc...)
"Even more outlandish is the Hypervelocity Rod Bundles research project. That effort calls for creating a system of metal poles, fired from space, that could strike anywhere on the planet. It's a long-held -- and long-ridiculed -- idea. Keeping the rods from liquefying as they enter the atmosphere is a daunting task,"
From what I know of the system (did not read the whole AF brief) the proposal is to have a satellite orbit geosynchronously relatively above the target, and just fire the projectile downwards. The heat generated by re-entry is because of the horizontal motion of the craft, but a projectile of this type would only have vertical motion with respect to the atmosphere, and therefore relatively little heat generated. Please correct me if I'm wrong, physicists!
"and could only deliver one-ninth the destructive energy per gram as a conventional bomb."
Given that the military already uses kinetic kill technology (horizontally fired from vehicles, no explosives) that are able to penetrate main battle tank armor, why would dropping a similarly size projectile from orbit (wouldn't the terminal velocity be tremendous) be less than traditional explosives? I'm confused by their assertion.
"In theory, lasers -- fired from the ground, from space, or from the air -- would bounce off these blimp-borne mirrors, to track or even destroy enemy missiles. "
Why would you loft a laser platform into orbit and fire it through all that atmosphere down to a blimp, when you could just mount it on a large aircraft? The cost of getting it into orbit and having a blimp hovering around has to be less than strapping it into a 747, plus, you have less diffusion from a lower-altitude. Again, it sounds like the military is getting a little outlandish when simplicity might work better. (imagine that)
"But the Air Force report goes far beyond these defensive capabilities, calling for weapons that can cripple other countries' orbiters. "
Again, from what I've been told, it's not hard to destroy satellites. They are orbiting at ridiculously high speeds. Wouldn't just releasing a cloud of marbles (or even sand!) in their trajectory, orbiting in the opposite direction, easily shred the enemy satellite? The energy released by that impact would have a factor of twice the actual rotational velocity of the satellite -- a very large number, I would think. I don't think that there's any way to protect an orbiter from something like that. Again, if my physics is wrong, please correct me.
All of this seems to me like they're just ignoring physics (in arguments for and against the systems) just like those who said Goddard couldn't fly a craft in space because you'd have no air to push off of.
Sorry for the long post. This is just a very fascinating topic, and I suppose its good to see the media/military pick up on something that's only been fiction 'til now.
Actually it is technology and progress that has given us the ability to selectively kill so effectively, that the last 60 years have been among the most peaceful (statistically) in history. Granted, the proliferation of nuclear weapons terrifies me... but I would say that their deterrent value has been proven.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Very true. Detonations of a spaceship with an atmosphere inside will cause a sound you could hear at a short distance. The sound would travel (for a short while) along the expanding gas.
It might be legal, but I don't see the point nor the ethics. Aren't there enough weapons already? The US has already won the arms race, yet they still want to enlarge that gap. Not everyone is pro-american, but with this behavour the US is feeding those people's fears.. Why do they need so much weapons if it isn't for world domination? Furthermore, an orbital weapon isn't useful against a terrorist, it's meant for war.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Actually that's only partially right. According to a recent book that I read about the Cold War Khrushchev mitiousally planned the Soviet economy back in the 60s to overtake the West in about 20 years. Had the economy stayed where it was in the 60s (manufacturing, steel, raw resources -- basically the paradigm that had ruled since the industrial revolution) the West would have been screwed in an economic sense. Probably not a military one, because there's always the nuclear deterrent (the whole point of which was originally to stop the Russians from taking over Western Europe -- we had our doubts as to our ability to defeat their massed tank armies), but it's something to consider.
Fortunately the global economy went hi-tech and the West (with our non-centrally planned system) proved able to adapt faster. Reagan might get some of the credit for tying the Russians down in a massive arms race (hard to focus on improving your technology and economy if you need to devote 40% of your GDP to the military to keep up with the capitalist pigs) but the Cold War was going to end one way or another. All Reagan did was force it to happen sooner which arguably destabilized the World -- and oh by the way, we'll all be paying for his military buildup for the next couple of decades...
