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Chinese Lasers Blind US Satelites
SniperClops writes, "China has fired high-power lasers at U.S. spy satellites flying over its territory in what experts see as a test of Chinese ability to blind the spacecraft, according to sources." The article mentions the reluctance of the U.S. administration to talk about this "asymmetric" effort by the Chinese military.
I got "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
I bet the lasers are red in colour ;)
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As does alot of the world not in the united states but still grounded under it's definition of right and wrong is why can't a foreign self governing nation control its own airspace and space space. If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds. Why the difference for china?
From TFA:
So its a bit like saturating a camera with light so it can't take good pictures, but once it moves on it should be OK.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
For it's national defense program? The whole "do everything with lasers" mindset seems to fit.
Where's Austin Powers when you need him?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Well, good for them....I guess. I would imagine that the US would do the same to Chinese spy satellites (if they had any - which I don't know and don't feel like googling), so why be surprised when the Chinese do it? It seems to me that this is just a case of the Chinese government acting in the interests of it's own national security. This may be news, but it should not be surprising.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
grounding all the Blackbirds and relying on Satallites was a really good one.
To be fair though, I'm guessing there are SR-71 replacements (Aurora?) busy doing a similar job but we just don't know about it yet.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
looks like it worked...
Read the rest of it. It's an interesting article, but some of these statements come off as revenue generating news (and considering this is Defense News, it's no surprise).
They forget to mention that we would probably do the same (if not worse) to deter spy satellites over our own country. They also don't address the concept of whether or not a country has a righ to its own privacy here. I think we would want privacy for our country and should not be surprised or angered to find our attempts thwarted when spying on other countries. Well, that jamming station must not have worked well and I highly doubt it was put there by the Russians. I cannot think of a clear motive for it. Probably sold as surplus or exchanged for payment by a disgruntled soldier and found its way to Iraq.
So we'll either change our standards or give the military a special encrypted standard. The cat and mouse game will begin between the US wanting to see what China's doing and China not wanting the US to see what they're doing. Frankly, I don't really give a damn. China has some bad leaders and some severe problems but they're more internal than anything.
You'll find at the bottom of the article: That's right, they do. So this isn't really news so much as "Country X Defends Itself Against Country Y" except that Country Y is the only country that thinks it's hot shit and that the world must reveal all and revolve around Country Y. Also, our leader has stated that non-compliance means you are with the terrorists and you're against us.
My work here is dung.
TFA: "If you keep looking over the fence at you neighbor's back yard, you're going to get poked in the eye"
:-)
I like this
Also Chinese defence program is called "Assassin's Mace".. it's straight out of a badly dubbed movie!
I was getting so tired of those satelite scans detecting my Super Hackers.
This is a very serious development. The Chinese can launch satelites, put men into orbit, have nuclear weapons, are financing most of our balance or payments thanks to Bush
The other day, their defense minister asked the US to "shut up!"
Pretty soon, they will stare us in the face and say..."Do whatever you will...knowing full well that we just cannot!" They just won't care. May be Bush should threaten to bomb them.
It is obvious to any red-blooded, patriotic, Jesus-loving American that we are the only source of righteousness on earth and it is our God-given duty to use His power to advance our cause of spreading His holiness throughout the world and trample over the devil-worshipping heathens. Therefore, what we do is good and what all the godless nations of the world that are not America do is wrong. Thank you, and God bless.
Join Tor today!
Not that I'm denying the right for the Chinese to keep their secrets safe from the NSA, CIA or whomever wants to peek at their secrets but it seems somewhat apposite that this story is posted a day after this one. In fifty years time are we going to be praising a Colonel Hong for saving the world from another imminent disaster or are we actually going to learn something this time round?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Did you ever see a friggin' shark in a Google Earth picture? No?
Now you know why.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
You have to hit the lens dead on center however.... to overwhelm the ccd. Try it in a conveinence store where they have a monitor setup to show people they are being monitored...
I bet that laser was mounted on the top of a sharks head...
The future of this country with ACPAC operating on Capitol Hill terrifies me.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Meta will eat itself
The big deal here is that this is yet another message to the folks who want to spend hundreds of billions on satellite weapons. Put 'em up there, and someone will spend a lot less money to disable them when the need arrises.
Space based weapons systems are not "siezing the high ground". They are more like climbing a tree with a sack full of rocks. They have some advantages, but overall against a serious opponent, they are a poor and expensive strategy.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Don't let any China man complain about bad coverage!
...which are likely left as decoys for the other dozen or so invisible ones...the reconnaissance version of a honeypot. The US has had stealth technology for a long time...aerodynamics is what took so long to build the F117. Since aerodynamics doesn't matter in space, I think it is likely that the satellites put up in the 70s where probably stealthy. Highly directional, bursty, spread spectrum downlinks would make it very difficult to detect. Again, that's 70s-era technology.
The $500 billion dollar annual defense budget is being spent somewhere. I would hope some of it was put into spy satellites that are awful easy to overlook.
So let me get this straight. The US sends spy satellites over another country, and they temporarily disable it from spying on them.And we are supposed to be what? (outraged?) Kinda makes you wonder sometimes who's in the right.
Not surprisingly the arms race continues.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that all countries continue military R&D.
It hits the news that the US has Drones flying over and dropping bombs in Afghanistan, but it is somehow slashdot front page news that the Chinese are doing a high tech version of blinding a video camera with a flashlight?
What about the man portable observation drones, guided rockets and robots?
To ensure that if China decides it want's to cut off all trade and access from the world, it can even keep space-spying from revealing it's activites. Frankly, it's a very strategic move. If I were in the pentagon, I'd start doing threat assesments and invasion options right now. Just in case. Kind of like we did before WWII.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
According to the UN Treaty on Outer Space (also here at wikipedia), of which both China and the US are signatories, "outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means". So it is not "chinese space or airspace". Attacking a satellite (or blinding it) is akin to doing the same to a ship on the open seas. It is a violation on the freedom of other nations and a violation of the neutrality of space. It's just one step short of piracy or an act or war.
