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jonkoops 20 hours ago [-]
Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future.
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if its space to ground, like an orbital missile platform or something, you are technically in the clear.
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
notahacker 20 hours ago [-]
Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here.
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
mapt 17 hours ago [-]
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules.
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
gorgoiler 13 hours ago [-]
While armor is indeed much harder in space, it is not impossible:
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
notahacker 11 hours ago [-]
Whipple Shields are a very important part of protecting things like the ISS, but are optimized more for chance high velocity impacts with tiny bits of debris than an adversary's targeted projectile or their robotic arm grappler, or indeed non-kinetic weapons like directed energy or EMPs which is probably the capability the US intends to imply here.
freebsd_lovefes 11 hours ago [-]
You know nothing about space armor until you manage to shoot down Amarr's dreadnought in Eve Online, tyvm.
lr1970 16 hours ago [-]
> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
onion2k 13 hours ago [-]
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
I might have thought about this too much.
Fwirt 13 hours ago [-]
Space is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or human habitation, but when you're just passing through, the odds of getting punctured are probably still reasonable, at least for unmanned spacecraft. Keep in mind that the ISS maneuvers out of the way when there are several miles to a potential impactor, just in case. We have all our eggs in one basket right now, so everybody is really careful with that one basket.
onion2k 11 hours ago [-]
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
toast0 12 hours ago [-]
> But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P
wat10000 15 hours ago [-]
It's not quite as bad as that. Space is big and hitting stuff is really hard. Your hand grenade scenario has effectively been done a few times and it (obviously) didn't make LEO unusable. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
mschuster91 13 hours ago [-]
> Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
jdougan 7 hours ago [-]
The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.
wongarsu 12 hours ago [-]
The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2].
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react? I doubt they would assume "this is probably just an EMP and not a direct nuclear strike on our territory"
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react?
We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.
wat10000 12 hours ago [-]
If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.
freebsd_lovefes 11 hours ago [-]
Plot twist - someone has already thought about this and took measures of unimaginable scale...so that, no one, ever, wipes out, humanity, with nukes.
Dylan16807 10 hours ago [-]
Can you do better than "measures"
kragen 6 hours ago [-]
This is not correct, and the experiment has been done a number of times with no real effect, most memorably in 01961, when Project West Ford put 480 million copper needles in 3500-km-high medium Earth orbit (MEO); but it's a little bit challenging to understand why.
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
pennomi 5 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t any needles launched prograde be put into a higher stable (though obviously elliptical) orbit?
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
The wires in Project West Ford weighed something like 40 micrograms, with a diameter in the low tens of micrometers. They don’t really fit the criteria of what’s being discussed here - they would not do significant damage to other satellites, and while they could reenter the atmosphere and hit a person, you probably wouldn’t even feel it.
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
…and for those unfamiliar with this fun project, the idea was to provide a radio relay system that wasn’t easily disabled by an enemy. This was before communications satellites were common.
trhway 8 hours ago [-]
You fire a radar guided powerful laser pulse at the incoming object causing small surface ablation , intentionally a bit to the side, which will serve as a small reaction mass eject altering the trajectory of that incoming object.
waste_monk 16 hours ago [-]
>A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time
Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2]
If you have a vehicle that can reach orbit, then you have an ICBM. That's why Sputnik struck such fear into Americans.
spwa4 19 hours ago [-]
But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated.
A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
zenbane 18 hours ago [-]
This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.
smackeyacky 16 hours ago [-]
We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
bloak 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cineticdaffodil 13 hours ago [-]
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victorbjorklund 15 hours ago [-]
Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
Forgeties79 17 hours ago [-]
You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.
brookst 17 hours ago [-]
“Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people.
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Forgeties79 13 hours ago [-]
Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”?
Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
ang_cire 7 hours ago [-]
I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values".
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
willy_k 17 hours ago [-]
Good example of their point. That’s not “why”.
cineticdaffodil 13 hours ago [-]
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somenameforme 16 hours ago [-]
A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
feoren 15 hours ago [-]
> Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
> I think it's something similar with China
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.
Yes, but again that was a conventional weapon, and would have been fine under the treaty. I don't exactly condone it but it was also crap and never flew again. This video https://youtu.be/e-n_V5iEwAs goes into some of the reasons it was a particularly crap idea
tastyfreeze 6 hours ago [-]
I have little doubt that the OST was circumvented by definitional tricks. That is how the game of treaties and power is played. Something like rods from God or a conventional bomb orbiting platform wouldn't be considered a WMD but most certainly are the types of weapons common folk would think the OST forbids.
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
varjag 11 hours ago [-]
I think they don't fly survival guns on Soyuz anymore. But cosmonauts on ISS do keep a shank or two onboard for sure.
SG- 11 hours ago [-]
The US doesn't care about treaties anymore.
exe34 17 hours ago [-]
> used for defending yourself against wild animals
> in the event that you land in a forest or similar.
I was very confused and wondered where this was going!
nojvek 14 hours ago [-]
Do US and Russia even give a shit about treaties.
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
pwdisswordfishq 20 hours ago [-]
Not that the US ever gave a shit about international treaties.
_djo_ 20 hours ago [-]
To be fair, this move is coming after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years. Which the US has highlighted many times in the past.
At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.
That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
notahacker 15 hours ago [-]
Neither Russia nor China's known weapons deployment is likely to breach the very narrow restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty, and the latest capability the US has vaguely claimed probably doesn't either.
In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.
sesteel 51 minutes ago [-]
Your comment on Russia and China is false.
voidUpdate 20 hours ago [-]
Russia was at least planning to launch a space-to-space laser back in 1987, but the prototype (essentially just a mass simulator, no lasers inside) failed on launch quite spectacularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
_djo_ 20 hours ago [-]
Russia also seems to have tested the release of a sub-satellite from another satellite, perhaps a precursor to a kinetic space-launched weapon.
I see a lot of fear-mongering reports from sources claiming authority.
I don't see any evidence.
_djo_ 19 hours ago [-]
What kind of evidence are you expecting? Detailed photographs of the satellites on orbit?
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
etiennebausson 17 hours ago [-]
I personally don't trust elements provided by U.S. agencies and foundations since the Irak war and the "proof" they delivered to justify it.
Proxy at work is stopping me from reading most of grandparent links, so it'll have to wait for home.
mc32 17 hours ago [-]
It’s like they’ll believe any rumors about the US doing things but then need concrete evidence irrefutable evidence when it comes to its adversaries.
aa-jv 19 hours ago [-]
I'd like to see evidence which supports the claims and not have to rely on a call to authority fallacy[1] in order to agree with this collective-derived reality.
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
What evidence would satisfy you that there are weapons in space? You either have to check yourself somehow, or trust a third party. Is there a third party you trust to provide evidence?
The article from The Space Review comes pretty close to providing some actual evidence.
There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.
voidUpdate 19 hours ago [-]
What extra would you want from the space review article that would constitute actual evidence for you?
aa-jv 18 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
andsoitis 17 hours ago [-]
> There are lots of claims and speculation that China is developing space weapons, and there is an allusion to evidence (but no actual evidence)
Why do you keep avoiding the question?
gowld 9 hours ago [-]
Space Review website has malware-download ads all over the page. That spooks me.