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Incredible as it sounds, the EAGLE effort is underway at the Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy division, sources there confirm. Also under research at the lab is the Ground-Based Laser, which, according to the Air Force report, would shoot "laser beams through the atmosphere" to knock out enemy spacecraft in low-earth orbit.
If you remember, shortly after one of those commercial reconnaisance satelites went into orbit and photographed a military base (Area 51?), the military basically informed the company that it has the capability of dropping the satelite from orbit. Now, whether they mean via the space shuttle or now, I don't know. I have a hunch that the US military already has missles that can take out a satelite, especially since ICBM's have been around for decades.
Shouldn't they be renamed "Space Force"? Maybe "Air and Space Force"?
Zoid.com
Let's not kid ourselves. Russian Space Web has a nice piece on the thoroughly demonstrated anti-satellite weapon systems of the former USSR. I don't know much about our (USA's) own anit-satellite system, but I do know that Russia has done much of this testing, and I would guess a lot more than the USA. I say that because Russia would know if we had tested the weapons, just as we knew that they did. And that information that they knew would be leaked, of course. So I think that Russia had a lot more antisatellite weaponry than the U.S., at least when it comes to kinetic energy weapons (i.e. a shrapnel bomb) in space.
With this in mind, I believe that the USA military has a legitimate interest in developing at least a similar system for weapons parity. I mean, the US military depends heavily on space for communications, and if that were knocked down by China (say, if China wants to invade Taiwan) or maybe a future threat, we would need to be able to knock down either their weapons before they reached our satellites or to knock down their own satellites to make it a level playing field.
And who knows. Russia seems of late to have forgotten what it means to be a democracy, so if some dictator arose in the future, it would have been nice to have at least thought of what to do beforehand. The future can't be predicted too accurately. 250 years ago, the most powerful nation on the earth today was a disjointed band of colonies under the rule of the British Empire. You never know. Hopefully the next great empire won't be like Hitler or Stalin or Mao Tse Tung and murder millions. Being a citizen of the USA, I believe that the USA should try to prevent such a murderous empire from taking control of the high ground and rain down their own fire from the skies.
P.S. I realize that this is a huge piece of flamebait, but as this is a democracy, there needs to be contrasting opinions (diversity of opinion) for us to really function fairly here at slashdot, so please respect my opinion, as I respect yours.
Now the papers here have all picked up on the new Pentagon plans and our new PM, already embroiled in another scandal is backed into a corner of upsetting the electorate just before an election when his popularity is already falling, or upsetting the elephant living to the south of us.
We are tired of seeing our high-paying jobs outsourced overseas and watching your Government subsidized businesses (*cough* Airbus *cough*) compete with ours.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Boeing has never being subsidized by the US government. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Iraq: war to save the U
The concept of 'hostile' aircraft popping up in the interior of the country just wasn't imagined. Any hostile aircraft would have been coming over either of the oceans. The alert jets on both coasts were to take care of any.
A (previously) normal hijacking ("Take me to Cuba!"), was planned for. If necessary, alert jets would have escorted them until they landed. A scenario which has happened many, many times.
Analogy:
You have a defense system for your house. Locks on the doors and windows. Presumably, these will keep the bad guys out, or a least make enough noise so that you can get your secondary defense system, the baseball bat under your bed.
Now...if the bad guy, masquerading as your best friend, materializes out of thin air, right next to your bed, your outer defenses have already been breached, and you don't have time to employ your secondary.
There is only so much you can do.
Would you please name the oppressive right-wing puppet regimes we are currently supporting? Please don't go back into history for examples because I could just as easily retrot with evil regimes your country has supported. As we've previously established all nation-states act in their own (perceived) best-interest. I'm just wondering what oppressive right-wing regimes we are currently supporting. You need not reply if the only example you can come up with is "Israel".
I know saying this will get me labelled anti-semitic* but as long as Israel feels that the US is 100 percent in its camp then the situation in the Middle East will never improve. It will take a serious commitment by Israel, and by the US, as well as by the other parties to achieve lasting peace in the region. That commitment will never be made as long as Israel and hardliners like Ariel Sharon are allowed to dominate the politics of the region with bombs, rockets and tank shells.**
I don't think cutting off our aid to Israel is going to solve anything. If anything that'll just make them feel like their backs are against the wall. Do you really want a nuclear-armed nation to feel like it has it's back against the wall with no allies?
