Satellite Wars (ft.com)

schwit1 writes: Sixty years after the space race began, an orbital arms race is again in development. Military officials from the U.S., Europe and Asia confirm in private what the Kettering Group and other amateur stargazers have been watching publicly. Almost every country with strategically important satellite constellations and its own launch facilities is considering how to defend — and weaponize — their extraterrestrial assets. "I don't think there is a single G7 nation that isn't now looking at space security as one of its highest military priorities and areas of strategic concern," says one senior European intelligence official.

The U.S. is spending billions improving its defenses — primarily by building more capacity into its constellations and improving its tracking abilities. A $900m contract was awarded to Lockheed Martin in 2014 to develop a radar system capable of tracking objects as small as baseballs in space in real time. But there are also hints that the U.S. may be looking to equip its satellites with active defenses and countermeasures of their own, such as jamming devices and the ability to evade interceptions. A purely offensive anti-satellite program is in fast development as well. High-energy weapons and maneuverable orbiters such as space planes all open the possibility of the U.S. being able to rapidly weaponize the domain beyond the atmosphere, should it feel the need to do so.

Comments

The real worry should be Kessler Syndrome

[JoshuaZ]

There's a serious risk that in low-Earth orbit if one has enough debris it could cause a cascade of destruction where debris hits satellites breaking them up into more debris which hits more satellites and so on. Such a cascade is called Kessler Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . If this happens it could render many orbits unusable for years. In that context, deliberately destroying satellites should maybe be considered a war crime since the potential for collateral damage impacting all of humanity is so severe.

Re:The real worry should be Kessler Syndrome

[Rei]

Even if sand was launched to LEO, it wouldn't have a long lifespan - the smaller the object, the higher its ratio of cross section to mass. And you don't have to launch into an orbital trajectory. And if you were really bothered, rather than launching sand one could launch grains of something that would sublimate in space.

The sand itself doesn't pose a long-term debris threat. Even the act of disabling a satellite doesn't inherently do so - so long as it remains by and large a single piece. However, sand grains piercing into, say, a pressurized hydrazine tank and detonating the satellite into chunks of shrapnel of various sizes, that's a very different issue.

No defense

[AK Marc]

If North Korea got a big nuke to work (the size tested that was considered a "fizzle", where an H-bomb went off only as an a-bomb, or something like that), they could do quite a bit of damage to a country by launching a large nuke over it. There is no missile defense that could shoot down a DPRK ICMB fired at South Africa via US trajectory, but as it passes over Kansas, in low outer space, it is detonated. The blast would EMP most, if not all of the contiguous US, as well as take out any satellites over it at the time (about $1T of satellites, give or take a few orders of magnitude).

If there's no defense against that, then there's no real point to waste money on security that can't protect from a single obvious attack vector.

And the apocolypse would be much like some of the bad movies with just 2 bombs from DPRK. What would the world look like if Europe and the US were hit? Russian and China not hit. With the sudden power shift, we'd go into a world war, infrastructure would collapse.

The ironic thing is that weaponizing space would increase the chance of it happening. How? Because when a smaller nation has no options, and nothing to lose, they'll do the most damage they can. A nuke hidden in a container in LA harbor was the "old" worst case. But only because those coming up with the worst case have no imagination.

Zero direct fatalities? Think zombie apocalypse!

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Indirect fatalities are fatalities.

Consider what would happen if the whole electrical network in the US went down. That is the likely effect of an orbital EMP. All electric power would stop and stay stopped. Gas pumps wouldn't work. Refrigeration would fail. Shipments of food would not arrive and mass starvation would ensue. People would be wandering around starving searching for ANY food at all.

If you don't think nuclear retaliation isn't the right response for inflicting THAT upon the USA, what is the point of having a nuclear deterrent?

--PM