And BTW, other nations including China and the Soviet Union (now Russia) have been sending spy sattelites over the US for decades without the US attacking them (although we have plans to do so in time of war).
I know this will turn into an anti-American thread, but what is the big deal? This was a dance the US and USSR carried on for decades. If anything, it will now force the US scientists back to the drawn table to come up with a different solution to accomplish the same thing.
If anything, your reaction to this story should tell you where you stand with respect to the US.
More power to China, I know this will force the US to improve/upgrade it's space efforts. And that, to me, is a good thing.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Of course, reading my own definition, this would justify Afghans and Iraqis seeking to expel the Americans and the British, just as it justified the French Resistance in WW2, and the American Colonists in the 1770s.
At what point is the present US administration going to face up the fact that it is the self-appointed global hegemon and that five and a half billion people disagree with that?
Pining for the fjords
If the lasers aren't "breaking" the satellites, than I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with what China is doing. While its certainly in our best interests to see what China is up to, its in theirs to stop us. Regardless of whether or not we are "legally" in their airspace or not, if they point a laser in space and it happens to blind our satellite, than I can't see that they've done anything wrong.
If they blew it up, that would be something else.
So can I get one of these lasers for my car to blind the speed radar cameras?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
"Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs." Guess the jamming system didn't work so well.
A couple of thoughts occur to me. 1 - The Chinese are damaging someone else's property. There's no international law that says you can't look over the other guy's fence. If I take a picture of my neighbor sunbathing and her husband breaks my camera, then the cops will charge him, not me. 2 - Causing trouble for the other guy, without direct confrontation, is what the cold war was all about. 3 - Unlike the Soviets, the Chinese trade with us and need our market. We have ceded our manufacturing industry to them. We don't have to do that. If they play hardball, we should shut our borders to their exports. We should do that now while we still have the capability to re-spawn our manufacturing industry. Being totally dependent on the Chinese for our manufactured goods means that they can do anything they want to us.
I would suggest that before people point about China's right to protect the space above them, that those people would look at TREATY ON PRINCIPLES GOVERNING THE ACTIVITIES OF STATES IN THE EXPLORATION AND USE OF OUTER SPACE, INCLUDING THE MOON AND OTHER CELESTIAL BODIES (1967) and AGREEMENT RELATING TO THE INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE ORGANIZATION "INTELSAT" (with annexes and Operating Agreement)(1971). We blew up a derelict russian satellite with a F15 firing a special missle in the '80s and it caused all sorts of issues, so there is international precident on this being a bad thing. In addition, all we have to do is take pictures from the 'side' view or develop 'stealthy' satillites.
In God we trust, all others require data.
Electric Boogaloo.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If I was in the US spying game and I know that someone was trying to blind my satellites, I'd say "Oh no, you've stopped me photographing your secret installations" even if the attempts were unsuccessful. That way the target thinks they've stopped the spy satellites, whereas in practice, the lasers may be completely ineffectual.
Until the Chinese spies can get hold of genuine, spoiled, satellite photos (that weren't staged/planted) they cannot be sure they have suceeded.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Be assured that the SR-71 was replaced with a more capable spacecraft. It is likely that the Chinese only shined lasers on the satellites they could see. Meanwhile the US has nasty laser weapons of its own.
an ill wind that blows no good
Is this really a reliable news source? I am really unfamiliar with DefenseNews.com and the site looks to be little more than a home-run website that any of us could put up. It looks like a reaction to all the conspiracy theorist "news" sites like http://www.911sharethetruth.com/ .... what do you all think?
mr pibb + red vines = crazy delicious
Remember a while ago when all of the "news" outlets were talking about al queda using lasers to blind pilots and crash planes? Is this another one of those? Could laser be one of those things that makes news people salivate, like internet, child porn, or video game violence?
Seriously, if the chinese are indeed doing this, it seems like an awfully impressive technological feat. I just wish they weren't doing it. Satellites are really good at keeping the peace, because they let you know what your enemy is doing so you're not making up dragons in your mind.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Filters. Laser beams, as all geeks know, shine at a particular and very narrow frequency. Yes, "tunable dye lasers" can shift frequency across a range, but they don't have the power ratings of a CO2 laser. So suitably filter-equipped spy satellites should be able to cope.
Lasers blind ... oh, dammit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am not a fan of nuclear weapons anywhere, but this is a dangerous world with people who *literally* want to send us to hell or to see our redeemer. They will buy and use nukes -- and Iran and Korea are all too willing to give or sell them away. In the business where others are willing to kill us, I want to be working to disarm them, period. The United States has few options -- and both the Europeans and Asian nations that are not China have largely stayed out of fray hoping once again to let teh US carry the burden of disarming. A united front would really sincerely help the world. It would even help the Iranians and Koreans who as a people would rather plan crops than seed nuclear bombs.
Mike www.sharecube.com
...is that no one is saying "The Chinese are wrong". Not one person quoted in the article has said that. The article never suggests that. Being in the remote sensing industry, I find this article interesting, but beyond the technical interest of the subject it's no more exciting, important inflamatory, or pompous than a sports report. It's no different than a "Saints defense finds a way to shut down Vick" headline. No one is wrong and no one is claiming anyone is wrong. Someone has just added a new play to the playbook. So, stop with all the "The US thinks it's the shit and the Chinese are victims of spying" crap.
It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful.
End sensationalism now!