We could take a step in the right direction by selectively refusing to send them certain military equipment, pressuring the Government to come back to the bargaining table and giving them a promise of American security in the advent of another war with the Arab states. Pulling the rug out from under them overnight isn't going to accomplish anything -- it would ultimately be self-defeating.
But this discussion is about the influence that US aid has on the region, and that influence is solely on Israel. The one thing I will say about the subject is I don't see how escalating levels of violence can bring about the peace that both Israelis and Palestineans deserve. Sometimes, you have to be the one willing to break the circle of bloodshed: an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Ghandi so eloquently put it.)
Actually until Bush pissed it away by invading Iraq we had a considerable amount of influence with the Arabs too. We still have some influence with the Saudis but not too much left with the Palestinians these days I suspect.
Lastly to avoid looking like a hypocrite if you are going to criticize the US for supplying Israel with bombs and tank shells you should also citizen the Arab states for supplying the families of the suicide bombers with cash. What's the difference?
P.S.: Long time no see. Good to know your still around!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
1. The Kyoto protocol, to which the Clinton administration had previously committed the US
The president of the United States can not ratify ANY treaty. Treaties are ratified by the US Senate. The Kyoto treaty has never even come to a vote in the Senate yet, largely because in 1997 the US Senate voted 95-0 for a resolution (with 65 co-sponsors) to send a message to then President Clinton basically warning him that it would be rejected if he continued to push for it.
3. Free trade, by placing tarriffs on steel, lumber and other imports, in direct violation of NAFTA and other free trade agreements
I am assuming you are referring to the recent impass between the EU and the US. The NA in NAFTA stands for North American. Last I checked neither Canada nor Mexico were members of the EU.
4. Invading Iraq, which was done without a proper UN mandate, hence the UN-bashing when the US didn't get close to getting what it wanted (no, the previous decade old resolutions were not sufficient, if they were the US wouldn't have been looking for a new resolution green-lighting the war in late 2002 and it wouldn't have got so shitty with France and the other countries in the Security Council that promised to veto any such resolution)
Actually, the US did have a mandate from the UN. UN resolution 686 authorized use of force against Iraq in the first Gulf War. That war ended in a cease fire the terms of which were broken nearly daily by Iraq as they engaged coalition aircraft. The second gulf war can easily be viewed as a continuation of the first.
5. The other long-range missile treaties with Russia (originally signed in the 1970s, when it was part of the USSR), which it unilaterally scrapped almost as soon as it entered office.
You have me baffled by this one. Which treaties are you talking about? I spent the last 30 minutes searching google thinking that I had missed something about the US pulling out on SALT or START and found NOTHING. I assume you are referring to the ABM treaty, which was not broken. The treay was exitted using the exact procedures as outlined within the document.
As for all your anti-american sentiment crap: How does sentiment abroad relate to Bush? Did this sentiment exist before 9/11? If Bush is the root of all this sourness abroad, and Clinton is the antithesis of Bush, then why was Al Quaeda attacking the US and planning 9/11 during his presidency?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Anti-US sentiment is rife, even in those countries whose governments had backed the US invasion of Iraq: In Britain 85 percent were opposed to war, In Australia it was over 80 percent and in Spain it was over 90 percent, and most of those in opposition were highly critical of Bush's motives. It turns out that they (and the rest of the World) were right to be.
One of the problem is that the American public took this anti-US sentiment personally. As much as I can tell (from my part of the world, and people I chat to in Europe), it's not a sentiment against the citizens of the US. but ratter it's current government, and also the American media.
Most US citizens get their news from US-only news sources. Worse of all, CNN. You wouldn't believe how toned-down US newscasts are comparatively to other news sources.
Wrong! Use google for half an hour, and you will see that the U.S. government was well aware of this threat, and had even been warned of it by foreign governments. If it's easier to just believe in the wholesome goodness of your (and my) government and that they wouldn't lie to you, then feel free to write me off as a foil-hat wearing conspiracy nut.