Gregkion 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
_djo_ 19 hours ago [-]
If they did, then all three are equally guilty of breaching the treaty and making weapons in space a new norm. That's plausible, sure.
If they didn't, it makes sense why they'd choose to compete on the same playing field now, as the norm is already broken.
None of what I'm posting is about saying the US are the 'good guys' here. Neither the US, Russia, nor China are 'good' for creating a new space arms race that puts everyone at more risk. It might be something we can understand from a purely rational perspective while disliking that it's happening.
maxglute 18 hours ago [-]
>equally guilty
Not really, LBH, if RU and PRC ask US to kneecap US launch tempo or set some Washington naval treaty tonnage to space limits, US would lol.
Rationally US (hegemonic stability) is incentivized to be uniquely bad, i.e. significantly MORE guilty of introducing new/more escalatory arms race conditions by virtue of having most space capability/tech stack, and incentivized to maintain capability gap. US typical the one pushing boundaries to seek absolute security because it cannot (and currently does not have to) accept parity.
Followed by RU simply because they're broke and have to do desperate shit like Cosmos 2542. Meanwhile PRC counterspace rollout has been within norm, i.e. match capability of others, land->space direct ascent ASAT, coorbital rendezvous / proximity ops, EW/dazzlers (land+space). PRC cooking from the regular menu, partly because catchup, but PRC also way past RU in space now, but hasn't introduced any destabilizing novel counter space tech that would escalate space arms race except doing normal stuff at scale that triggers US anxiety over size of gap. But ultimately, no one is forcing US to break meta continuously because it rationally won't accept vulnerability.
DoD/W didn't have to weaponize SpaceX... but they did, so we should not be surprised in future if general international space admin/order breaks down in future. i.e. US/SpaceX got first come first serve dibs on favourable civilian LEO orbital shells assignment from UN/ITU, but now SpaceX now civil military fusion platform, so probably expect PRC counter space mega constellations to simply ignore US space entitlements in future.
TitaRusell 16 hours ago [-]
We don't know what the US does. They are just as enigmatic as the Chinese to the point that US Congress is not even allowed to learn about the secret projects.
ak39 14 hours ago [-]
What is the point of any treaty with the current US administration which does not play by international laws? Rules and laws that the USA itself spearheaded after WW2.
nickff 13 hours ago [-]
The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.
zobzu 12 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Most of these things are just big world politics. Same for AI, btw.
"OMG dont do this this is horrible" as the other country does it and hasn't talked about it or haven't been caught doing it.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
12 hours ago [-]
jillesvangurp 16 hours ago [-]
Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. There will likely be some escalation in debris and damage resulting from that might eventually result in some kind of action. But most of the damage here would be economical and sending more stuff up is now very cheap. Manned flight is relatively infrequent and aside from the space station and very short lived space tourism, most activity in space is unmanned.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
hajile 16 hours ago [-]
SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.
jillesvangurp 15 hours ago [-]
Those are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day
Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
nradov 11 hours ago [-]
That depends what you mean by "open ocean"? Vessels near ports or in defined traffic lanes frequently maneuver to avoid collisions as per the rules of the road. Outside territorial waters it's less common but still happens occasionally. Either way, those avoidance maneuvers are such routine events that no one really gathers data on them.
throwitaway222 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.
hajile 5 hours ago [-]
Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars.
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
beambot 11 hours ago [-]
The blast radius from a maritime collission is (mostly) relegated to the vehicles in question [1]. The same is not true for satellite collisions.
[1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> same is not true for satellite collisions
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
eks391 9 hours ago [-]
Space is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
moffkalast 9 hours ago [-]
Debris from a collision on water won't spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds.
hydrogen7800 15 hours ago [-]
I learned that within the 2 hour launch window for Artemis 2 there were many blackout periods ranging from seconds to minutes for collision avoidance.
throwitaway222 14 hours ago [-]
At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.
nomel 13 hours ago [-]
No, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.
JumpCrisscross 12 hours ago [-]
> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
This just isn’t feasible it’s like wanting the ocean to be free of weapons. Space is most of what there is, nations that want to defend themselves will have to utilize space as a war fighting domain all we can do is put that off
iAMkenough 15 hours ago [-]
Sounds like it’s finally time to start blasting random satellites out of the sky.
15 hours ago [-]
snvzz 12 minutes ago [-]
Regulations are only as strong as the power to enforce them.
sesteel 54 minutes ago [-]
We do things in response to the actions of others; I'll leave it there.
gadders 14 hours ago [-]
You don't need to have weapons in orbit for the Kessler Syndrome:
Ion thrusters allow satellites to stay in low orbits with significant drag, providing significant protection from Kessler syndrome.
rtkwe 17 hours ago [-]
That would likely require basically banning GPS, imaging and communication satellites too, if we get a WW3 I would be shocked if there weren't physical attacks against those assets by anyone with the requisite launch capabilities because they're just that useful to militaries. Maybe it gets relegated mostly to jamming them instead but I'd be surprised if that level of restraint happened.
scottyah 14 hours ago [-]
There are many separate GPS systems and all the big powers know how to jam and work without them. It was one of the first tactics used in Ukraine.
rtkwe 14 hours ago [-]
Of course. But those are also limited to the areas around the jammers too. In a broader hot conflict there'd be a good reason to disrupt the opposition's GPS capabilities across the globe not just locally. It'd be pretty bad economically for many countries to lose GPS access in their homeland but difficult to achieve without a way to disrupt the satellites directly.
imglorp 16 hours ago [-]
They're not dumb; everyone knows this. It's like the old "mutually assured destruction" image of two people standing in a pool of gasoline, each with matches at the ready.
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
mikeweiss 15 hours ago [-]
Only works when the thing you want to make off limits isn't all that desirable in the first place.
verelo 17 hours ago [-]
> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica.
Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.
The outer space is already a dumpster and a disaster.
BurningFrog 6 hours ago [-]
Unless you can enforce a weapons ban, "should be a neutral ground" means absolutely nothing.
Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.
micromacrofoot 15 hours ago [-]
There's not really enough stuff up there to cause the kessler syndrome yet, maybe at some specific bands you could cause some annoyances... but ~75% of satellites are operating in bands that would decay into the atmosphere, fortunately it's just easier to operate in the decaying band anyway
bpodgursky 16 hours ago [-]
I agree with the principle but Russia and China absolutely already have armed satellites in orbit, so that needs to be negotiated before unilaterally stopping.
mytailorisrich 12 hours ago [-]
Space is too important and strategic for it to remain free of weapons and military presence.
GiorgioG 13 hours ago [-]
> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica.
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.
damnesian 19 hours ago [-]
Oh I'm sure it will be "neutral," in the sense that all of us normal humans are potential targets in this day and age, under this leadership.
preisschild 17 hours ago [-]
Not really possible. For example, the Soviet Union had naval radar satellites (RORSAT) in space that could directly guide missiles to specific ships.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
cindyllm 15 hours ago [-]
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aaron695 18 hours ago [-]
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reptileIllumina 19 hours ago [-]
Funny you mention Antarctica. Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized. Some Norwegian sailors has being severely punished for sailing boats there.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
Really at this point between conspiracy and official realize is just matter of a year if not just a couple months now.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized
To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5 hours ago [-]
No one expects the Antarctic Inquisition
andai 11 hours ago [-]
>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
nradov 11 hours ago [-]
Ya, that's a hilarious comment from the Chinese after they have literally tested their own anti-satellite weapons. But then their diplomats have never been short of chutzpah.
Once a country develops midcourse ballistic missile intercept technology, it's practically impossible to not own an ASAT weapon. It's just a matter of targeting and programming.
This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.
Revanche1367 10 hours ago [-]
You think the US doesn’t have similar things?
nradov 9 hours ago [-]
What a weird comment. I never claimed the USA doesn't have similar things. It's an arms race.
And the US complained about it then, so what’s your point in calling China’s complaint here chutzpah while leaving the US out?
r_lee 9 hours ago [-]
the commenter never implied that they don't
but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive"
and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
Revanche1367 9 hours ago [-]
How many wars has China started in the last century?
SubmarineClub 8 hours ago [-]
Very convenient of you to not include what China is doing in Nepal, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and on the Indian border.
And if China hadn’t stuck its dick into the Korean War, the whole peninsula would probably be as prosperous as the south.
etc-hosts 5 hours ago [-]
North Korea was more prosperous than South Korea, until the US bombed flat over 85 percent of the buildings in North Korea. 20 percent of the population of North Korea died.
I'm going to bookmark your comment and read it instead of drinking coffee every day this month, thanks.
elteto 6 hours ago [-]
They mostly just massacre their own.
kurthr 5 hours ago [-]
What a weird question, does that include Chiang Kai-shek? or limited to the "communist" party?
You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.
China supported the Khmer Rouge, maybe Pol Pot is memorable?
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
Between 5-7, depending on how you count. Although that type of whataboutism is entirely irrelevant to a space arms race.
tbugrara 5 hours ago [-]
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whatshisface 11 hours ago [-]
In human terms, there is a spectrum between knowing where to buy a firearm, owning a firearm, and pointing a gun at your head.
tintor 11 hours ago [-]
Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.
Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.
restalis 2 hours ago [-]
"Putting" weapons in space, like in orbit (otherwise they won't stay in space for long) is not like putting weapons in international waters close in to the target. Any weapon that relies on moving some (projectile) mass from there will have to deal with the costly orbital mechanics, where the projectile will have to be pulled out of orbit with a lot of mass and time to reach anywhere on the planet. It's... not that good of an option for attack, compared even to existing ballistic ground-to-ground trajectories. For non-projectile orbital weapons, i.e. energy weapons, the physics are brutal, because the amount of energy necessary to reach any degree of destructive effect to a target on the ground is way too large. And all that has to also be weighted against the risk of having such weapon staying exposed in the orbit, like a sitting duck, for anyone on the ground to disable it in numerous ways. If there would be any case for having weapons in space, I don't think it will be to attack anything on the ground.
eps 10 hours ago [-]
First country to admit putting weapons in space.
andai 6 hours ago [-]
I was wondering, didn't they have something like this fifty years ago? Wasn't that the whole point of the space program?
> Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.
First to publicly announce it. However, Russia beat us to the punch.
Russian, China, India, and the US are all in this secret little club (but maybe not so secret anymore!)
topspin 9 hours ago [-]
> Being the first country to put weapons in space
The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).
Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.
krapp 5 hours ago [-]
Russia mounted a gun on one of its space stations[0] but it didn't work out, and they were going to launch an orbital nuclear platform[1] but then everything went to shit.
Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.
Rather interesting timing after the US accused China of supplying Iran with high-res imagery used to support attacks on US bases, then a Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart
dhx 16 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it be possible to confirm who may be supplying imagery by taking some IRGC supplied imagery such as [1] and figure out which satellite(s) were overhead at the time and capable of taking the image? It may not be particularly straightforward to do so--but seems theoretically possible with:
- Consideration of time-of-day/azimuth of overhead satellite based on shadows and perspective.
- Comparison to other imagery of the same location checking for portable objects (such as vehicles) and keeping track of when they appear and disappear, and whether they're present in the imagery being analysed.
- Consideration of cloud coverage and weather conditions to rule out unwanted satellite passes.
Then write up a report and publish it, making it a believable and concrete finding instead of a finding that otherwise may just be perceived to be speculation/vibes.
It's really not interesting at all. The US Destroyed that satellite to stop that information flow.
missedthecue 6 hours ago [-]
China has more intelligence/imaging satellites in space than the US does. I don't think it will stop the information flow.
fnands 17 hours ago [-]
Yaogan-50 for anyone asking.
Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
willy_k 17 hours ago [-]
As an aside - the word conspiratorial has become polluted.
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
AnimalMuppet 14 hours ago [-]
A major provocation? "Oh, you deny using your satellites to supply them with imaging? All right, then it wasn't us who blew up your spy satellite that wasn't supplying imaging."
That is, China's in a bit of an awkward position to complain very much.
rl3 13 hours ago [-]
Problems start when their complaints take the form of using their own deniable capability against U.S. satellites.
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
nomel 11 hours ago [-]
So, what solution do you have in mind, if China supplies military support to an adversary? Politely ask them to stop? Let them continue? Seems not so trivial to me, especially since everyone has satellites up there for this purpose, and there's a good chance China would do the same.
FabCH 8 hours ago [-]
Politely ask them to stop seems like a great idea to try first before you actively attack a space capable nuclear superpower!
nomel 7 hours ago [-]
If they did supply images, to supporting the attacks, that did or even didn't result in the death of soldiers, then they were first to commit an act of aggression towards a nuclear superpower. This is a measured response to that act of aggression. Asking politely, in that context, doesn't necessarily make sense, especially when you can just burn a few hundred million of their dollars to demonstrate why they shouldn't do that.
I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].
There is a meaningful difference between „providing information to a country currently being attacked“ and „blowing stuff up in orbit“.
One is significantly more risk to the rest of the world than other.
lossolo 13 hours ago [-]
China is not Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela or some other third world country that the US has fought in over the past few decades. You can't just destroy one of their satellites for free. And I can bet the US didn't do it, because that would be a major escalation, especially now that Xi is coming to the US and there are rumors that the US wants a deal.
boc 5 hours ago [-]
So China's brand new recon satellite that was placed specifically in orbit over Iran just happened to self-destruct weeks after China was accused of giving Iran high-res satellite imagery that was used to kill American soldiers?
And the US just publicly told everyone they have weapons in space?
Hell of a coincidence.
chinathrow 11 hours ago [-]
So it broke apart by itself?
lossolo 10 hours ago [-]
"The European Space Agency estimates that there have been more than 660 explosions, collisions, or anomalous events resulting in fragmentation. As it stands, there are currently more than 1.5 million space debris objects in Earth orbit.
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
willy_k 3 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t mean anything. “Sometimes satellites hit things or have problems and blow up. Maybe it hit something and had a problem”.
Edit: Its a perfectly valid response to the question that was asked.
aaron695 9 hours ago [-]
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hn_submit 17 hours ago [-]
I thought the Russians were supplying them with HiRes imagery. I've not heard of any Russian optical or radar satellite breaking up.
asdff 11 hours ago [-]
Wasn't the shuttle originally planned to be a weapon as well, capable of intercepting and sabotaging satellites using its loading bay workshop? There are also the various "mini shuttles" the three letter agencies fly around the earth for several hundred day stints of doing who knows what exactly with who knows what capabilities (other than having a similar sabotage potential as the original shuttle perhaps).
CodeWriter23 9 hours ago [-]
The SIR-C/X-SAR was launched in the Shuttle Bay and used to map the entire surface of The Earth. Some would call that a munition. This article, following that event IS the confirmation.
baxtr 10 hours ago [-]
As far as I know, a major issue with NASA space programs such as the shuttle was that each group held its own requirements. So, most likely the DoD had some additional demands.
bdamm 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
sgustard 12 hours ago [-]
Reagan and Gorbachev came within inches of abolishing nuclear weapons, but the sticking point was the US would not back away from building space weapons. As long as warmongers are in control we will continue to live in danger and fear.
cedws 11 hours ago [-]
Gorbachev's dead now and look who sits in his place. I'm not so sure such a treaty would still be respected anyway. As as for who sits in Reagan's place...
All you need to know about making deals with Russia.
RobKohr 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Ukraine should have held onto its nukes. But it got a lovely piece of paper to protect itself with.
s1artibartfast 6 hours ago [-]
easy to say at a distance. It didnt have full control and had the nuclear powers pushing them to.
We dont know if Ukraine would be a state today if they refused
notthemessiah 10 hours ago [-]
The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.
nomel 11 hours ago [-]
> As long as warmongers are in control we will continue to live in danger and fear.
Can you expand on your solution to world peace?
whh 11 hours ago [-]
I think it's generally acceptable to make a statement without proposing a solution.
legulere 9 hours ago [-]
You need to get a critical mass of people to despise war so much that they are ready to have disadvantages themselves to make a war free world a reality. E.g. complete stop of trade with countries starting a war or supporting such a country.
It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
nomel 9 hours ago [-]
So, you're saying that this requires all people of the world get along and agree with anything that might cause war? That sounds like a reasonable plan! Thanks for the response.
wraptile 8 hours ago [-]
Or a post resource scarcity society where everyone's rich enough to be able to make ethical decisions with very little actual cost.
frumplestlatz 8 hours ago [-]
Power over others can never be post-scarcity, and it's an incredible motivator.
frumplestlatz 8 hours ago [-]
In which case, any country willing to fund a military and start a war would dominate the world.
Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.
"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".
tonymet 9 hours ago [-]
The capabilities of the "space weapons" didn't exist. Reagan used the threat of those weapons to perpetuate USSR's unsustainable military & defense investment, knowing the US could sustain it. Within 5 years, USSR was defunct.
Reagan had the right strategy , for his time.
asdff 11 hours ago [-]
I mean in hindsight there's no way israel or china would have disarmed.
golemiprague 7 hours ago [-]
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WillAdams 15 hours ago [-]
C.J. Cherryh has a memorable quote on this in her _Downbelow Station_.
>They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.
GMoromisato 13 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite SF books.
I feel that applies more to Russia's space program--some cosmonauts (not all, of course) support Putin's war.
hereme888 6 hours ago [-]
The part where China "begs" the US not to weaponize space, and then talks of how China wants to militarily dominate space... Such typical tactics to delay US progress.
gggmaster 4 hours ago [-]
Typical tactics to shift the blame to China.
misetech 17 hours ago [-]
I think most of the powerful countries in the world already have space weapons. Space exploration is just a facade for this.
bdamm 15 hours ago [-]
Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.
hiddencost 14 hours ago [-]
From a certain point of view ICBMs are a method of communicating.
freebsd_lovefes 11 hours ago [-]
Trajectorial calligraphy is a subject in some schools where individuals who like to communicate unconventionally study.
BiteCode_dev 14 hours ago [-]
I'd wager starlink is mostly military with the cover of civilian use case.
Permik 13 hours ago [-]
There's the program called Starshield, that's part of the miltech side of the program. One of the military uses is using the starlink constellation signals as a passive SAR for the whole planet with millimeter scale accuracy.
mars-or_wars 14 hours ago [-]
search "Declassify Elon Musk's space-based weapons program before Biden leaves the White House"
> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
huurtehoog 20 hours ago [-]
I recommend reading the paper by Parnas about the original SDI system.
See also: the mass of starlink satellites over time.
doe88 16 hours ago [-]
Nothing to worry about, General Turgidson said it was just made in order to prevent a space gap.
causal 15 hours ago [-]
Man I imagine within the first few minutes of a hot war LEO and geostationary would just light up with assets pointed at one another. I know we will have bigger problems at that point in time but I hope we are at least trying to developed weaponry that doesn't Kessler-ify all of space for the next thousand years.
chukar 20 hours ago [-]
Well, that's one way to kick off a new arms race. Guess the orbital junk problem is about to get worse.
rtkwe 14 hours ago [-]
It's been quietly brewing in the background for a couple years with accusations out the US about Russia and China secretly testing systems to intercept and sabotage US satellites either temporarily or destroy them permanently.
alfiedotwtf 20 hours ago [-]
Say goodbye to satellites and space tourism for the next 200 years :(
tialaramex 20 hours ago [-]
Kessler trashes LEO and yes, "space tourism" because that means bare orbital joyrides and those would become unacceptably hazardous for a tourist attraction. But it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits, or for leaving if we, or more likely a non-human probe wanted to leave Earth's orbit.
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
> it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
tialaramex 10 hours ago [-]
No. The reason this can't work is that "trashing" an orbit works by a long chain of random collisions which also put debris into different orbits at roughly the same altitude. The debris from a smashed StarLink for example goes into a thousand different orbits with a variety of different directions but all at a similar altitude to the StarLink and so they'll collide with other StarLinks and similar LEO birds. For LEO that works, so many of these orbits are also occupied, the cascade happens - but for GEO all of the similar orbits are empty except the one everybody uses. Orbiting Earth in exactly 24 hours but say North-South, or at 14° is fun but pointless, all of the GEO birds are in the exact same orbits because they're "hovering" over a specific point on the equator by travelling at the same speed at which that point rotates, that's the whole reason to be at that expensive altitude. So your trash almost invariably goes somewhere empty and makes little difference to anything.
10 hours ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
I'm thinking of someone intentionally trashing an orbit. I still think ASAT is more econmical. But if you wanted to dump a bunch of sand around an adversary's GEO arc, I believe that's doable. It's not really feasible in LEO outside cartoonishly-aimless evil.
freedomben 17 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Ace Combat 7 (a great game) already explored this. Both sides destroy each others communication satellites at nearly the same time and it creates utter chaos on the battlefield. Had one side succeeded and the other failed, it would have been game over for that side. That seems the most likely space weapon to me, though IANA military expert by any means.
snickerbockers 11 hours ago [-]
Am I supposed to feel sorry for jeff bezos' loss?
isthissonow 18 hours ago [-]
US does not want an arm race, which China eventually will win. US wants war now.
What filthy b..ds is your pentagon, cia, politicians..
spaceuhhbased 15 hours ago [-]
The Soviet Union placed a 23mm autocannon in orbit as part of Salyut 3, a manned space station launched in June 1974:
Hard to be certain due to Cold War secrecy, but the consensus seems to be that they conducted several test-firings before the station was finally deorbited.
FuckButtons 12 hours ago [-]
using a 23mm auto cannon on orbit is more or less useless. There’s no way to reasonably shoot something when your relative velocities could easily be strictly greater than the bullets. Even if something is coming straight towards you it’s very difficult to aim when you have to take into account orbital mechanics. You would need a huge amount of RCS fuel in order to counteract the impulse from the gun. And even if you did shoot the gun if you miss, you now have a bunch of bullets that share your orbit and will at some point intercept your flight path again, if you don’t miss, you still have shrapnel sharing your orbital path.
exabrial 12 hours ago [-]
I have a feeling every major nuclear power probably does at this point. Russia definitely has global GPS jamming capabilities in orbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.
consumer451 11 hours ago [-]
The more practical approach appears to be fully on-orbit activities, as those are currently far harder to attribute. The field of "Space Domain Awareness" is still nascent and rapidly evolving.
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
> but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard
Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.
asdff 11 hours ago [-]
It probably felt really hard decades ago. But we are already well into the era where you can target a particular seat of a car driving on a highway with a nonexplosive kinetic weapon.
twothreeone 10 hours ago [-]
That doesn't mean you can hit it too. The only case which I remember was well documented was for a turret gun "controlled by satellite" hit the passenger of a standing vehicle from the back of a truck in front of it (nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in Tehran in 2020 while his wife, sitting immediately beside him, was unharmed). Also those reports were pretty questionable at the time, there were multiple competing narratives, and I'm not sure the satellite gun story was ever independently verified.
vondur 10 hours ago [-]
I've assumed that they put weapons on satellites as soon as it was possible.
Steve16384 20 hours ago [-]
I feel safer already. What's the worst that could happen? I'm sure no-one will put an AI anywhere near it.
m4rtink 10 hours ago [-]
So what is it, just kill sats, or something more interesting like rods-from-god, briliant pebbles, orbit to ground laser cannon or somethong else entirely ? Inquiring minds want to know! :-)
physhster 17 hours ago [-]
Bunch of idiots with space weapons. Great!
monneyboi 17 hours ago [-]
If we get to try and explain these times in like 30 years to our (grand-)children, I'm sure it will be with a great sense of embarrasment.
I hope one of these days we can get our priorities straight.
dudefeliciano 17 hours ago [-]
Do you feel any embarassment coming from the previous generation, which set the stage for what we have now? I think it will be much of the same.
tomasphan 16 hours ago [-]
All the time. Politically speaking the past is quite embarrassing.
dudefeliciano 15 hours ago [-]
in the west older generations hold much more power over who gets elected, demographically speaking, and look at what's going on. They feel no shame whatsoever and are doubling down.
Arubis 15 hours ago [-]
Sometimes. Depends who you ask. Some boomers are in glorious denial. Many are still in bloody office. The ones I’ve heard opine about embarrassment and failure are mostly those that’ve been trended towards fight-the-power for their adult lives.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
No their heads are in the sand as they exit the stage. Pathetic.
AndrewKemendo 16 hours ago [-]
I feel resentment and contempt to every previous generation of humans and embarassment for my generation for sure
Every human on earth should be embarrassed at the state of the anthropocentric world
kbelder 14 hours ago [-]
I'm proud of our long and amazing climb upwards, from brutality to technological civilization.
Thanks to all our forefathers that have passed their gifts onwards.
dudefeliciano 11 hours ago [-]
analog brutality, that thing of the past. much better now with technological brutality
galleywest200 15 hours ago [-]
Prehistoric humans get a pass in my book. They seemed to have a cozy life.
AndrewKemendo 3 hours ago [-]
Their greed turned a lush world into what you see today
alexashka 6 hours ago [-]
There is no 'we'.
testing22321 13 hours ago [-]
Hopefully our grand children are alive to hear that explanation.
krunck 15 hours ago [-]
The boom in private space companies all vying for USG cash was the initial indicator this was happening. The amount of mass sent to orbit so far for USRO and USSF has been huge. And it's not going to let up.
How long until the CEO of Lockheed Martin comes out asking for a ban on space weapons?
daveguy 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe they'll ask for a "slower pace of development" so it doesn't look as much like they're just asking for new regulatory barriers on their competition.
bix6 16 hours ago [-]
Nice we can finally get rid of those pesky starlink satellites that have ruined astronomy!
drob518 11 hours ago [-]
When are we getting sharks with laser beams?
asdff 11 hours ago [-]
We opted for training sea lions instead to defend our submarine bases
poolnoodle 20 hours ago [-]
Who do they want to shoot in space?
anentropic 19 hours ago [-]
other satellites
M95D 18 hours ago [-]
Isn't it easier to shoot them from the ground when they pass over? In space, the orbit must be adjusted to at least come close enough to the target, wait for the rendezvous, fire, then adjust orbit again for the next target...
consumer451 17 hours ago [-]
I believe that attribution is more difficult in strictly on-orbit activities. I would imagine that these weaponized satellites use radar stealth approaches similar to modern fighter aircraft. AFAIK, ground radar is basically what we have for space awareness.
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
Not if you want to hit your target before the other side can react and respond. Also if you expect your target to potentially shoot back, a rocket attempting to reach orbital velocity is a vulnerable target to any space based weapons or lasers because it has very limited ability to maneuver from its flight path and still reach orbital velocity.
17 hours ago [-]
emptyfile 20 hours ago [-]
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latexr 20 hours ago [-]
Not in space, from space.
hoistway 16 hours ago [-]
Guess someone finally pushed that 'deploy to production' button on orbital defense. Always assumed this was already live for years.
wewewedxfgdf 21 hours ago [-]
As long as they're OK with China and other countries having space weapons then all is fine.
Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop.
This is fine.
_djo_ 20 hours ago [-]
There have been detailed and credible claims of Chinese space weapons for some time now.
> they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop.
The Nukes of Damocles
consensus1 20 hours ago [-]
You actually think they don't already?
MattPalmer1086 20 hours ago [-]
What would be the point? MAD relies on everyone knowing you can take them out if they attack you. What does a space weapon offer additionally that makes the huge expense worthwhile?
dingaling 16 hours ago [-]
MAD is not military doctrine and never has been. It's a philosophical concept that arose in the mid 1960s and gained column-inches in the press because it had a cool and ironic name. Even McNamara rejected it.
USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.
MattPalmer1086 10 hours ago [-]
I would argue that despite not being military doctrine, it has been effective. Nuclear deterence is demonstrably real. It is a form of Nash equilibrium.
I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.
Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).
The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...
trelane 17 hours ago [-]
Killing opponents' satellites comes to mind.
Not every target is on the ground.
edgyquant 17 hours ago [-]
Space based weapons have been discussed as one of the ways to break MAD eg space based systems can see and stop a nuclear missile before it could land
consensus1 11 hours ago [-]
Controlling the high ground has been a critical element of warfare ever since the primary weapons were spears. If you want to claim that isn't the case then the burden of proof is on you.
porridgeraisin 20 hours ago [-]
Are you serious? Just because you have nuclear weapons doesn't mean all other forms of military are useless. I don't even know how to parse that argument to respond in more detail.
