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Pentagon Wants Disposable War Satellites
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invited manufacturers to propose squads of disposable mini-satellites costing about $500,000 each, capable of providing reconnaissance to soldiers at the press of a button. 'We envision a constellation of small satellites, at a fraction of the cost of airborne systems, that would allow deployed warfighters to hit "see me" on existing handheld devices and in less than 90 minutes receive a satellite image of their precise location to aid in mission planning,' says the agency. The U.S. Army already has access to drone aircraft to provide intelligence from the skies, and last year they announced that new helicopter-style machines equipped with 1.8 gigapixel cameras will soon go into service in Afghanistan. However, DARPA says such unmanned aircraft cannot cover extended territory without frequent refuelling. The SeeMe constellation will consist of some two-dozen satellites, each lasting 60-90 days in a very low-earth orbit before de-orbiting and completely burning up, leaving no space debris and causing no re-entry hazard. 'With a SeeMe constellation, we hope to directly support warfighters in multiple deployed overseas locations simultaneously with no logistics or maintenance costs beyond the warfighters' handhelds,' says program manager Dave Barnhart."
$500,000 per satellite with a 2-3 month life? Pretty expensive. Does that include the cost of launching it too?
I think Dale Brown had something like this in some of his novels... called them NIRTSsats or something.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
With quite a few of these up at any one time (to cover a wide area), and with their locations likely classified to prevent external interference, isn't there a risk of these causing safety problems with rocket launches?
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
It seems to me that another and even cheaper solution to the problem of long-duration flight is being ignored. Just combine a balloon for lift with propellers for movement. Because most of the need for fuel goes into keeping it aloft --use the balloon for that part. The good old zeppelin shape can reduce the effect of wind on it (not that it needs to be very large, for a reconnaissance drone). And if the balloon was transparent plastic, it would be harder to see from the ground.
Disposable, miniature satellites that provide communications relay and/or photographic coverage can be manufactured for closer to $5,000 a piece. What is DARPA thinking?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Only in the military can you label a $500,000 piece of equipment as "disposable"...
I was in OIF 06-08 and I would have loved to have this intel a couple times. Once I was sent out to recover a vehicle that had been blown up, and due to terrain requirements, I had to take a road that hadn't been traveled on for some eight months. Consequently we didn't know it was heavily defended with IEDs and had huge ditches from rain runoff (pretty common in desert environments). It took my convoy about 24 hours to travel 5 kilometers because we had to improvise material to fill in the holes enough for the trucks to travel over. The satellite coverage wouldn't have helped with the IEDs but it might have helped give me a better idea of the road conditions.
Another time I was leading a convoy of about 30 vehicles and the route I chose had been blocked by another unit the previous day. It can be an emotional event to turn around that many vehicles in some Iraqi towns.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
One of the benefits of the military and NASA is the new technology they develop. So, here's an idea for a launch technology that would dramatically reduce the cost of near-earth satellites. Launch them with a big gun.
There was a project called HARP which used a large gun to shoot projectiles at 8000 miles per hour. Their record altitude was 112 miles up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP Given that HARP used a kludged together gun, it seems likely that they could develop a purpose built gun that would serve the purpose.
Aren't *all* satellites disposable? I don't recall us going up to grab one and then re-using it.
It's not actually weaponizing space, but a platform where we have a railgun that fires 8 foot long 16" wide solid steel I beams at the earth at hypersonic velocities. If you could fling one at say 5800mph it would make a nice eco friendly way of taking out a target.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can see guys getting uproariously drunk and saying, "Let's launch them suckers!" Up they go, half a million a pop, plus launch expenses.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
That the whole military BS gets defunded !
Won't happen in gung-ho US.
So, learn it the hard way - get extinct!
With a SeeMe constellation, we hope to directly support warfighters in multiple deployed overseas locations simultaneously with no logistics or maintenance costs beyond the warfighters' handhelds," said Dave Barnhart, the programme's manager.