Read the final UNMOVIC/IAEA report.
The Bush administration, notably Rumsfeld, actively lies about the specifics of UNSCOM's departure from Iraq, claiming Sadaam expelled them. The state department web site is slightly more circumspect, using the passive voice "were expelled" without subject. That is arguably accurate, so long as you claim it was Clinton who expelled them. Officially, they withdrew on their own.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
I read somewhere that, in the event of war, all China would have to do to knock out our GPS system, would be to launch payloads of gravel into orbit to take out all the satellites.
It might be ovely simplistic (earth orbit is so sparsely populated that a thousand-fold increase in debris may have no noticable effect). But it has a frightening elegance.
Makes me worried about the time when we are truly dependant on satellite systems. Then those fragile satellites will be a great target for terrorists.
USA didn't sign the ICC treaty because of their fears of it becoming a platform for political grandstanding. Nothing more, nothing less. Which is exactly what people tried to use it for against American administators durign the war on Iraq. Regardless - is it legal for people to shoot people? No. But sometimes the police have to shoot in order to stop much greater criminals.
Disclamer: Yes I supported the war, but I think Bush is an idoit too.
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
... the all-time classic by Robert A. Henlein
not only does this book explain how to organize a guerilla network to overthrow an entrenched power.
it also explains how you can easily terrorize earth by launching simple rocks from Moon's surface. you don't need much power to overcome Moon's gravity... so just build a (large) launcher, calculate the exact path it will take, and launch it... so it comes down on your enemy as a nice meteorite.
i didn't do the math, but i do have a feeling that Henlein did when he came up with the idea.. any physics students here?
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a book called Footfall back in '86.
Includes all the funs stuff like rods and gamma-ray lasers.
Brief synopsis: Space bad guys show up in orbit and use advance weaponry like rods to destroy tanks, drop meteors to destroy cities, etc. Lucky us they inherited the tech and aren't very imaginitive, so we strap nuclear bomb propulsion to a couple of shuttles and use nuclear powered gamma ray weapons to beat them into submission.
This is not surprising. The US government has indicated pretty openly that they are going to militarize space. Their future Star Wars program, which will start rolling once the Missile Shield is "successful", will necessarily involve militarization of space.
Recent attempts by Bush administration to reshape NASA is also consistent with this space goal.
I have always claimed that the UN will collapse* if USA militarizes space. We'll see if I'm right.
(* If you wonder why I think this, it is because of human behaviour. When USA militarizes space, it will most likely start claiming territory on the moon, mars, etc as its own. This is pretty consistent with human behaviour over time (just think of colonization, circa 1500's/1600's/etc). Whoever that has power in space will have power over territory in space. This is true if human behaviour is the same as in the past (i.e. warmongering territorial animals)--I don't see why it be any different since humans stopped evolving tens of thousands of years ago. This will mean that the UN has no say in territory disputes in space, and the UN will have no power to promote peace. Once that happens, there is no point of having the UN. People always mistakenly assume that the most important elements of the UN are things like WHO, WTO, UNICEF, UNHCR, and so forth, but the truth of the matter is, UN is primarily a body that is responsible for territories (ie. borders of countries).... On a different note, I also have a hypothesis that the UN will collapse right before WWIII--just like how the League of Nations collapses just before WWII. This has nothing to do with militarization of space. )
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
... we would have had a continuously manned space station (Manned Orbiting Laboratory or MOL) as well as a fleet of rapid turnover missile-or-aircraft launched, horizontal landing lifting body spacecraft (where do you think I got this nifty nick?) by 1975. Instead, we got von Braun's moon project. OK, so MOL and DynaSoar we to double as weapons platforms. We might have gotten to the moon later (and considering what's happened since, so what?), but we probably would have hda semi-permanent bases there now, and I'd give even money we'd have people who'd been to Mars and back.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I guess the space elavator is comin soon then. Otherwise these are going to be some really expensive darts. And you better know which bunker you are busting because if you get the wrong one you justwasted millions if not billions of dollors.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg