The United States Space Arsenal

ntmokey writes "When China tested a missile on its own satellite in January, the nation's aggressive statement immediately raised eyebrows among the world's other space-faring nations. Popular Mechanics looks at the implications of a conflict in space — including debris that could render space unusable for decades — and examines the United States' own space arsenal."

Comments

I think you mean

[Inoshiro]

The United States' Space Arsenal.

It really makes no sense for one state to be united.

Re:How can we clean it up?

[wizardforce]

space tethers take care of larger space junk see here: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News .asp?NewsNum=264

but could they send up a satellite to look for some debris and zap it with a laser to vaporize it?

nice idea but think about how precise you would need to be to take out chunks the size of a pebble spaced out [they are not clumps anymore they drift] from anywhere with any efficiency without blinding higher satellites.

What happens if we set of a nuke in the upper atmosphere?

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_altitude_nuclear _explosion

Re:Star Wars

[techno-vampire]

I happen to know several people who were on the citizen's committee that came up with the idea. The whole point was for it to look like something we just might be able to pull off so that the Soviet Union would have no choice but to try to copy it and bankrupt themselves in the process. You see, we could afford to build all that stuff, provided we could get it to work, but they couldn't. When they tried, it brought their creaky economy crashing down, and their government soon followed. Believe or not, I don't care, but the people I know who were involved in the planning all tell the same story.

Re:sad but inevitable

[jollyreaper]

There are no land formations to hide behind, and no air resistance to slow down projectiles, which is why satellites can be taken down without bothering to mount explosive warheads on the missiles (it's my understanding that is why they are called "kinetic kill vehicles"). Nope. The reason why missiles have explosives on them is because a direct hit is very difficult to achieve. What's more likely to hit a bird flying by, a solid slug or a pellet spray from a shotgun? With proximity-fused weapons (cannon shells, missiles) the idea is that the weapon is not likely to hit the target but will pass very close. The proximity system uses radio waves to detect the object and will explode the weapon the moment the range increases. To show the likelihood of a direct hit, the Air Force would conduct live fire exercises with real missiles against real drone targets like remotely controlled F-4's. The training missiles had the warheads removed. Most missiles would pass within proper kill proximity of the drone and very few would actually strike it, causing damage.

Newer missile designs are becoming accurate enough that the warhead can be dispensed with, the impact of the weapon alone will be sufficient. The Brits have found their smart bombs so accurate, they are replacing the actual bomb with a concrete casting, leaving the guidance system and fins the same. This kind of weapon can be used to plink tanks in civilian areas. 2 tons of concrete dropped on a tank from 10,000 feet means no more tank, an explosion would be overkill at that point. It also means that you can hit a tank sitting outside a school and not even break the windows. That's a win for any civilians unlucky enough to be nearby.

As for space weapons, the insane velocities involved with orbital speeds is what also makes an explosive redundant. A fleck of urine almost took out the cockpit window on a previous shuttle flight. Nothing is likely to survive the impact of a kinetic kill vehicle, assuming the defense contractors can get the thing to hit without having to rig the demo.

Re:Star Wars

[Rei]

Nice way to not address the poster's points, and instead resort to rhetoric.

The Soviet Union collapsed because of a coup, a radically reformist government, and breakaway republics. The Soviet Union's economic might declined radically from the sixties to the eighties. The Soviets themselves recognized this and wrote about this. It's one of the main issues that brought Gorbachev to power. There was already wide discontent because their industrial production couldn't provide their people the sort of standard of life that the west's did, because of widespread corruption, repression, and so forth. Soviet military spending during Reagan didn't even match their inflation rate. After the 1982 Afghanistan disaster, Andropov made it an economic strategy to disengage from foreign conflict. The big military expenditure boosts in the late Soviet Union's history were the waste that was Afghanistan and their two-way Cold War with China as well as America (largely because the two couldn't agree on what was the "right" form of Communism).

Here's an article from 1991, published in International Affairs, analyzing the (already circulating) claim that the US military spending increase caused an increase in Soviet military spending, bringing about the country's downfall. The full article isn't online but you can read the abstract.

Rhetorical Hairsplitting

[DynaSoar]

> so if china does it it's shocking, i wonder what it'd be called if you yanks did it

Successful. If by "you yanks" you mean the US Air Force. They launched the Vought ASM-135A ASAT against a "retired communications satellite" from an F-15 in 1985 and killed it. Note this was an air launched weapon (the "could this be next?" question on the article), not rocket launched as was the Chinese weapon.

If by "you yanks" you mean the US scientists who were at the time using the Solwind research satellite that the USAF actually shot down, I suppose it'd be called "what the fuck happened to our satellite?", until they figured out what happened. At that point it probably became "what the fuck did you do that to our satellite for?"

Since the official story is still that they shot down a retired communications satellite, rather than acknowledging the actual kill (the answer to the above questions being essentially "What satellite? Shut the fuck up."), we've no way to know if they missed their target and the ASAT locked onto Solwind by mistake, or if they just took out a target of opportunity that wouldn't cost them anything. Both are disturbing in their own way.

There's also no word on how much debris was created by Solwind's destruction. The US Space Surveillance Network knows they answer, but they're not saying. They are, after all, operated primarily by the USAF.

Although the ASM-135A ASAT project was cancelled soon after the Solwind kill, there's no reason to expect the USAF stopped ASAT development. The ASM-135A was built from an AGM-69 SRAM and Vought Scout B fourth stage (a Thiokol Altair III motor). These had both been operational for more than a decade when they put the ASAT together. They could have used much newer and more powerful, already operational hardware the very next day, taking it off the active armament shelf, bypassing the messy PR problem of using a defense contractor directly and so having to admit they launched something. The Vought project proved the feasibility based on older hardware. The US military doesn't readily let go of a proven idea they deem necessary unless it has something better to replace it.

Re:Star Wars

[olman]

The Soviet Union collapsed because of a coup, a radically reformist government, and breakaway republics. The Soviet Union's economic might declined radically from the sixties to the eighties. The Soviets themselves recognized this and wrote about this. It's one of the main issues that brought Gorbachev to power. There was already wide discontent because their industrial production couldn't provide their people the sort of standard of life that the west's did, because of widespread corruption, repression, and so forth. Soviet military spending during Reagan didn't even match their inflation rate.

That's doubleplus good doublespeak you have there, comrade.

First off, soviet economy was about to "collapse" late sixties already but they were bailed out by the oil crisis. Yeah. They ran the circus for additional 20 years with the oil income when the crude prices quadrupled due to the middle east oil czars getting their act together. Economic collapse is not quite that straightforward in the planned economy either as the value of goods was strictly controlled by the goverment. In any case sovs economy was in better shape late 70s than late 60s, cf age of stagnation in Brezhnev era. Interestingly enough to soviet citizens this may be the "golden era" since the system "worked" at that time.

As for military spend. GROWTH may not have exceeded their inflation rate, but so what? First off, the real inflation value was astronomical due to the central banks printing money with prices of goods fixed by the goverment. Yeah, you may have got cheap shoes from the shops but the tricky bit was finding the shop that actually had any shoes. Secondly, USSR military spending of their GDP was huge. See for reference the soviet tank production figures and other conventional munitions.. They could have fairly easily overrun NATO in 70s and 80s (Please, no red storm rising fantasies here. Yes, Leo 2A4 is much better tank than T-72, but if you have 10x the numbers in strategic reserve in one side, you can concentrate them on 1:100 numbers locally) if not for the pesky first strike and the whole mutually assured destruction-deal. So mainly soviets were exceeding military production combined NATO countries with economy that was basically crap. Doesn't leave much room for decent consumer goods production there. Plus, well, since prices were goverment sanctioned and there was waiting list of years for the crappy car, what for improve the product?!

Re:sad but inevitable

[Weedlekin]

"Look at tank armor some time. You get a long ways with thickness and deflection"

This used to the case with thickness, but deflection has never been used. The reason sloped tank armour replaced flat planes was because it prevents a thicker cross section to an incoming projectile, and not (as many seem to believe) because it has any deflection value against high speed projectiles. Modern tank armour on the other hand is a series of almost flat planes, much like that of WWII tank armour, although for very different reasons.

Modern tanks basically face three types of threats (from other tanks and infantry -- the likes of hellfire missiles are beyond the scope of this topic): high-energy anti-tank (HEAT), high-explosive squash head (HESH), and APDS (armour-piercing discarding sabot, i.e. long-rod kinetic energy penetrators). Each works differently, so armour incorporates several different mechanisms, each of which is specifically designed to counter one of these.

1) HEAT rounds use plasma jets to burn their way through armour (the classic RPG uses this system). There are four possible counters:
a) Spacing. Armour has multiple air spaces in the hope that the jet will consume some layers, leaving the rest intact. It isn't very effective against modern HEAT rounds, but is still much better than a solid layer of equal thickness.

b) Stand-off plates / cages. These have been used for years to protect tank wheels from older, less powerful infantry HEAT weapons, and appeared on the bodies of the less heavily armoured German tanks during WWII. Some infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) in the current Iraq conflict carry "cage" versions, proving that it's still effective against weapons that don't carry tandem-charge warheads.

c) Explosive-reactive armour (ERA). Tanks are covered with small explosive-filled boxes with a metal face-plate. The plasma jet detonates the explosive, and the face plat is thrown laterally in its path to consume it. Not effective against tandem-charge warheads.

d) Ceramic pyramids that remain solid at extremely high temperatures are set inside the armour to dissipate the jet. This is the mechanism used by "Chobham" armour (originally a British design, hence the name); it is effective even against tandem charges, but is extremely costly to manufacture, and also very heavy.

2) HESH. This round flattens against the surface of the tank, and then detonates into the armour, sending a shock wave through it that causes the inner surface of the vehicle to "spall" (i.e. become shrapnel that ricochets around inside it, turning the crew into human sushi). It's fairly easily defeated by a combination of spaced armour and spall liners, which are layers of adhesive plastics on the inside surface of the armour. For this reason, it's primarily used against infantry fighting vehicles nowadays, whose thinner armour has little room for effective air spacing, and therefore spalls very well indeed.

3) APDS / APFSDS. A sabot is used to carry a long, thin, extremely heavy penetrator rod with a point that converts its considerable kinetic energy into very high pressures and temperatures where both the rod and armour become fluids (a process that's analogous to squirting a jet of water into a bucket of oil). The length of the rod must be more or less that same as the armour it's intended to penetrate because the solid rear moves "through" the liquid front (which loses kinetic energy rapidly), becoming liquid itself in the process. A rod that's too short will therefore simply "bore" a hole in the armour, leaving a "hot spot" on the inside that would be likely to burn anyone who touches it rather badly, but has no other effect. Note that DU penetrators are also pyrophoric, i.e. they burn inside the armour in addition to becoming liquid (sintered tungsten doesn't do this, and is also more prone to shatter than DU, although it's far less toxic to both tank crews and the post-battle environment). It can be countered in two ways, both of which are present in the best modern composite ar