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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.
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.
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.
How does Dirk Benedict track satellites?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prowler_(satellite)
Prowler was an American reconnaissance satellite launched aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1990 in order to study Soviet satellites in geosynchronous orbit. The government of the United States has never acknowledged its existence, however it has been identified by amateur observers and through leaked information.
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.
Learn to love Alaska
This reminds me. I had a '72 Plymouth Satellite 2-door with posi-traction when I was in my junior year of college. It was a totally bad ass car. I wish I had it now, if only to show those friggin' millennials with the new Challengers what the original looked like.
I had glass pack mufflers on it so it made a racket when I was taking off from the stop light. Got about 3 miles to the gallon, if I remember correctly, so I mostly kept it parked.
So satellites. Yeah, whatever.
Do you have difficulty obtaining an erection without Viagra? Do you vote in every election? Do you drive much slower than the speed limit during good conditions, never ever pulling over to let others pass since you're obviously not in a hurry - because fuck everybody stuck behind you? Do you enjoy Bingo or Shuffleboard? Do you miss Matlock? Do you drink prune juice? Do you congregate with other old people at the entrances of grocery stores and department stores, blocking foot traffic even when there are benches and a lobby - because fuck everybody else? Can the exact center of a busy shopping isle be found down to the picometer by where you leave your cart - because fuck everybody else? Do you refer to yourself as having a "fixed income" as though working folks can just get a raise anytime they want? Are cars the only thing they just don't make 'em like they used to? Is your nut sac even more wrinkled than the Cryptkeeper on Tales From the Crypt? Do you go into stores and hassle the staff and worry them to death with tons of insignificant requests and ask them where things are when those things are in plain sight? Do you live in Florida or hope to live there? Are you a member of AARP? Do you buy printed newspapers and maybe write letters to the editor? Do you enjoy bankrupting the younger generations, accomplishing what Islamic terrorists and Soviet Russia etc. never could? Do you have a comb-over or a toupee? If you have a wife does she have big floppy tits she practically trips over?
You sound old.
The Earth is a prison. Get me out of here!
I'm not sure the 1940s are quite "pre industrial". Where I come from, we'd been industrial for about two centuries.
P.S. what is deal of using noun always in singular without article?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
It will produce a mighty effective no-orbit zone, as we create a lot of new tiny satellite killers out of the debris from the pnce upon a time satellites. They'll eventuallu deorbit, some fairly soon, and some will be up there quite a long time.
It won't even take that many things going kablooey to make wharever we wish impossible to get through. You don't have to hit the satellite, you don't even need to get near it. Just create the shrapnel and let basic orbital mechanics to take care of the rest. A fleck of paint did thishttp://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/files/2012/03/sts7crack.jpg to a space shuttle window on mission STS7. Imagine what millions of substantial pieces of metal and other stuff that used to be a satellite will do. The only possible ways to make this not a earth orbiting version of mutually assured destruction is to somehow keep whatever is trying to kill the satellite unable to achieve orbit, and fall back ot earth. Maybe a laser, but even those would likely cause some debris.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The pettiness of chemical rocket propulsion makes weaponization of space unlikely in the short term. We are currently in the "pentacontera" age: five stacked storeys of oarsmen needed to propel a toylike, tiny ancient greek boat across the wine-coloured sea, full of sirens and better not lose sight of the shore if you want to live!
Turned out to be necessary to weaponize the sea back then.
Good, I'm delighted they're finally doing that.
1) serious research into living, working, traveling into space will only come when it's militarily significant
2) even better if the primary sphere of conflict between great powers moves off earth; rather than a hair-trigger annihilatory balance here, better by far that the meaningful fight takes place out there and that whoever loses is so out-matched by the result that there's no point in fighting here on earth.
-Styopa
The scenario you propose is only one of many reasons why I despise people that claim we can be carbon neutral only if we create a national grid connecting all the wind and solar plants scattered about the country. We should not create an even larger interconnected electricity grid, we need more smaller grids. We can get carbon neutral by using nuclear power.
We can spread out the nuclear power using small modular reactors. Large multi-gigawatt nuclear power plants are a prime target for attack. Multiple small nuclear power plants with a capacity around a half gigawatt is not such a nice target. Using molten salt reactors means that if one is attacked there would not be a meltdown and spread of radioactive material beyond the grounds of the power plant site.
One deterrent to an EMP attack is to create the infrastructure that is not vulnerable to it. We will no doubt have some sort of means to connect the various grids together so that should there be a loss of generating capacity on one grid can be made up by surplus from a neighboring grid. It should be the norm that the grids remain relatively small and disconnected from the rest so that a cascade failure cannot happen, such as in the case of an EMP attack, sunburst, forest fire, power plant failure, or whatever.
Wind, solar, and a large interconnected grid would be a very expensive and fragile means to get a "green" national grid. Using small modular molten salt reactors would be a much more feasible and robust means to that end. I'm sure many believe the problem lies with NIMBY in keeping nuclear power from becoming the primary source of electricity in the USA but I believe it is the federal government holding it up. There are plenty of low population places in this federation where power lines already exist to put a nuclear power plant. Getting the permits to build one would require an act of God or Congress.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Hello,
I have a lot of sympathy for what you're saying. The electrical grid badly needs to be made robust to EMP/solar flares, because even if no one detonates a nuke in orbit, eventually there will be a solar flare that will be powerful enough to have the same effect. Or some sort of cascading failure. Smaller modular grids are inherently more robust, on that you cannot be disputed.
You are also right that nuclear has much less of a carbon footprint than burning coal or any other fossil fuel. What I'm not confident of is that nuclear power of any sort can be competitive, economically, with alternatives.
Don't get me wrong, I like nuclear power in principle, but when it comes down to money, people have argued, pretty convincingly, that the fact that you have to generate heat and then convert it to power incurs so much capital expense that direct electrical generation will always be cheaper.
Direct electrical generation means that the fuel directly spins a turbine or generates electricity, examples of direct conversion:
hydropower
solar
natural gas fired turbines (the burning gas turns the turbine directly)
All flavors of nuclear power (except possibly aneutronic fusion) heat water which is converted to steam which turns turbines which generates electricity.
Here's the link that goes into the argument more thoroughly:
https://matter2energy.wordpres...
Didn't we sign treaties with the USSR in like the '60s that agreed not to build orbital offensive platforms? Or did that just cover nukes? I guess I'm referring to the Outer Space Treaty.
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.
Don't be absurd. Russia, for example, has already made jamming our GPS systems a capability they have provided to others in proxy wars because GPS is a very useful tactical tool, and that way they get to test their GPS-jamming gear. Countries often attack each other in ways short of nuclear war. Just because you don't have a way of defending yourself from a nuke doesn't mean it's not worth having conventional arms.
Both have massive ground based laser system designed to take out sats. In fact , ussr once threatened the shuttle by hitting it with a laser on the window. Purposely. Now, Russia AND china, have small sats about size of basketball that they are moving slowly by American sats. These are only useful as a first strike weapon. Basically, if we launch at attack, upon launching, we do not need the sats. OTOH, if Russia, and/or china, launch, then taking out sats first, give them a critical edge.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
P.S. what is deal of using noun always in singular without article?
Or of using a noun as an adverb to start the third sentence?
I suppose that a hyphen could have done the job just as well.
Please recall the web of treaties, designed with the same purpose in mind, that led to WW I.