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

[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.