MattPalmer1086 19 hours ago [-]
I was responding to this comment specifically about nukes:
>Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop
nonethewiser 16 hours ago [-]
I think he was saying China already has weapons in space. Not necessarily nukes.
porridgeraisin 18 hours ago [-]
My bad
markdown 20 hours ago [-]
No, of course they don't.
21asdffdsa12 21 hours ago [-]
The biggest assets space weapon wise has Musk? Anything that can become a particlecloud taking out a orbit counts- so two constellation sattelites, that aim for one another should count?
skyhvr 7 hours ago [-]
Katsuhiro Otomo would be proud.
13 hours ago [-]
hn_submit 17 hours ago [-]
In the great power struggle there can be no safe havens. All the world's a stage. And the sky too.
aeve890 16 hours ago [-]
>All the world is a stage
Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.
14 hours ago [-]
sizzle 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds like the plot taken from For All Mankind
HelloUsername 20 hours ago [-]
> "a kinetic kill vehicle of some sort - so a vehicle that would release a projectile of some sort that would ram into a satellite and destroy it"
So, it's a pistol on a robotic arm, or what? Kinetic weapon doesn't say much.
A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
AngryData 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah im not sure what they are going on about, "Rods from God" and kinetic bombardment applies to things at the bottom of the gravity well getting hit from shit dropped from up above, it has nothing to do with satellite-to-satellite weapons. Like to launch up a few ton bullet of tungsten into orbit, then maneuver it in place when needed to deorbit and strike a major target, hits like a nuke but without the nuclear program.
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
xtiansimon 19 hours ago [-]
Because, of course, P47 has to be the first, do the thing that’s obscene. Grrr.
Theodores 20 hours ago [-]
Technically the US has had 'space weapons' for many decades, due to how an intercontinental ballistic missile works.
Incidentally, the Shuttle raised concerns in the USSR because they saw those large cargo bay doors and rocket thrusters out back, to think that this was a 'delivery system'.
In the modern battlefield, 'hypersonic' missiles are the new shiny. However, any ICBM is 'hypersonic', at least during the space phase. The new meaning of hypersonic means going at 'hypersonic' speeds through the atmosphere and in the final approach. Force equals mass times acceleration, more speed means more deceleration, which means packing a bigger kinetic punch.
ndiddy 16 hours ago [-]
Sort of related: The Shuttle was designed for military use, but mainly regarding launching and capturing spy satellites. From a NASA report on the Space Shuttle's history ( https://www.nasa.gov/history/sts1/pages/scota.html ):
> One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.
> In addition to the Air Force's cross range demand, the military also wanted a larger Shuttle payload bay than NASA originally advocated. NASA wanted the Shuttle payload bay to accommodate modules for a future space station, which necessitated a payload capacity of approximately 50,000 pounds. The Air Force wanted a bay 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50,000 to 65,000 pounds and that had doors that could open out into space to deploy satellites easily. This payload requirement meant that the fuselage of the Shuttle needed to be essentially a large rectangular box with rounded surfaces. In general, NASA went with the Air Force's requirements because it needed the Air Force's support to help insulate it from the political charge that the Shuttle was really just a step towards human exploration of Mars or a permanent space station, which is precisely what some people at NASA wanted it to be.
The Air Force was working on a Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB in California, but after the Challenger disaster they decided that the Shuttle wasn't reliable enough and opted to instead use traditional disposable rockets to launch spy satellites.
adamsb6 16 hours ago [-]
Depending on how you want to define “weapon” the actual offensive capability of the shuttle may qualify. It was designed to be able to capture satellites and return them to Earth.
We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.
t1234s 13 hours ago [-]
With how much money we spend on the DOD and MIC it would be disappointing if we didn't have multiple arrays of space weapons and weather modification.
ciconia 16 hours ago [-]
Why spend money on healthcare when you can spend it on being able to annihilate any country on earth?
sejje 16 hours ago [-]
America spends more % of its GDP than France on healthcare.
cogman10 16 hours ago [-]
For the most expensive population to insure (old people) in a much more inefficient manor (private coverage via medicare advantage).
ARandomerDude 16 hours ago [-]
At this point I would take filled potholes.
cogman10 16 hours ago [-]
Even worse, Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are.
Cool, we have a weapon in space that cost $1B and 6 months to re-arm. That's not super helpful when who we are fighting is flying $20k lawnmower powered drones to take out all our bases in the region.
We are basically the modern version of the Spanish Armada.
drnick1 15 hours ago [-]
> Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are.
Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.
dragochat 11 hours ago [-]
actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
vablings 14 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but that's absolutely incorrect. The USA has literally zero control when it comes to Iran.
mrguyorama 13 hours ago [-]
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land.
Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s.
America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will.
Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale.
The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed.
If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs.
Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day.
And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that
TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale.
Could ask Japan how that math changed - and that was with technology from 1944.
A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
AngryData 8 hours ago [-]
Traditional bombing campaigns did far more damage to Japan than the nukes did though. Also any plan that relies on dropping multiple nukes as an aggressor is a losing plan as the entire world will turn against you.
cogman10 15 hours ago [-]
Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters.
To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.
toast0 11 hours ago [-]
> To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
cogman10 10 hours ago [-]
My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations.
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
drnick1 15 hours ago [-]
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bit38ds 14 hours ago [-]
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AngryData 11 hours ago [-]
So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world?
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
tyrabound 20 hours ago [-]
> China responded on Tuesday by warning against an "arms race" in space.
> "We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
WarmWash 16 hours ago [-]
China and (maybe?) Russia are putting weapons up there no matter what.
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
passive 17 hours ago [-]
I suspect this isn't true in any meaningful way, and relates to Trump's people deceiving him.
Seems 100X more likely that Trump said "what kind of weapons does space force have?" and they had to come up with something, rather than a clandestine space weapons program being successfully developed and deployed.
ChoGGi 17 hours ago [-]
It would not surprise me at all if the Trump administration is the one to bring Kessler's nightmare to fruition.
Might be a good thing for humanity if we all get stuck here, and have to figure out how to get along or die trying...
mmaunder 15 hours ago [-]
It’s paywalled. Is anyone reading it before replying here?
I have been getting occasional paywalls from the BBC asking to pay to read articles. Clearing cookies does remove the paywall for a while so I think it's some sort of A/B test they're running.
epolanski 14 hours ago [-]
Feels like I struggle to wake up to a good news since a decade.
LightBug1 16 hours ago [-]
- Confirm openly that space weapons have been deployed.
- Open the floodgates to the open militarisation of space by all possible nation states.
- In response, justify huge increases in space defense spending budget
- Rinse / repeat to kingdom come. Same as it's always been.
Someone's getting a nice fat bonus, cigar and a blowjob tonight.
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
carterschonwald 15 hours ago [-]
… i thought international treaties explicitly say no space weapons. ughhhh fucking wh
razerbeans 15 hours ago [-]
FTA it says the treaty covers "weapons of mass destruction". But historically (at least prior to the 2000's), there was an unspoken rule of not weaponizing space. I think that's changed in the last ~20 years and recall covered of China sending kinetic weapons into space.
krunck 15 hours ago [-]
And you think America cares about treaties?