Many may have forgotten that less than four months in office, Bush responded to a US Navy spy plane that was forced down in China... five months before the 9-11-01 hubbub would make the blunders seem irrelevant.
n e01/china_plane.html
4 /06/pilot.interview/
At the time, April 1st 2001, the plane and some 22 (?) US personnel were forced down and detained by China. On April 2nd, Bush issued a unilateral saber-rattling, demanding the return of the personnel, the plane, at the threat of a diplomacy breakdown. China found this "arrogant," and it took 11 days of detention before the US could carefully phrase an apology that satisfied their release.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-ju
I remember the news of it all too well... it coincided with the rioting in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine (at the place of my work) which began my daily panic attacks.
The incident five years ago cost the life of one of the two Chinese escort pilots. Their new "solution" is agruably less deadly.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/0
Well, by that logic, sovereignty extends in an ever expanding projection to the end of the universe, sweeping various astronomical objects into and out of the soveriegn control of nations. Sometimes our national boundaries cross the face of Neptune at greater than the speed of light, since at a bit more than 4 billion km, that's the speed those boundaries are "moving".
Setting aside absurd fantasies, lets ask this: how far should national bounaries extend into space, or into the core of the Earth? After all, sovereignty doesn't even extend to the middle of the ocean. Strictly speaking, it only goes out 12 nautical miles. There's an exclusive economic zone that extends out 200 nm, but it's not sovereign territory. You can't declare part of the EEZ off limits to navigation and sink ships travelling through it.
Space, by convention, starts at 100km above sea level, or 53 nautical miles -- four times more distant than the territorial claims over navigable waters. The 100km mark is somewhat imprecise, but roughly it can be used to divide modes of travel between aeronautical and actual space travel. Does this distincction bear on claims on national sovereignty?
I think it does, and I think I can justify this.
The standards of national sovereignty over territorial waters are set on pragmatic grounds. Clearly, a sovereign nation needs to exercise some control over its adjacent seas. On the other hand, allowing it to own out to the middle of the ocean presents such problems for both air and sea navigation that normal commerce between nations becomes impractical.
In a way, we can see a form of what Robert Nozick calls the "Lockean Proviso" at work here. John Locke was interested in this question: if there is private property, where does it come from? He thought that this came from mixing your labor with a resource which is shared by everybody. This was a necessary condition, but is it sufficient? The answre is yes, but with a proviso: you must leave "as much or better" for everyone else. Imaging a village with a common. On the common is a well. Anybody is free to pick up rocks from the common and take them home to build walls; the rocks become their property because they mix their labor with it, and there are still plenty of rocks left. Now suppose somebody takes those rocks, and builds a nice wall and roof over the common well. He has mixed his labor with the well, so can he claim it as his property? The answer is no, because there aren't any other wells in the village.
In other words, you can claim jurisdiction over a thing so long as it does not place an undue burden on the community. While the proviso does not fit the territoriality issue exactly, I believe this underlying principle applies. A nation can claim jurisdiction over territrial waters because it does not hinder the rest of humanity unduly.
The division of the area over nations into aeronautical and astronautical space is highly relevant. In aeronautical navigation, friction and the physics of fluid flow are the dominant factors. In order to fly, you must continually expend energy; your movement is governed by the interaction with the fluid over your control surfaces. In other words it takes effort to fly into somebody's air space. Incursion into air space is not something another nation has to make an effort to avoid while using the air space over their own territories, on the contrary. It's hard to do and easy to avoid in aeronautical navigation. So no other nations are hindered in the use of their own air space by your claiming your air space, satisfying the Lockean proviso.
In astronautical navigation, inertia is the dominant factor. It is possible to make slight adjustments to your flight path, but large ones take impractical amounts of energy and reaction mass. Unless you are stationing a satellite in geosynchronous orbit (which may be an exception under this reasoning), you pretty much have to fly over the entire Earth's surface. To claim terri
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
and is one of the world superpowers.
You don't and you aren't
That is the major difference.
If it was a a different country with less influence, the US would already have shot it down.
This is a little offtopic but it is FTFA:
Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets in the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs.
Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? If this really did happen, they did a really poor job of explaining how it worked. Did the military just tell a bomb to go in whatever direction it couldn't see in or something? Or maybe this is just a bad news source since obviously they're trying to appeal to the younger generation by using trendy phrases like "in the 2003."
Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
I remember back in the Reagan / Star Wars heyday seeing a clip of an excimer laser vaporizing the middle chunk of a Titan II booster. Damnedest thing - the video was a closeup of the shell - looked like Gemini-era, so 10? 12? ft diameter, maybe the same height - and that chunk just vaporized, and the top fell straight down onto the bottom. All that was missing was the little "Yikes" sign the Coyote holds when the same sort of thing happens to him. Excimer lasers are now used with different power and tuning for common eye surgery. Point being, that with the right power and tuning, you could likely fry the chip(s), or in general pick and choose which component you wish to remove.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The Queen owns the lot, regardless of which way she's pointing.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
"According to top officials, however, China not only has the capability, but has exercised it. It is not clear when China first used lasers to attack American satellites."
Wouldn't "disable" or "blind" be more fitting. There is no attacking going on.
Can I bum a sig?
Ownership is all about force. If you can stop someone taking something then you own it. Whether that force is exercised through the police, law, by rolling in tanks or standing there yourself with a pointy stick.
If the chinese can stop the americans flying spy satelites overhead then they own the space. If they can't, they don't own it.
Deleted
Because if they could restrict activitis in orbit, then that would be the end of satellite communications, the space program, etc. Oh, and other countries (and private corporations) do orbit recon sats over the US. Without the US objecting.
Best Slashdot Co
Brain Dead Hot Secretary: Good morning General Tang, your 6:00am appointment with the Shang-Hi Business an Group has been waiting to see you.
General Tang: [angered] Its 8:45, I do not see anyone till after 14:00!
