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U.S. Considers Anti-Satellite Laser
SpaceAdmiral writes "The U.S. government wants to develop a ground-based weapon to shoot down enemy satellites in orbit. The laser will be much more powerful and sophisticated than a similar endeavor a decade ago. From the article: '... some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as potential fuel for an antisatellite arms race that could ultimately hurt this nation more than others because the United States relies so heavily on military satellites, which aid navigation, reconnaissance and attack warning.'"
That probably wouldn't work. Any laser sufficiently powerful enough to destroy a satellite would destroy a mirror too. If the mirror has less than perfect reflectivity it gives the laser something to heat, damaging the mirror and eventually getting through.
My response to reading the article: duh!
Here are some recent articles on the developments in China. The US is not starting this race, but it'd be nice to keep up regardless.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-07 -27-china-satellites_x.htm m l
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/HD20Ad03.html
http://www.house.gov/coxreport/chapfs/ch4.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-01c.html
http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/84-no3.htm
http://www.afio.com/sections/wins/1998/notes48.ht
The world is, a dangerous place. As with Sudan and Iran, the UN is no deterrent to aggression. Enlightened self-interest directs us to investigate these types of systems for the same reasons we investigate lethal pathogens. Surviving them requires understanding them even if we never intend to use them.
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Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
I think you are actually right on the money here.
The U.S. isn't really concerned about enemy spy satellites -- god knows our borders are so porous, you could just send a TV crew in and photograph almost anything you want, as long as they don't look Middle Eastern -- but navigation satellites are another matter.
The saving grace of the GPS system, from a U.S. military perspective, is that an enemy really can't depend on it; we can throw errors into it pretty much anywhere, anytime we want without having our equipment be affected (except all the guys using civilian GPS receivers because they haven't been issued real ones). I think there's a real concern that if there was a competing GPS-like system, that an enemy could use it to pilot a cruise missile at a U.S. target in such a way that we wouldn't get much warning.
Now, I think this is kind of a false threat: I think, given what I said earlier about our borders, that it's a whole lot easier to just drive a truck up to said U.S. target and blow it up than it would be to cobble together a homemade V-1 or V-2 with Galileo navigation, but apparently others disagree.
At any rate, any navigation system that provided GPS-like accuracy that wasn't within direct U.S. control would almost certainly necessitate the creation of a way to destroy it, or at least temporarily disable it in certain areas (if you de-orbited a satellite or two you might be able to make a hole in the system's coverage that would take a while for the operators to replace from spares).
Not that it would do any good against ICBMs, Chinese or otherwise, since they use astro- and inertial navigation systems anyway.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Militarizing the space in near-earth orbit and creating a military highly dependant on satellites is just stupid.
Oh, wake the hell up.
News flash: Reconnaissance satellites are *weapons*. They are also *not new*. They've been around for decades, so space has already been 'militarized.' The Russians had a working anti-satellite program back in the *late 1960s*. We were succesfully killing satellites with missiles back in the mid-80s. The notion that this 'militarization of space' is anything that has its roots in the current administration bespeaks a woeful ignorance of recent history.
A few missles that blast millions of ball-bearings into to orbit, and the entire planet will be locked out of space for hundreds, or even thousands of years
No, it wouldn't. There are any number of ways to deal with that scenario, ranging from heavier armored satellites to different target orbits to cheap pop-up satellites that you can launch from submarines and don't have to survive for more than a fraction of an orbit. None of these are as good an option as what we do now, but the suggestion that all someone would have to do to prevent all access to space for millennia is set off a few rockets full of ball-bearings is absolutely ridiculous.