So somehow purchasing and launching 24 new satellites every 60 to 90 days counts as "no maintenance or logistics costs." No wonder the military budget is about a trillion dollars a year. sheesh.
-- QED
Why not lace them up with lost of C4 and let them become mines that you could set for space warfare, should we ever need them....just because they are decommissioned does not mean we can not reuse them for other things...
"War" satellite? Umm...the article speaks mainly of imaging missions. This is a "recon" satellite. I guess the temptation to scream "war" just won out, eh? Sounds much more sensationalist that way.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I haven't read the article but I'm surmising that it won't be cost effective unless they can come up with a cheap way to get these "squads of disposable satellites" into orbit. At least they burn on re-entry, so they won't contribute to the space-junk problem.
Sometimes it really is okay to tell the military NO. But this will be green lit without debate, because to debate matters of military spending is unpatriotic.
I always thought that it would be interesting to see weaponized UAVs that could be launched from a high-altitude loitering plane on demand.
When requested, a UAV with a weapon could be released from a loitering plane and then controlled on the ground by the unit requesting it for surveillance and ultimately to engage a target if necessary.
It could be faster than waiting for a manned plane or helicopter air strike as well as providing detailed intel.
how about the US use that money to help people instead. There is no reason to be spending that kind of money on defense when there is literally no threat to the US mainland.
Howsabout we just withdraw our military to within our own borders and work on actual healthcare instead?
Only the Pentagon could define half million dollar satellites as "disposable" and describe putting "a constellation of see-me satellites" in serveice or a two month period as having "no logistics costs"
When the military gets over 1/3 of the US budget, $500K would seem like a disposable number. To everybody else, it sounds like they're talking about things as a dictator's wife would speak of shoes.
And doesn't space in the orbital regions around the planet already have a catastrophic amount of space junk as it is? Pretty soon any craft leaving Earth is going to have to be heavily (and I do mean heavily) armoured just to get out or into orbit. How will that make things cheaper and better in the long run?
This isn't only a benefit at the ground level either. In the global warfare type scenarios, just having this capability would be worth a great deal.
If a first world enemy were to fight the US, taking out our satellites would be a very reasonable thing to do. Any systems that depend on satcom would be handicapped until we could get the systems restored, and while the really critical systems would have workarounds set up, many of the lower priority systems would lose some capability.
If the US demonstrates a backup satellite network is available anytime and at a (relative) low cost, that reduces the incentive to develop anti-satellite capability and reduces the risk of losing them. And honestly, putting something reasonably heavy into orbit for $500k sounds cheap to me.
This capability is required for any form of sustained combat. It becomes even more critical once debris becomes detrimental to long term satellite system.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2682447&cid=39109285
actually these things are supposed to burn up during deorbit so maybe they could on the way down knock a couple other things out of orbit.
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of course i would hope that some sort of "redaction" charge is on the satellite but since these things are designed to burn up on reentry having any sort of charge would be a waste of weight.
(of course if the De-Orbit course just happens to intercept one of %Other Nations% sats then its "gravy")
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and why are you not doing this from a "Safe" location and not aware of whats RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU??
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Satellite dispose of YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Now, to enlighten the above and others, a little bit of maths is required.
While a vector is a high school concept it can be explained more simply as a triangle and I'm sure trigonometry turns up before high school even now. What the above poster has missed is that even a 10 degree change is not a "tiny correction". Consider a 10 degree change when going at 5000m/s, you can look at it as a right angle triangle with 5000 on one side, 10 degrees in the corner so the other side ends up as 882. So for such a change in orbit you need to burn enough fuel to get a change in velocity of 882 metres per second. That is not trivial. Doing that "as a routine operation" is the stuff of short missions or bad SF.
A very minor change in orbit doesn't make it difficult to find so it's obvious that you meant major changes, otherwise why bother to "correct" the earlier poster at all if you don't actually disagree with them?
Not so bright and lame boy, sitting in a tree.... M-O-D-D-I-N-G.