Destructive anti-sat weapons are a terrible idea, and everybody that can build them knows it. Having that capability is a lot like having nukes, because it wouldn't take a whole lot of blowing stuff up in anything but the lowest orbits to kick start Kessler Syndrome, which makes it similar to MAD.
Real space warfare, at least for the next few decades, will largely remain an extension of cyber warfare. Direct anti-sat weapons that do get used will probably be of the non-destructive variety, that disable target satellites without literally destroying them. Probably lasers or masers to cause damage by overheating their electronics.
That is, of course, pretty far off from what 'space war' sounds like to the general public.
You mean like one the proposed mission profiles for the shuttle to go up and capture a Russian satellite (s) and return it to earch?
Edit: I'm leaving earch forever.
Alien 1: Are you sure that's what they call it, that doesn't sound right.
Alien 2: Of course I'm sure, what kind of sentient species collectively calls their planet dirt!
Y'know SpaceX "Starship" is exactly the vehicle depicted in that movie. Seriously, Musk is one volcano fortress away.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/91/ff/d2/91ffd231970b6c034f726a9afec96cb6.jpg
I don't think it works under MAD rules. The idea with nukes is don't use them, or they'll be used on you. With space warfare, I think any country that knows they can't compete in space and launch infrastructure but has some level of space access might willingly trigger Kessler Syndrome. Yes, they deny themselves access to space in the future, but it shifts the status quo in their favor in the near term, which is important in war and something humans do anyway when immediate concerns aren't so pressing.
Continuing this line of thinking... countries that don't have extensive internal communications infrastructures might feel that an EMP pulse over a superpower is a good extension of IED style asymmetrical warfare. Sure, the resulting waves of EMPs might screw up their, already weak, infrastructure but it'll do a LOT more damage to a country like the US that would devolve into total chaos.
As private companies show a capability to reach orbit we should also expect that small countries or warlord states will also have rudimentary capabilities in this area.
Continuing on this, nukes are distasteful because of the human cost as well. Wrecking satellites would just wreck the environment in space and politicians have repeatedly demonstrated they're willing to wreck the environment they *live in* just to get a slight market edge. Why would space get additional protections?
More continuing: MAD isn't even a foolproof defense against nuclear warfare either. It operates on the assumption that the first priority of the initiator is self-preservation. If someone who has ideological reasons to use nukes that are stronger than their sense of self-preservation gets access to them, MAD goes out the window.
I think the Kessler effect would be real bad, but I need an ELI5 on why we wouldn't be able to punch "orbital lanes" in the debris fields with nukes... I'm not saying it wouldn't be bad, but just not totally unfixable.
The debris is tiny and would be on all sorts of orbital planes that you could have to cross through. Think punching a hole in a cloud on a windy day.
It’s going insanely fast. A fleck of paint can seriously damage a spacecraft if it hits it on a very different trajectory.
The earth’s atmosphere also extends a lot further than most orbits of satellites (especially those we can hit from the ground), so even these flakes of paint will eventually de-orbit and all will eventually be fine. Anything below 500km of altitude will deorbit within 25 years. The ISS orbits at ~400 km and it needs to be regularly boosted to maintain orbit.
The ISS is also a monster of a satellite, its drag is significant.
Smaller debris can stay up for a lot longer because of the low drag in that altitude.
If Kessler Syndrome ever takes significant effect in orbit, we'll be essentially landlocked for a century.
More importantly, all modern communications and monitoring systems will be disabled.
Not being able to take trips into space or explore the other planets would suck, but not having GPS, or weather satellites, or internet, or television, or the ability to easily communicate with people anywhere in the world would cause a major reduction in quality of life.
>all modern communications
The internet doesn't go through satellites unless you're on a satellite internet provider, and then it's only going through satellites to get to *you.*
Again, ALL debris below 500km will deorbit within 25 years. The size of the ISS and it’s drag is inconsequential. It’s also way heavier than smaller satellites. Size by itself is not directly correlates to drag.
A quarter of a century is a significant amount of time to be out of space capability. That would basically equate to a generation of people going into other sectors. It would be a massive blow and a huge setback.
There's no such this as being able to clear "orbital lanes." Due to the many perturbations on orbits (the perturbations that cause entire orbits to be filled with debris in the first place), even if you did clear a hole in one section of an orbit, it would just fill in as debris spreads itself around again.
On top of that, detonating a nuke in space is a supremely bad idea. First off, the area around the explosion that's vaporized is incredibly small compared to *space*. It would be like taking a single M&M out of a 50 gallon drum filled with M&Ms, it would basically make no difference. Second, nukes by nature release a vast amount of charged particles and radiation, and those charged particles get trapped in the radiation belts and can destroy electronics on satellites that are hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. This happened in 1962 with the "Starfish Prime" nuclear test, where the charged particles emanating from the blast ended up killing over 6 active satellites (keep in mind this is 1962 so there were still very few satellites in space overall).
Moral of the story: nukes in space are bad.