Brain Dead Hot Secretary: [shocked] But General, they said they have good news!
General Tang: This had better be GREAT news!
[general goes storming into office]
General Tang: [shouting] Who the HELL are YOU!
Fat White Guy Dressed in Black: [smiling, calm] We have good news today sir, you have just retired as head of Laser Projects.
General Tang: [shouting] Miss Brain Dead, call security!!
Fat Black Guy Dressed in Black: [smiling, calm, pulling gun with silencer] Your choice is to either retire, now; Or have a Heart Attack.
[guards show up, but with a replacement General]
Fat White Guy Dressed in Black: [smiling, calm] Ah, the New head of Laser Projects.
General Tang: [shouting] General Ming, so we meet again.
General Ming: [calm] I'm sorry to hear about your failing health, I hope the best for you in your new future. The SHBanG people are not pleased with your actions, and hope that the General Staff will understand that causing bad things for business is not good business. It appears that the american dogs only made 3 payments on their satillite WE built for them, with 1.4 Billion Yuan to go. They say our satillite is 'Broke', and it is not their fault that it is broke; In other words, no more Yuan for us. I'm glad you understand.
Try hitting a stop sign three blocks away with a laser pointer.
Now try to hit one 22,000 miles away
Im not going to do the math but move it a smidg and you missed by miles
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
that the administration would like to keep this quiet to keep us civilians from using this kind of tech against the cameras that are used to spy on us. If it works for satellite cams, I bet it will work great on the street corner cams. Mabe even better on the night vision cameras. Oh my! What's the border patrol to do now? Anyway, I think anything that can level the playing field a bit is a good thing. Let's see if Walmart puts them on the shelves.
What?
Truman should have listened to MacArthur and let him (UN) send those red commies back to the stone-age !! Okay, more stone-age than now.
's ok, we gotta thank the Chinese for gunpowder and paper money, printing, rockets, a few other things over the last few millennia so I guess it all comes around turns around...
Honeypots can be a very effective way of attracting the attention of foreign intelligence and military procurement personnel, facilitating the study of foreign governmental information flows and research capabilities, and/or for disinformation purposes. I foresee an expanding role for high-technology honeypots operating under the guise of advertizing various types of weapon and counter-weapon optics and satellite R&D for sale at military trade shows and elsewhere, possibly associated with or including elements of genuine technology for greater overall plausibility.
...be the counter to a laser beam blinding a satelites? Just put it in front of the lens and bounce the beam away before it disrupts the view.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
One analyst they interviewed said that if you keep looking over your neighbor's fence, sooner or later you're going to get poked in the eye. Other analysts in the article seemed quite nonplussed about China's response. The is a general understanding that if one country is spying on another that the victim of the spying has the right to protect themselves through the use of counter-measures.
When will Walmart start selling these?
It sounds like a great alternative to all those wimpy dingy laser pointers.
So, I am suggesting that our next spy sat to go over China be nothing but a mirror. See what they think of that laser then.
Everybody grab your laserpointers and start blinding chinese tourists!
Thus far, China's countermeasures do not permanently damage the satelites but only prevent them from taking pictures while over China. You'd probably have a point if China were trying to shoot US satelites out of the sky, but they're not. They're just adding enough visual noise to make pictures taken over their airspace worthless.
But here in the real world other countries do have spy satellites and we don't bomb them. And whoever said they 'can't' do this anyways?
The blurb says that they did blind the US satellite, whereas the article says they merely attempted to and that "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful." Good old hype.
...that you'll just be hungry again in an hour.
Thank you, I'll be here all night.
I visited the Udvar-Hazy Center when I stopped by northern VA to visit an aunt of mine while I was out in DC. The SR71 was back on display. They've been grounded for quite some time.
Nukes for all the unstable countries, why the fuck not.. Why bother worring about global warming well just blow the place up.
I was going to mention this but you beat me to it. The russians are still spying on the US, but we don't blind **their** satellites. (One I know of firsthand checks, among other things, the US Space and Rocket Center every day to make sure the big Saturn V / Saturn I and other decent sized missiles dont just go missing)
Does this establish some kind of precedent (obviously not a legal one) permitting corporations to block satellites?
After all, no one owns outerspace. If I setup a laser blinding rig, can I go willy-nilly, blinding satellites in my LoS?
Sounds like fun. I'd like to strike a blow against spying in MY territory.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Machiavelli opined in /The Prince/ that an unarmed prophet was no prophet at all. And in fact, Christianity (which Machiavelli implicitly condemened with his observation) is rather exceptional in the marketplace of religions in this aspect. Most of the world's major religions have major figures that were also great warriors. And even within Christianity, Jesus Christ himself is quoted in the Gospels that a king going to war estimates the size and power of enemy armies and sues for peace if his resources are insufficient for the task at hand. I don't see any prima facie disconnect between nuclear weapons programs when your enemies have such and having faith.
Disabling and blinding are forms of attack. A quick martial arts hint, always attack your opponent's weaknesses, in terms of the human body that means the eyes, throat and groin. The Chinese are now attacking two of the three, they're attacking the eyes through the satellites and also the US economy through the exchange rate.
5
It's a fascinating war to watch, especially considering that the US doesn't even realise it's at war and has been for decades.
Read Sun Tzu (Something the US government would do well to read)
http://www.gutenberg.org.nyud.net:8090/etext/1740
Attack by Stratagem...
"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."
Deleted
Not only are the problems not insurmountable, they've already been surmounted. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/spy_pr.ht ml
Well, at least from visible flares reflecting off the satellites. It's been some time since I read this, and I don't recall the article talking about if they could be detected by radar (not like the amateur would be able to test that anyway, though china could). A quick "Find in This Page" doesn't show much talk about radar either.
beams attached to it!! ;)
-Xen
If they get rid of the spy satellites, how will we get good Google Earth images?
