Slashdot Mirror
India Developing Vehicle To Knock Enemy Satellites
Frankie70 writes "Star Wars are back in fashion. With perennial (and nuclear armed) foe Pakistan always teetering on the brink of political collapse and neighboring regional superpower China taking greater strides into space technology, India has announced that it is developing an exo-atmospheric 'kill vehicle' that will knock enemy satellites out of orbit."
You can't just 'knock something out of orbit,' like it's a porcelain vase on a mantelpiece. Orbits do not work that way! They're building a kill vehicle to blow up satellites.
They're still going to be in orbit, just in lots of little pieces.
There's an article1 about the military version of the Soviet Salyut space station, which flew as Salyuts 3 and 5 between 1974 and 1977.
Virtually no information was available about the military Salyuts until recently, when access was opened up to a full-scale training model at the Moscow Aviation Institute. Well, guess what--Salyut 3 had a machine gun. The station had a 23 mm rapid-fire cannon mounted on the outside, along the long axis of the station "for defence against US space-based inspectors/interceptors".
http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/spaceguns/
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The thing is, it's not just military spacecraft that would be targeted. Assuming the ASAT rounds have the range, you'd see things like com satellites (even civilian ones--think Iridium), GPS satellites, maybe even weather observation satellites. In a full-blown war where it's drastic enough to start downing birds, you're going to hit anything that could possibly help your enemies and give you a better chance to survive.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Any of the countries with space launch capability could ruin the party. It was pointed out years ago that a vehicle loaded with ball bearings can be sent around the Moon and back toward Earth, releasing a load of shrapnel which would sweep across all Earth-based orbits. Fortunately, space is big. Really big. So the damage would be spread out over time, depending upon how large the attack is.