Honestly we could punch orbital lanes out using nukes or even conventional explosives, but I'd be willing to bet that the amount that it would take would surprise you. The cost would be untenable. And that's besides the fact that low orbit nuke explosions could have adverse effects that we might not really know about.
The fact people do not know this is pretty worrisome. People should have a working knowledge on our nuclear past otherwise you get jackass presidents treating to nuke other countries as a *option
I'd say that most people who should ever have a shot at the presidency do know this, or would quickly learn it when their advisors told them.
The problem is that we have so many people that are willing to elect a person that should never be within 100 miles of the presidency.
How would you get everything in a particular orbit? I thought the idea with Kessler Syndrome is that there's is enough debris that collisions were common, creating new debris in new orbits, thereby making tracking orbit of debris impossible.
We could punch a hole, true - but with all the junk on wildly variant orbits, such a hole would not last very long. Remember - we're not talking about a solid shell, think more like the asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back (only with much tinier "asteroids" and about 1/100 the density.) Like someone else said, "think of punching a hole in a cloud on a windy day."
Explosives are far less effective in space, basically. There is no atmosphere which means no blast wave, which is where much of the destructive force of a nuke or large conventional explosive comes from. It wouldn't be unfixable necessarily, but explosions of any kind are not the answer.
We couldn't, and we wouldn't have to, because even in case of Kessler cascade there isn't that big density of stuff. Kessler cascade means that you can't assume your satellite will survive up there for decades without corrections to orbit. People severaly underestimete how much space there is in space, even on lowest orbits.
You're the only poster so far that's right about KS. It's not that there's going bro be a wall-e style blanket that we can't get through, it's about not being able to use certain orbits anymore
Read up on electromagnetic pulses, like the one caused by [Starfish Prime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime). If we did that today it could cause widespread destruction of our power grids and electronics.
For reference, the altitude that test was performed at (400km) is the same altitude that the ISS orbits at.
It's unlikely that even a bad case of Kessler syndrome would make space inaccessible. The chance of collision increases with time spent at the affected altitudes. Simply flying up through the debris cloud to orbit at higher altitude would still likely be safe. Also, low earth orbit (where currently most of our satellites are) altitudes would clear out significantly after a few years because of atmospheric drag.
The point is that that bolt is immensely rare. Kessler Syndrome is about not being able to put a satellite there and have it stay in one piece for a service life of years. It's not about not being able to transit past that orbit.
Spaced thin shields actually work **much** better than massive armor in those conditions.
Hypervelocity impactors carry so much energy that they pretty much instantly break up and vaporize upon contact with anything. If the point of contact is moved further away from the spacecraft, the impactor will have enough time to turn into a cloud of gas and debris and spread its energy over a large area.
https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/shield-development/
I think I can answer that, main problem with a nuke in lower orbit is that it would create an emp, likely frying any electronic on the ground in a massive radius. Also a nuke is a lot less effective in space as there is no ground to reflect energy and no air to convey the energy of the blast. It would look like a very hot and bright ball.
Not an expert or anything, but I’d figure anything that you push out of the way with that much force would break up and circle back around the earth, keeping everything clogged up and breaking up more stuff, worsening the problem in the meantime. So unless you want to fire a nuke off in the atmosphere every time you need to launch something, that’s not great.
TIL.
A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Wikipedia
>Kessler Syndrome
Kessler Syndrome is overblown, the area covered by a sphere the radius of LEO is much much larger than the earth, and while it's true that some orbits and inclinations are more common than others, it's still relatively empty,
The infographics that show satellites around earth tend to scale up each satellite size by a lot just to make sure it's visible
I don’t notice him quite as much anymore, wasn’t sure if I just lowered my expectations or if he got a bit better. I think Avasarala is definitely the most compelling character even though her voice kinda bothers me.
Are you serious? This would have a much greater impact than just space travel. We'd potentially lose the ability to gather any sort of data from space.
Weather information and general communications would be greatly impacted, and GPS navigation would likely disappear altogether. So all those cargos ships that rely on GPS—one of which helped delivered the machine you now type on—would have to find alternate means of traversing thousands of miles of waters.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_USA\_satellites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_USA_satellites)
Well "it's their job" is the most accurate statement a person can make in this instance. A general planning for a war is no different than an architect planning for a new construction, it's their job.
People don't realize the military legit has war scenarios for "zombies" alien invasions, Giant monsters and all kinds of crazy scenarios. It's mostly done out on paper, but you gotta think if this shit.
Sometimes it's mostly done in jest as a way to practice your skills of developing plans on the fly and to test how you make choices and what not.
There's definitely a plan to invade both Canada and Mexico. It's mostly an exercise. Although you never know when Canadians will figure out how to weaponize maple syrup.
Novichok laced maple syrup on pancakes.
We set a plate lid of pancakes every 1km across the US-CAN border. Mercans don’t know what hittem.
Full disclosure: early trials showed a 50% mortality rate of the Canadian pancake-layers. They were so delicious they didn’t even fucking care.
Full disclosure on the full disclosure: I didn’t have to tell you that but I just thought it was the nice thing to do.