Wasn't this is plot of Epoch 2?
I guess there is a very simple solution to this laser problem: Just mount a mirror in front of the satellite and send the laser right back where it came from. That would be fun for the people on the ground actually sending out the laser :-)
Shining light in an attempt to drive machine sensors into saturation == torpedo in a shipping channel where ships are manned and destruction of property will occur?
Right.
So back when there was that article which mentioned using infrared light to zap cameras in movie theaters as an anti-piracy measure - those infrared beams are also similar to shooting torpedos, yes?
:(){
I say this was just a test of their accuracy, and that their REAL goal is to carve the name CHAIRFACE on the surface of the moon.
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/slbd. jpg
(From: http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/asat/mirac l.htm)
Interesting how many people complain about the US while millions upon millions risk life and limb to simply get a chance to come to the US. If 5.5 billion people thought the US was naughty, they wouldn't be tripping over themselves to gain entry.
"And if more than fifty percent of the country turns their key at the same time, BOOM!"
I predict it goes BOOM at 7:00am on the first Monday after the system goes live.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is total bullshit. Someone has contacted the 1970's "commies are coming" paranoia virus which has long been considered eradicated.
Anybody remember General Keegan, the paranoid US top brass, who was convinced that USSR is planning to shoot down american spacecraft with nuclear powered death-ray cannons? He saw a spherical tank on spysat photos of Shari-Shagan, the USSR testing range and harangued around the entire Washington D.C. to warn this is made to contain the power of a small nuclear explosion, which will be used to drive death-ray cannons that kill US spacemen. In fact it was a chemical agent container used to generate vast smokescreens for laser telecommunications jamming experiments.
As the old Pentagon saying has:
Keegan was right, far righter than you think!
...have spy satellites. That's why operations at some U.S. military installations are restricted to night, or, to times when their satellites are not overhead.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
EOM
God spoke to me.
We have been hitting mirrors left on the moon by apollo astronauts since 1969.1 3-9999-lz1c13laser.html
l oLaser.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/200607
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/Apol
Thats 239,000 miles hitting an 18 inch square target.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Contrary to your DIALOGUE and ARGUEMENT (though you may CRITICISE), the only HONOURABLE thing to do is admit that the U.S.A. is not the CENTRE of the world. ;)
I guess there is a very simple solution to this laser problem: Just mount a mirror in front of the satellite and send the laser right back where it came from.
Nah; there's no serious power behind the laser, especially after it passes through the atmosphere a second time. It sounds like the Chinese are trying for temporary disabling (too much light to take pictures), rather than something more permanent (too much energy fries the electronics).
Alternatively, start sending up satellites with supplementary code, so that "high intensity laser beam" means "deorbit to impact with maximum velocity at this laser's point of origin." Publicly and prominently announce it as a means of insuring the "safe and controlled" deorbit of satellites at the end of useful life. At that point, the Chinese use of their overpowered laser pointers becomes a self-correcting problem. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Reality: China flashing our spy sats with lasers.
Your post: General Keegan and his delusions from, like, a thousand years ago
Relationship: ???
If the lens is not open then they cannot hit the camera. Only open the lense to take a picture. The shutter need not even be mechanical it can be electrical. Not even the Chinese can muster enough power to keep a laser active and on a target for as long as the target is in their 'air space'. "Nothing to see here".
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Hey dufus, 67.2% of English speakers worldwide say that you're wrong.
t s1997.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:English_dialec
Percentage of native English speakers worldwide by country:
U.S. - 67.2%
U.K. - 16.9%
CAN - 5.8%
AUS - 4.5%
Other - 5.5%
(Ironically, the source of the data is from a British Council report.)
So even if the U.S. is the only country that uses "color," it's still by far the most common spelling. More generally, American English is, by any realistic measure, the principle dialect of the English language in use today; bitching and moaning about it won't make it any less true.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Big problem with your statment is that everyone knows that the United States never went did land men on the moon. It was all a big cold war show.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Because Gary Francis Power's plane got shot down.
Short version of a long story is that the US and Russia agreed that knowing that the other country wasn't about to launch a nuclear attack was good information for both sides to have. The Open Skies treaty was the result.
China, however, isn't a signatory. But she's trying to orbit humans and satellites so if she wants those assets to overfly the US, she'll have to agree to leave US space assets alone or risk losing her spacecraft.
The blurb says that they did blind the US satellite, whereas the article says they merely attempted to and that "It remains unclear how many times the ground-based laser was tested against U.S. spacecraft or whether it was successful." Good old hype.
A lot of modern western military tactical thinking revolves around spy satellites, communication satellites, navigation satellites, UAVs (most of them remote controlled or semi autonomous at best) as well as battlefield information exchange and coordination networks (basically tanks, planes and ships connected by a kind of WIFI-on-steroids). Since the Americans gutted their network of human intelligence assets in favor of satellites and ELINT in general over the last few decades they must be pretty worried by this even if this Chinese effort only targets one segment of their information gathering and command apparatus. Keep in mind that US satellites have previously been more or less unassailable to anything except perhaps hacker attacks on their command and control links. People keep citing conflicts like the Iraq war as an example of how a modern war is fought but in reality the US forces (and NATO forces in general for that matter) have never gone up against an equally strong, technologically advanced, worthy enemy. The most resourceful and tech savvy enemy they have come across so far in a real honest to goodness shooting war were the Serbs who performed an improvised re-organization of their mostly obsolescent air defenses and communications system thus creating a a new distributed system. The various system elements were highly mobile, often interconnected over the telephone infrastructure which precluded jamming and also made locating the system elements by their radio traffic harder and the Serbs also used a massive amount of decoys. All of this combined to cause US and Nato forces major problems when it came to locating and taking out military assets or suppressing the Serb air defenses. One is tempted to theorize that if western forces ever come up against an enemy that fields top of the line air, naval and ground assets and into the bargain engages in electronic warfare in a big way i.e. jams battlefield networks, UAV remote control links, GPS, Communications, Radar etc in a big way in addition to blinding their spy satellites and even shooting them down the US/NATO military will be in trouble.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
As does alot of the world not in the united states but still grounded under it's definition of right and wrong is why can't a foreign self governing nation control its own airspace and space space. If I built a spy satellite and orbitted it over the united states I would be a terrorist and bombed in seconds. Why the difference for china?
