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

Star Wars

[nlitement]

Whatever happened to the Strategic Defense Initiative?

Re:Star Wars

[timeOday]

It worked. It broke the economy of the Soviet Union.

What a convenient post-hoc rationalization for a monumental waste of money that is. I guess that may have accelerated the fall of the Soviet Union by a month or two, at a cost of billions, but I'll bet the ROI from giving Stingers to the Afghanis was at least a million times better. (Just imagine how things would be in Iraq now if the insurgents had more than RPGs and light machine guns to bring down our helicopters and airplanes).

Re:Star Wars

[Enlightenment]

Of course, it helped that the enemy that we faced was morally bankrupt and couldn't have possibly won the cold war. It frightens me that people actually associate "morally bankrupt" with "couldn't have possibly won." The two don't necessarily go together.

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.

Re:Star Wars

[tftp]

When they tried, it brought their creaky economy crashing down

Your theory is fine, and your friends are entitled to their own views; however USSR never "tried" to make its own Star Wars hardware. USSR's ABM efforts were identical to USA's work and resulted in the ABM-limiting treaty that stood for decades, until Bush tore it up. The reason is that USSR's scientists did some calculations on a napkin and concluded, correctly, that it's impossible to build such a system at this time that would actually work (1000's US's missiles flying in and 100% intercept.) It's still impossible, decades later. Given the number of missiles that both camps had, the system indeed had to have very impressive reliability, or else it would be complete waste of money. So USSR never built one. After Reagan announced his SDI USSR just sent more money to shipyards and built a bunch more of nuclear submarines, that's it. After Bush's démarche Putin also did the same - ordered a bunch of warheads that make zigs and zags at reentry speed.

And if you are interested in why the USSR fell, it's not even because of economy. It was bad, but there was no hunger yet. It might have been, though, if the USSR was allowed to rot some more. But it never happened, and "the people" in the street were as surprised with these developments as anyone in the West. The real reason is that when Gorbachev wanted to liberalize economy he accidentally liberalized the political life, and there were plenty of opportunists waiting and ready to insert themselves into the corridors of power. That's what they did, and that's where all the independent republics got their leaders from. Russia got Yeltsin, and that was not even the worst outcome. Gorbachev saw it happening but wasn't ready to defend the old way. For that he was briefly detained, and the conspirators tried to involve the army to put the toothpaste back; it did not work. So that's how it happened, and I did not even need to talk to anyone to offer you this overview.

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

USA tests

[timmarhy]

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

my favorite cold war short story

[jollyreaper]

I forget the name but it was written years and years ago. It's from the perspective of a young canadian watching the first return trip to space since WWIII. He thinks back to how things were before the war, the assumptions made around the globe. The US and USSR were so intent on mutually annihilating each other that no concern was given to any other nation, including the one most of the warheads would be flying over. The Canadians developed a secret WWIII plan. Special tunnels were carved into mountains, angled at the trajectories the missiles would be sure to follow over the pole. Gigantic atom bombs were created in a secret program. These bombs were placed at the bottom of the tunnels and the intervening space was filled with aerodynamic shrapnel. When the button was finally pushed and the missiles flew on their way, the Canadians pressed a button of their own. Their bombs went off and powered what were essentially giant shotguns, blasting debris into unstable orbits. The blast destroyed most of the warheads in the first exchange and continued to remove large fractions of each subsequent exchange. There was a bit of luck with bombers being more vulnerable to interception than prewar doctrine had anticipated with the net result being both sides running out of weapons before civilization was destroyed.

So our narrator is watching the first rocket trying to get back into space in the twenty years since the war. The night sky is still full of shooting stars as the debris comes back down into the atmosphere. All but the highest of the pre-war satellites were destroyed and nothing new has been able to survive making it through the shrapnel cloud. The thought is that most of it will deorbit in the next hundred or so years. The hope is that armored rockets might be able to survive impacts. The narrator sees this new rocket struck by debris and destroyed, the astronauts lost along with it. Mankind survived the war but lost space in the process.

The story probably isn't as scientifically accurate as one could hope but it still has emotional impact, an visceral truthiness.