Arubis 15 hours ago [-]
Historically it did, so long as the politically privileged class of USians were among the folks that would be advantaged by those treaties.
Anti-nuke proliferation and CFC restriction treaties worked.
Treaties with native populations were ignored and violated whenever convenient; now they get occasional acknowledgement in speeches but no actual change or action.
I would’ve put space weaponry in the first category.
Arubis 15 hours ago [-]
Laws are for the little people, obviously.
16 hours ago [-]
recentlypostedj 15 hours ago [-]
Wasn't it always known? I thought Trump had said it in his 1st term. Cant find the article thought
kibwen 16 hours ago [-]
Behold, the real bull case for SpaceX: not space-based datacenters, colonizing Mars, or asteroid mining, but the thorough militarization of Earth's orbit by the US.
throw158a3 6 hours ago [-]
America is just another rouge state like Russia and China
junon 20 hours ago [-]
> Golden Dome
Trump seemingly cannot resist the classic opportunity for a "1up", can he?
Eawrig05 13 hours ago [-]
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darig 17 hours ago [-]
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DarmokTanagra 18 hours ago [-]
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pythonRon 20 hours ago [-]
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gchamonlive 20 hours ago [-]
When the sole focus is profit and to crush enemies and not to care for the people, the world will start to look like it's full of enemies and profit. It's a self perpetuating, self inflicted situation.
vbezhenar 20 hours ago [-]
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Aboutplants 19 hours ago [-]
Only to be impacted by the debris field it creates
motbus3 17 hours ago [-]
Cmon folks. What is happening over there? Can anyone tell me? Is it the plastic in water or something?
ck2 19 hours ago [-]
the idea that the orange infant can order the use of weapons in space should be terrifying to everyone regardless of politics
no-one is stupid enough anymore to say "oh he would never"
or "only against people we don't like"
No, of course he would use it against Canada or Greenland if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or didn't sleep at all
He clearly has rage fits which is one of the early signs of dementia
He would most definitely order the use of space weapons
I am really surprised he has not nuked some part of Iran yet, innocent civilians be damned but there are still 800 days left so here's hoping we don't wake up to that headline
minipark 20 hours ago [-]
Isn't it ironic? Spending billions on threats from space while ignoring the person on Earth who acts like Putin's favorite unsecured login.
15 hours ago [-]
mrtksn 18 hours ago [-]
How is this smart? US was already able to strike any place on the globe, what happens if this motivates the US enemies also have weapons in space and then US mainland becomes strike-able.
What was the thing that the US military previously couldn't blow up? The enemy now can have giant piece of hard metal in orbit and blow up previously %100 out of range data centers for example.
Very unwise action on US part.
Merad 17 hours ago [-]
"Space weapons" here most likely means some combination of anti-satellite weapons and electronic warfare such as GPS jammers. AFAIK it's been widely believed that the USSR/Russia has had these capabilities in orbit since the 80s. I'd be willing to bet that the US has had them for decades as well, it just hasn't been publicly acknowledged.
mrtksn 16 hours ago [-]
For some reason they did not provide any details beyond that they have kinetic and non-kinetic means. Kinetik indeed can mean just ability to blow up satellites but IMHO it is good enough to trigger an arms race.
mrguyorama 12 hours ago [-]
The arms race was always happening. Russia put a weapon on a space asset decades ago, basically for shits and giggles, but was recently practicing a space asset maneuvering and deploying a smaller asset, and there's very little justification for such a system other than "Attack another satellite", especially since no public cover has been offered.
Both Russia and China have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Ages ago.
Space being not militarized was always a fiction. Space was militarized first and foremost, and everything NASA ever did was to encourage and help that goal. This has only gotten dramatically less symbolic and more actually meaningful since recent massive advances in space sensor platforms and scale.
This is only a change in public messaging unfortunately.
This was always the inevitable outcome, because there's no "Bigger fish" to make independent nations follow any rule other than the rule of the jungle, and space is the highest ground.
WarmWash 16 hours ago [-]
More unwise is doing nothing and letting adversaries have it.
5upplied_demand 15 hours ago [-]
The same logic that has spent decades providing us with poorly planned preemptive attacks and an ever-growing military budget. Meanwhile, the quality-of-life for the citizens who pay for it continues to decline.
ajsnigrutin 18 hours ago [-]
I always find it funny here, how out of all the targets "the enemy" could hit, HN-er is afraid they'll hit the datacenters :)
You don't need space weapons to hit datacenters, you need one van full of explosives and someone willing to die to deliver it to a datacenter.
To temporarily disable them, you just need a cheap drone with some explosives.
mrtksn 17 hours ago [-]
Finding someone who is both willing and able to deliver explosives to a datacenter wouldn't be easy, the last stime something like that happen is 9/11. Throwing large masses on the other hand is not so hard as countries like Iran already have missile building capacity and are partners with actual space capable Russia.
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
MSFT_Edging 16 hours ago [-]
There were suspicious rednecks shooting out power stations a couple years ago.
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
lithos 17 hours ago [-]
Hit enough transformers and it will be a very long temporary.
Invictus0 18 hours ago [-]
You thought we had a whole Space Force without any Forces?
mrtksn 18 hours ago [-]
Well, let's hope that these forces are going to get better outcomes than the forces that fought in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran.
It's so ridiculous to elevate the war zone when you were far away and out of reach currently. US is so target rich that I will be very surprised if US enemies leave those alone once US paved the way to the new frontiers.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
I might have thought about this too much.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
[2] https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/articles/new-normal-componen...
[3] https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasst...
We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
Eh, you can do a lot better than that: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conksat_introducing-fragsat-f...
:)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...
A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
> I think it's something similar with China
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.
Is your comment an example of this?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz_program#Defense_measures
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
> in the event that you land in a forest or similar.
I was very confused and wondered where this was going!
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.
That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secretive-russian...
The US invasion of Iraq was also based on "strong evidence" of WMDs.
Got some?
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
I don't see any evidence.
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
Proxy at work is stopping me from reading most of grandparent links, so it'll have to wait for home.
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.
Why do you keep avoiding the question?
If they didn't, it makes sense why they'd choose to compete on the same playing field now, as the norm is already broken.
None of what I'm posting is about saying the US are the 'good guys' here. Neither the US, Russia, nor China are 'good' for creating a new space arms race that puts everyone at more risk. It might be something we can understand from a purely rational perspective while disliking that it's happening.
Not really, LBH, if RU and PRC ask US to kneecap US launch tempo or set some Washington naval treaty tonnage to space limits, US would lol.
Rationally US (hegemonic stability) is incentivized to be uniquely bad, i.e. significantly MORE guilty of introducing new/more escalatory arms race conditions by virtue of having most space capability/tech stack, and incentivized to maintain capability gap. US typical the one pushing boundaries to seek absolute security because it cannot (and currently does not have to) accept parity.
Followed by RU simply because they're broke and have to do desperate shit like Cosmos 2542. Meanwhile PRC counterspace rollout has been within norm, i.e. match capability of others, land->space direct ascent ASAT, coorbital rendezvous / proximity ops, EW/dazzlers (land+space). PRC cooking from the regular menu, partly because catchup, but PRC also way past RU in space now, but hasn't introduced any destabilizing novel counter space tech that would escalate space arms race except doing normal stuff at scale that triggers US anxiety over size of gap. But ultimately, no one is forcing US to break meta continuously because it rationally won't accept vulnerability.