Actually, no. China has any number of satellites in LEO or MEO, which orbit over the United States. They don't (for obvious reasons) disclose which are their spy satellites, but I assume that they have them.
It's common knowledge that the Soviets had spy satellites which orbited over the U.S., just as they knew we had ones that orbited over them. Pretty much any country with launch capability probably has spy satellites of some sort or another.
Nobody shoots down each other's spy satellites, because it would be an act of war; the U.S. would have to retaliate and pretty soon we'd just have a whole lot of orbiting debris in orbit, and everyone would be blind. For the sake of stability, it's better to just let things go -- everyone knows that the other guys have satellites, and with some careful observation can figure out when they pass overhead. Sometimes it's even useful to let the other side have that capability (e.g., after various arms-reduction treaties, the U.S. would leave the cut-up bombers in the middle of the desert, so that the Russian satellites could see them and verify that they were destroyed).
The Chinese are playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship here; if they start shining lights at U.S. satellites, spy sats or otherwise, than the U.S. is probably going to start shining stuff right back. It would be easily to escalate by accident.
My feeling is that the Chinese are really only doing this to tweak the U.S.; they're just saying "hey, we see you!" and "we could disable you if we wanted to!" It would be insanity for them to start doing it on a regular basis.
Messing around with other people's satellites is right up there with messing around with other nations' submarine cables. You just don't do it; everyone basically knows that you could, but it would be unproductive. The end result is that everyone's cables would get cut, and nothing would be gained.
The theory of MAD applies to a lot more than just nuclear war.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As you can see, there is more then one criterion. We are dealing with relative cost here, seeing wider picture then the cost of equipment itself. You can't seek the car keys "over here" (in streetlamp's circle of light) if they were lost "over there" (in dark). Keeping obsolete sats above is as costly as if they crashed and burned... in that case, they'd better be cheap even if it means they are short-lived, as designing them for long life is wasteful.
Now, as we said all that... why the little buggers need to get to orbit (costly!) at all? Just hurl them high enaugh, so that they fly over the area thru the thin air and recover them when they hit the next ocean surface, or don't... let 'em crash instead, just after they beam you everything they'we got.
How come none is deploying SAM's or AAM's for high altitude reconnasance - it's such a simple idea, even simpler and more robust then UAV?
I'm sure that if China was flying spy satellites over the US, it would be no problem.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Israel's existence is an act of agression by primarily european people to invade and occupy land that wasn't their's. Their beginnings clearly show many acts of genocidal intent and action and clearly defined "terrorism" by any standard used today, or back then in mid 20th century. They currently have a government primarily composed of mafia gang type warlords and have instituted many racial and ethnic and religious type laws that rival and surpass south africa at the height of the apartheid era. That people unbrokenly indigenous to the area going as far back as we have recorded history don't like them or their policies or fight back is understandable. The "zionist" movement was just that, a movement to conquer those lands and take them over. They came as conquerors and remain as occupiers. Most jewish israelis are at best only one or two generations away from being european, if not directly european born and raised themselves, they are not primarily a native people defending their own turf, except by the standards of "might makes right". That their were jewish people there for centuries is fact, albeit rather low numbers, but that the israeli population today is primarily european invaders or direct progeny of invaders from the recent historical past is also a fact.
In fact, what any of these completely unrelated points has to do with each other is not at all clear to me.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
'colonial times' being pronounced "when North America was Britain's bitch" if you like
And how do we define our times, where Britain is America's Bitch? The post-colonial times?
China has the FSW-1 spy satellite. Pacifist Japan launched their third "intelligence gathering" satellite a few weeks ago.
The old Soviet Union maintained heavy orbital surveillance of the US.
This was and is a Good Thing. US scaremongers shouting "missile gap!" were overruled by satellite intelligence. Soviet paranoia was limited to what was actually going on. Arms control treaties specifically and explicitly required both sides to submit to "national technical means" of verification.
>someone else has the right to disable it with proportionate force
As close as the Cold War came to ultimate horror, and as much as spy satellites stabilized it, that's an idea you do not want people to adopt.
>self-appointed global hegemon
Spy satellites are not a reason to believe that, unless the US starts shooting down other nations's satellites while maintaining their own.
The article mentions the reluctance of the U.S. administration to talk about this "asymmetric" effort by the Chinese military.
Maybe because it isn't asymmetric and we are doing the same thing. But if we aren't isn't this an act of war? It's no different than them shooting at one of our ships in international waters.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Unpronounced letters in some cases were part of that [lost] baggage. So was a state religion.
It would seem that the "state religion" baggage has been found again. A nation chock full of folks who actually want to see Armageddon occur, in their lifetimes, is a nation which needs to work harder at losing that baggage.
>They forget to mention that we would probably do the same (if not worse) to deter spy satellites over our own country.
The first Soviet spy satellite (Zenit) went up in freaking _1962_. Of course it was for photographing the US.
The US signed treaties (SALT, START) binding it not to interfere with spy satellites. Those treaties were with the USSR, but do you have *any* evidence the US has interfered with the FSW-1?
The Cold War was too recent to be completely forgotten like this.
