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Air Force Sets First Post In Ambitious Space Fence Project
coondoggie writes "The US Air Force this week said it will base the first Space Fence radar post on Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands with the site planned to be operational by 2017. The Space Fence is part of the Department of Defense's effort to better track and detect space objects which can consist of thousands of pieces of space debris as well as commercial and military satellite parts."
It will keep out the Space Mexicans.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
A 'Fence' surely isn't to DETECT space objects, surely a fence is to keep them out?
No, no, you misunderstand. It will be used to SELL stolen space junk!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Are the true illegal aliens.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Fence my ass.
This is Slashdot, not Craigslist.
Applications are:
1. Track other spy satellites, of the Russians, Indians, Chinese. In the future, I guess that these countries will have hundreds of those - many quite small.
2. Avoid collisions of their own satellites. The US also has hundreds of satellites in orbit.
3. Avoid collisions of other (commercial?) satellites, thereby protecting US economic interests.
In this particular case, I don't care whether they share. Even if they don't share, I am not particularly worried. What flies overhead shouldn't be hidden anyway. Anyone who feels like monitoring that can go ahead. Would be nice if they share the data, but I understand if they don't.
Because Kessler Syndrome. Space debris collisions create more space debris, which in the long term will cause problems for the use of space with everyone. Ideally these things should be dealt with internationally - it doesn't really make sense to have every nation look after their own satellites, and it'd lead to much wasteful duplication of effort.
The ideal solution would certainly be that everyone would chip in, since it's in everyone's interests. If the US is determined to go it alone anyway and build this thing, though, a far sighted strategist should realise that *even if* no one else offers to pay, it serves long term US interests to actually share this data with as many countries at possible. And maybe such a move would create goodwill and help dispel suspicion, and encourage global support (and funding) for future maintenance of the project.
Thanks for providing a fine example of the short-term thinking that's endemic to the private sector. This is exactly why governments can, and do, accomplish useful things that the private sector can't. Or do you really believe that everything important can be done in less than five years?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The USAF already has a system for detecting objects orbiting the planet called SPASUR. It operates on the VHF band just above the North American slot for TV channel 13.
The new "space fence" will operate on the S band, which is a microwave frequency. The idea is that the shorter wavelength will allow ground radar to detect smaller debris than could be detected with the longer wavelength SPASUR system.