DoD/W didn't have to weaponize SpaceX... but they did, so we should not be surprised in future if general international space admin/order breaks down in future. i.e. US/SpaceX got first come first serve dibs on favourable civilian LEO orbital shells assignment from UN/ITU, but now SpaceX now civil military fusion platform, so probably expect PRC counter space mega constellations to simply ignore US space entitlements in future.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
[1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planes/comments/15fh5js/a_us_air_fo...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59299101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_...
The outer space is already a dumpster and a disaster.
Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
https://san.com/cc/nasa-china-wants-military-moon-base/
Really at this point between conspiracy and official realize is just matter of a year if not just a couple months now.
To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?
I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-anti-satellite-test
This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4198/1
but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive"
and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
And if China hadn’t stuck its dick into the Korean War, the whole peninsula would probably be as prosperous as the south.
I'm going to bookmark your comment and read it instead of drinking coffee every day this month, thanks.
You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
China supported the Khmer Rouge, maybe Pol Pot is memorable?
Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
First to publicly announce it. However, Russia beat us to the punch.
Russian, China, India, and the US are all in this secret little club (but maybe not so secret anymore!)
The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).
Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.
Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3
[1]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 1999–2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060831035044/http://www.de.afr...
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 2009–2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160428181404/http://www.kirtla...
- LASER Effects Test Facility fact sheet from 2002 showing a 50-kilowatt CO² LASER setting a test target on fire: https://web.archive.org/web/20070315131556/http://www.de.afr...
- Consideration of time-of-day/azimuth of overhead satellite based on shadows and perspective.
- Comparison to other imagery of the same location checking for portable objects (such as vehicles) and keeping track of when they appear and disappear, and whether they're present in the imagery being analysed.
- Consideration of cloud coverage and weather conditions to rule out unwanted satellite passes.
Then write up a report and publish it, making it a believable and concrete finding instead of a finding that otherwise may just be perceived to be speculation/vibes.
[1] https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-jordan-strike-at-u-s-aircraf...
Press article: https://www.livescience.com/secret-classified-satellite-trum...
Blog write up: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/09/image-from-trump-tw...
Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
That is, China's in a bit of an awkward position to complain very much.
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/china-says-it-remains-opposed-weapons-...
One is significantly more risk to the rest of the world than other.
And the US just publicly told everyone they have weapons in space?
Hell of a coincidence.
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
Edit: Its a perfectly valid response to the question that was asked.
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
All you need to know about making deals with Russia.
We dont know if Ukraine would be a state today if they refused
Can you expand on your solution to world peace?
It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.
"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".
Reagan had the right strategy , for his time.
>They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.
I feel that applies more to Russia's space program--some cosmonauts (not all, of course) support Putin's war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8
> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
What filthy b..ds is your pentagon, cia, politicians..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
Hard to be certain due to Cold War secrecy, but the consensus seems to be that they conducted several test-firings before the station was finally deorbited.
People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711876
Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.
I hope one of these days we can get our priorities straight.
Every human on earth should be embarrassed at the state of the anthropocentric world
Thanks to all our forefathers that have passed their gifts onwards.
I expect "rods from god" to be used any time now.
https://panda.substack.com/p/salvage-fuzing-and-co-orbital-n...
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness
Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop.
This is fine.
https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/202...
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
The Nukes of Damocles
USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.
I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.
Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).
The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...
Not every target is on the ground.
>Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop
Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.
Semi related "Rods from God": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
Incidentally, the Shuttle raised concerns in the USSR because they saw those large cargo bay doors and rocket thrusters out back, to think that this was a 'delivery system'.
In the modern battlefield, 'hypersonic' missiles are the new shiny. However, any ICBM is 'hypersonic', at least during the space phase. The new meaning of hypersonic means going at 'hypersonic' speeds through the atmosphere and in the final approach. Force equals mass times acceleration, more speed means more deceleration, which means packing a bigger kinetic punch.
> One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.
> In addition to the Air Force's cross range demand, the military also wanted a larger Shuttle payload bay than NASA originally advocated. NASA wanted the Shuttle payload bay to accommodate modules for a future space station, which necessitated a payload capacity of approximately 50,000 pounds. The Air Force wanted a bay 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50,000 to 65,000 pounds and that had doors that could open out into space to deploy satellites easily. This payload requirement meant that the fuselage of the Shuttle needed to be essentially a large rectangular box with rounded surfaces. In general, NASA went with the Air Force's requirements because it needed the Air Force's support to help insulate it from the political charge that the Shuttle was really just a step towards human exploration of Mars or a permanent space station, which is precisely what some people at NASA wanted it to be.
The Air Force was working on a Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB in California, but after the Challenger disaster they decided that the Shuttle wasn't reliable enough and opted to instead use traditional disposable rockets to launch spy satellites.
We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.
Cool, we have a weapon in space that cost $1B and 6 months to re-arm. That's not super helpful when who we are fighting is flying $20k lawnmower powered drones to take out all our bases in the region.
We are basically the modern version of the Spanish Armada.
Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s.
America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will.
Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale.
The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed.
If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs.
Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day.
And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that
TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHave...
A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
> "We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
Might be a good thing for humanity if we all get stuck here, and have to figure out how to get along or die trying...
- Open the floodgates to the open militarisation of space by all possible nation states.
- In response, justify huge increases in space defense spending budget
- Rinse / repeat to kingdom come. Same as it's always been.
Someone's getting a nice fat bonus, cigar and a blowjob tonight.
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
Anti-nuke proliferation and CFC restriction treaties worked.
Treaties with native populations were ignored and violated whenever convenient; now they get occasional acknowledgement in speeches but no actual change or action.
I would’ve put space weaponry in the first category.
Trump seemingly cannot resist the classic opportunity for a "1up", can he?
no-one is stupid enough anymore to say "oh he would never"
or "only against people we don't like"
No, of course he would use it against Canada or Greenland if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or didn't sleep at all
He clearly has rage fits which is one of the early signs of dementia
He would most definitely order the use of space weapons
I am really surprised he has not nuked some part of Iran yet, innocent civilians be damned but there are still 800 days left so here's hoping we don't wake up to that headline
What was the thing that the US military previously couldn't blow up? The enemy now can have giant piece of hard metal in orbit and blow up previously %100 out of range data centers for example.
Very unwise action on US part.
Both Russia and China have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Ages ago.
Space being not militarized was always a fiction. Space was militarized first and foremost, and everything NASA ever did was to encourage and help that goal. This has only gotten dramatically less symbolic and more actually meaningful since recent massive advances in space sensor platforms and scale.
This is only a change in public messaging unfortunately.
This was always the inevitable outcome, because there's no "Bigger fish" to make independent nations follow any rule other than the rule of the jungle, and space is the highest ground.
You don't need space weapons to hit datacenters, you need one van full of explosives and someone willing to die to deliver it to a datacenter.
To temporarily disable them, you just need a cheap drone with some explosives.
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
It's so ridiculous to elevate the war zone when you were far away and out of reach currently. US is so target rich that I will be very surprised if US enemies leave those alone once US paved the way to the new frontiers.