(The military's side of the GPS signal IS encrypted, by the way. Jamming means raising the noise floor so the signal can't be heard).
Guidance is accomplished via the tight coupling of an accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) with a 3-axis Inertial Navigation System (INS).
30 meter CEP on INS alone, 13 meters with GPS. Enough to make a militarily significant difference.
China lends us a large portion of the 3 billion a day (only 2 billion a day last year) we borrow from other countries to keep this 'healthy' economy of ours chugging along. They are trading us cheap Walmart crap for our very financial stability, and have been for a long time. Its fucking brilliant...they manufacture crap for us to buy with their borrowed money, which seems like a great deal for us....until you understand that if they STOP lending us money, it would start a chain reaction that would get everybody else to stop lending us money, as the world would be flooded with dollars. The Chinese have played this perfectly. They never expect to get paid for the crap they sent, but it was cheaper to build that crap than weapons. End result? They can cock-punch Uncle Sam at any instant without breaking any international law or firing a shot, and he may or may not be able to get back up. China could take over the government of Tiawan and we couldn't say boo about it. Oh wait...
Are fair game eh'. Just like spys.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Maybe Reagan should have kept SDI after all. It's not as if we can get out of a treaty and make our own regarding space weaponry.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Ummm. Israel is not a theocracy. Israel has parliamentary democracy, a free press, an independent judicial system, freedom of religion, equal rights for women, etc.
Iran is a mullahcracy, has a supreme leader for life, political canadates must be "selected", state controlled press, Iran does not have religious freedom, etc. Iran even has a bloody moral police with incredible powers to arrest and detain.
You obviously don't work in the defence industry. Append lots of 0's.
For optical satellites, it should be possible to use filters to prevent the light from the (frickin') laser from ever hitting the light detectors that digitize images on the satellites.
Obviously, if there are no filters on the existing satellites, they will have to launch some new ones. I envision a "colour wheel" of filters that are optimized for known laser frequencies, plus maybe another wheel of filters with broader notches to deal with the unexpected.
It's just another example of "if we do it good, someone else bad." :[
The lack of knowledge being displayed here is remarkable.
You are all informed by Fox News of how dangerous the "regime" in Iran is. What do you think that they see on their news programs? The same sorts of human rights violations and dictatorial acts by the 'religious zealot' leaders of the US. They have signed the non-proliferation treaty - the world should back off.
Their government is stable and they have as much right to run their country as the US does. If the people rise up and topple their government - fine - but that could just as easily have happened in the US after the 2000 elections. Stop judging Iran based on the news you see and think about that for a while. Oh - one other note - the Iranians are 'aryans' or 'persians', not arabs.
As for NK - they are an unstable regime who'd let huge amounts of their people starve to build weapons and maintain the army....when little dear leader dies, it's coming apart there for sure.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
I'm going to shine this laser into space, and if any of your satellites happen to occupy that space, it's your own fault!
~Ben
Their laser missed the satellite by a long shot, as shown on the picture below :
Laser missed the Satellite
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
The old lady to the young man renting a room in her building: "You dont have to cover the keyhole to the bathroom all the time, Im not looking."
I'm sure the Chinese government realizes that spy satellites that you know about are a stablizing influence. Things, like nukes, are destablizing. Bring on the satellites. (as per Arthur C. Clarke)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Wouldn't you see a lazer beam being shot into space at asatelite. Especially one stron enough to blind or damage one in space? i would think that other U.S. satelites would see it wouldnt they ?
It's be more like you and your gang all live in one neighborhood. Me and my gang live in a different neighborhood a couple miles away. We're kinda friendly, we conduct business together, but we've also taken some pot-shots at each other from time to time. We both own telescopes and point them at each others neighborhood to see if the other has bought any new machine guns, knives, or to monitor how powerfull the others gang is. You get tired of my telescope and decide to shoot a laser at it so I can't see (for the sake of the analogy, it doesn't blind anyone). I don't say much because it's not really a battle I want to fight (I've got trouble with other gangs, and don't really need trouble from one I'm kinda friendly with). I also don't fire a laser at your telescope, though I do own one and know it works.
Your ideas of extending personal privacy to soverign nations just doesn't scale. Nations aren't the same as individuals, so stop trying to apply the same principles to each.
AccountKiller
I wonder if they have a small, portable version that can be directed at radar cameras, and other 'public' cameras, to blind them to one's presences?
Laser pointer? $10 at Fry's.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
I learned by playing Falcon 4.0 that jamming systems actually expose the jammer to attack. The bomb or rocket can be put into passive radar instead of active mode, whereby it just detects radar/GPS instead of emitting and detecting it. It simply locks on to the strongest source of radiation in the area. In this case, the GPS jammer is the strongest source of GPS signal, so the bomb just goes right for it.
We spy on everyone else, and as many countries as possibly can (including, probably, our allies). Why does anyone allow such spying if they have the power to stop it - I would have thought that we could have stopped the Soviet satellites from doing so, for example. Part of the merit to spying is that it makes the world more predictable - in a world with lots of capable powers, if the cards on the table, it makes things more regular and allows problems to be solved before they become costly, either in lives or money.
Blinding US satellites is a concern not only because the Chinese have something they don't want others to see (everyone has those) but because they believe they don't have to play nice, either because they have things other people want and so don't have to be nice (which will probably end badly when someone gets fed up with it) or because they believe that they have the capacity to change the rules to their liking, which unusually ends up in war with the people who benefit from the rules as they are. Neither seems like a good thing.
...but if the satellite was blinded, there would be no images to see.;-)
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
If China is willing to test their war lasers on our equipment, I think we should have the right to test biological agents designed to attack and disable their rice supply.
