Bill
02-20-2008, 04:36 AM
As we prepare to shoot down a spy satellite (which must suck in and of itself - a multi-billion satellite shot up in 2006 - never worked, and now it's falling down as the whole world watches), it's interesting to contemplate space war.
The hottest new thing will be lasers and masers to knock satellites down, or render them inoperative. Handy, because that doesn't produce the clouds of debris circling the earth at 18,000 miles per hour, blocking parts of space from access.
In October 2006 the Bush administration adopted a new, rather vaguely worded National Space Policy that asserts the right of the U.S. to conduct “space control” and rejects “new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.” Three months later the People’s Republic of China shocked the world by shooting down one of its own aging Fengyun weather satellites, an act that resulted in a hailstorm of dangerous orbital debris and a deluge of international protests, not to mention a good deal of hand-wringing in American military and political circles. The launch was the first test of a dedicated antisatellite weapon in more than two decades—making China only the third country, after the U.S. and the Russian Federation, to have demonstrated such a technology. Many observers wondered whether the test might be the first shot in an emerging era of space warfare.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=space-wars-coming-to-the-sky-near-you
And even tests of the technology needed to conduct space battles—not to mention a real battle—could generate enormous amounts of wreckage that would continue to orbit Earth. Converging on satellites and crewed space vehicles at speeds approaching several miles a second, such space debris would threaten satellite-based telecommunications, weather forecasting, precision navigation, even military command and control, potentially sending the world’s economy back to the 1950s.
one of China’s regional rivals, India, may feel compelled to seek *offensive as well as defensive capabilities in space. The U.S. trade journal Defense News, for instance, quoted unidentified Indian defense officials as stating that their country had already begun developing its own kinetic-energy (nonexplosive, hit-to-kill) and laser-based antisatellite weapons.
One of the most serious technological challenges posed by space weapons is the proliferation of space debris, to which I alluded earlier. According to investigators at the air force, NASA and Celestrak (an independent space-monitoring Web site), the Chinese antisatellite test left more than 2,000 pieces of junk, baseball-size and larger, orbiting the globe in a cloud that lies between about 200 kilometers (125 miles) and 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) above Earth’s surface. Perhaps another 150,000 objects that are a centimeter (half an inch) across and larger were released. High orbital velocities make even tiny pieces of space junk dangerous to spacecraft of all kinds. And ground stations cannot reliably monitor or track objects smaller than about five centimeters (two inches) across in low Earth orbit (around a meter in geostationary orbit), a capability that might enable satellites to maneuver out of the way. To avoid being damaged by the Chinese space debris, in fact, two U.S. satellites had to alter course. Any shooting war in space would raise the specter of a polluted space environment no longer navigable by Earth-orbiting satellites.
The hottest new thing will be lasers and masers to knock satellites down, or render them inoperative. Handy, because that doesn't produce the clouds of debris circling the earth at 18,000 miles per hour, blocking parts of space from access.
In October 2006 the Bush administration adopted a new, rather vaguely worded National Space Policy that asserts the right of the U.S. to conduct “space control” and rejects “new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space.” Three months later the People’s Republic of China shocked the world by shooting down one of its own aging Fengyun weather satellites, an act that resulted in a hailstorm of dangerous orbital debris and a deluge of international protests, not to mention a good deal of hand-wringing in American military and political circles. The launch was the first test of a dedicated antisatellite weapon in more than two decades—making China only the third country, after the U.S. and the Russian Federation, to have demonstrated such a technology. Many observers wondered whether the test might be the first shot in an emerging era of space warfare.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=space-wars-coming-to-the-sky-near-you
And even tests of the technology needed to conduct space battles—not to mention a real battle—could generate enormous amounts of wreckage that would continue to orbit Earth. Converging on satellites and crewed space vehicles at speeds approaching several miles a second, such space debris would threaten satellite-based telecommunications, weather forecasting, precision navigation, even military command and control, potentially sending the world’s economy back to the 1950s.
one of China’s regional rivals, India, may feel compelled to seek *offensive as well as defensive capabilities in space. The U.S. trade journal Defense News, for instance, quoted unidentified Indian defense officials as stating that their country had already begun developing its own kinetic-energy (nonexplosive, hit-to-kill) and laser-based antisatellite weapons.
One of the most serious technological challenges posed by space weapons is the proliferation of space debris, to which I alluded earlier. According to investigators at the air force, NASA and Celestrak (an independent space-monitoring Web site), the Chinese antisatellite test left more than 2,000 pieces of junk, baseball-size and larger, orbiting the globe in a cloud that lies between about 200 kilometers (125 miles) and 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) above Earth’s surface. Perhaps another 150,000 objects that are a centimeter (half an inch) across and larger were released. High orbital velocities make even tiny pieces of space junk dangerous to spacecraft of all kinds. And ground stations cannot reliably monitor or track objects smaller than about five centimeters (two inches) across in low Earth orbit (around a meter in geostationary orbit), a capability that might enable satellites to maneuver out of the way. To avoid being damaged by the Chinese space debris, in fact, two U.S. satellites had to alter course. Any shooting war in space would raise the specter of a polluted space environment no longer navigable by Earth-orbiting satellites.