I heard CNN's views around this issue "US SPY SATELITES BLINDED". They tried to link this to trade with CHINA. Why would any nation be OK with spying. Why even talk about countries; would you be comfortable, if your neighbour snooped on you? Trade in no means gives USA free reign into spying on that country.
But compared to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Taoism, various ancestral Asiatic religions and the rest of the religions of the world, this is a minority stance.
/ought/ to use their heads.
Also, nowhere in my previous post did I say that Jesus condoned warfare. My point was that faith, according to the Gospel, says nothing about whether you should use reason. The whole point of Jesus' parable was that people
Currently being played at the NRO's offices: "She blinded me with science!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Ooh! Like that god-awful spelling of "FOETUS"! Wacked.
I personally like the spelling "colour", it's kinda poetic.
The open use of space is set at part of an international space treaty (1967 treaty). It allows for shared use short of space based weapons and requires international cooperation on orbits, debris control, etc.
Article II
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
First, as stated in the article, pretty much no one in the Department of Defense is surprised by the Chinese attempt to counter our satellites. It was bound to happen. The Russians have done it, too. Heck, the Russians shot down one of our U2's (a plane is a little more in your face, though). In fact, the Iraqis used a Russian-built system during the ground war in 2003 that was designed try to jam our GPS satellites (ironically, it was destroyed by GPS guided bombs). The DoD is not making the fuss out of this you pretend they are.
Second, no sane person debates China's or any other self-governing nation's right to control their own airspace (see above regarding the U2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers). Remember that P3 Orion that a Chinese MiG crashed into a couple years back and made an emergency landing on Chinese soil? Part of the fuss about that, and I think the reason they actually returned the plane to us without first reverse engineering every single black box inside it, is because the plane had been so careful to stay outside of Chinese airspace until it was seriously damaged in the collision.
Third, there are no claims on space. China has no "space space." The United States has no "space space." According to UN treaties and accords as well as some de facto understandings, basically once you get above that 100 km mark you are free from governance by the laws of any particular country you happen to be over.
Fourth, the United States is not the only nation that operates spy satellites. Off the top of my head, I can think of quite a few others, and I assume most if not all of those orbit over the United States (ie, they are not geosynchronous). For example, I recall seeing news blurbs about the launch of military satellites by the US, Russia, China, Japan, Italy, India, France, the UK, and Israel.
Your post is completely off base and quite misleading.
Savage-Rabbit said:
>One is tempted to theorize that if western forces ever come up against an enemy
>that fields top of the line air, naval and ground assets and into the bargain engages
>in electronic warfare in a big way i.e. jams battlefield networks, UAV remote control
>links, GPS, Communications, Radar etc in a big way in addition to blinding their
>spy satellites and even shooting them down the US/NATO military will be in trouble.
Well, one can look back at history to see how the US military has done when backed up against the proverbial wall and out-gunned:
The Battle of Midway and the performance of Torpedo Squadrons 6 and 8
The Battle off Samar (a small part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Similarlly like you would "see" the bullet about to hit you in the head or the 100MW laser gouging your eyeballs.
"Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs." From TFA
There is a section of china that comes up as a blue quirk on Google earth...related? http://www.googleearthhacks.com/forums/showthread. php?t=7377
If you can read this, it's already too late.
Does anyone here remember Sputnik ? President Eisenhower laughed all the way to the bank when the Russians put Sputnik up. He wanted an international agreement on the neutrality of space so the US could put surveillance satellites into space, but did not want to signal his intention. Then Russia launched Sputnik and claimed that space was neutral.
Any country can put a satellite into orbit if they have the knowhow. Maybe the Chinese experiment was an accident - testing a ground based communications system that hit the wrong bird.
Did the laser permanently damage the satellite, or did it simply block its ability to use its camera while it was targetted.
People have a right to privacy. The fact you can see into someones bedroom from your multi-story apartment does not make it immoral or wrong for them to close their blinds.
The US does not own the world. The US does not own space. Get over it.
So yes, China going and doing this is an openly aggressive act. It's not as aggressive as cutting a cable would be, or landing soldiers in Hawaii, but don't think it's somehow innocent.
Get a grip. The US most certainly takes countersurveillance measures against other's satellites. You just don't hear about it. Spying is a dirty game. It goes both ways and every nation knows that. So do the people involved.
All you can say, as a normal citizen (you aren't in SIGINT are you?), is that you hope it doesn't get out of control and lead to bigger things.
This is routine. It always has been...
n/t
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The real question is how long would it take the US to harden deploy laser resistant satelites. The US has considered developing ground based atomic powered laser weapons. This program needs to be accelerated.
Above a certain altitude, space is not considered part of national territory. Its something like international waters.
Ahhhh.... but Iran and North Korea would NEVER use their nukes. Nosireeebob... either nation would be turned into glass bottom ash trays before the next morning's headlines and they know that. HOWEVER, they'll GIVE their nukes (or radioactive material) to some lunatic-fringe warrior group bent on destruction of anything they don't agree with and THEY will set it off. Whoever supplied the weapons would have plausable deniability (that "who me?" shit) which will only delay their being turned into ashtrays for a few days.
Most of the stuff on
Just string a counter-weight from the satellite out on a tether, give the tethered system some spin, and constantly vary the length of the tether to vary the rate of revolution. Try targeting THAT China!
It's not "stealing." It's not "theft." It's not even "piracy." It's free sharing of information that the US just happened to generate. It's no different from when somebody borrows your DVDs and makes a copy.
It only makes sense that the Chinese would do the same thing with military secrets as they do with our popular culture.
=)
± 29 dB
Maybe they are tired of making all are shit for us.
Doing a bloody good attempt at wiping out Cuba and Iraq though. One economically, the other militarily.
:v)
Vik
*possibly Intel laser on a silicon wafer!*
This is my sig.