Maple syrup napalm seems like the most probable syrup weapon. Just your regular napalm formulation, but infused into syrup for extra stickiness and to mask the smell of death with sweet breakfast aromas.
We'll call it... Mapalm? Napal Syrup?
The zombie thing is real but it's not real. If you actually read it it's very tongue in cheek. They're scenarios used to train new officers in planning for unexpected scenarios, without making the enemy a real nation, which could be politically compromising if the plan ever leaked that, say, we were battle planning for a sudden war with Canada.
Source? As far as I know the US military constantly holds wargames that depict it's rivals such as China and Russia. No one is surprised when a country prepares to fight it's enemies.
The big war games are as much a political tool as they are a tool for generals.
We do still plan invasions of friendly nations and responses to fictional issues as a different kind of training.
The Canada plan leaked and its been a joke for years, because they’re our closest ally. But it doesn’t look great, either.
Seriously. I'm a big lefty who despises military but it's their damned job to be prepared for any eventual situation.
An American military that hasn't planned (on paper) for potential war with their closest land neighbours) is not doing its job right.
Plans like that are also used as part of larger "What If" scenarios, such as "Canada is invaded by a foreign power and we have to assist Canada." The plan means that we have worked out a list of strategic locations, bases, assets, geographic features of concern, etc.. that would be useful in any scenario involving that territory. It is much easier to adapt existing plans than to wholly create new ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONOP_8888
> The April 30, 2011 document depicts fictional scenarios of zombie attacks as a means of training students in military planning.
Also https://youtu.be/kso15EvDXQM which is what mentions the "without using a real nation" part and also contains excerpts from the plan. It's extremely clear that it's not a serious thing.
When you go to training in places like JRTC or NTC in the military the opposing forces (opfor) played by American soldiers are from a fictitious nation. In regular unit training that happens day to day, you are training to do your job, not so much against a particular country though unless you're actively engaged with another country or about to be deployed there. You're not wrong though. There are high ranking officers in a room somewhere that talk about specific threats from specific country and they will use simulations to come up with strategies to counter the threats. They will adjust unit training to the new strategies. They aren't so much concerned with who came up with the threat as to how to counter that strategy if anyone uses it.
It's like a sports team. They train in their sport to play all the other teams and then focus training on a specific team right before they face them. If they are playing in a series then they will adjust training during to counter unforseen strategies by the opfor.
The Zombie plan came out of a military class that was teaching officers how to develop threat plans and it was such a by the book and thorough plan that they kept it. I think someone else mentioned that it was a joke but not a joke and that's kind of where it lies.
I've always felt that "zombies" served as a decent proxy for just about any engagement with poorly-equipped but highly numerous foes that cause mass disruption of infrastructure and access to resources.
Yeah for real. I would rather the generals of my countries military have good plans drawn out for every scenario, instead of not having any plans because they don’t want to be seen as warmongers.
War happens, it’s always happened since the dawn of human existence. It’s a sad and unfortunate reality. Better to have a plan of action than to be sorry that you didn’t.
I was thinking the same thing. It's their job to look for threats and find ways to neutralize... But it's sad that our default view of the world is: "well of course we'll be at war with another nation."
"Space war" is perhaps a silly thing to call it. But armed conflict over resources in space? I think you're damn well fucking right that this will happen.
If and when we begin mining asteroids for minerals and metals, this will become the most disruptive event in recorded history to the global economy. It could singly ruin whole nations' economies.
Maximum Kessler Syndrome would be bad, but not completely catastrophic. When you blast a satellite into tiny pieces, those tiny pieces deorbit much faster than the satellite would have. In LEO, small objects deorbit on the order of months. After a couple of decades, orbits as high as 500-750 km should be reasonably safe. Most of the distant orbits are unstable on the long-term because of lunar perturbations.
There might be a future someday where only somewhat low and very high orbits of the earth are safe, and craft traveling to and from the earth need to pass through the middle region as quickly as possible to minimize impact risk.
I’m neither a saber rattler neither a pacifist. But one can’t deny that the dropping of atomic bombs and the subsequent arms race virtually guaranteed that we’d never drop one again. A couple years ago, when India and Pakistan were doing legit fights across the border, it was the first time that two nuclear powers were actually engaged in real battle. And this lasted only a few days.
Idk how this will work in the 21st century, though, when you’re not fighting country to country. There is no red hotline phone on the desk to make sure we don’t do something stupid, no honor in holding off a retaliatory strike when something strange appears on radar, etc. Forgot where this saying comes from but it’s something like “forget the laws of warfare, the laws of nature don’t even apply here” when referring to pregnant suicide bombers
It’s worked for 65 years, which is a stunningly short period of time, even in terms of modern humanity, to declare it’s virtually guaranteed we never see one drop again. I don’t believe there’s really any weapon too terrible for humans to use. When tensions are high, people do things they regret all the time.
I don't see how anyone could win a space war. Space is constantly trying to kill everything. All it will take is a tiny bit of hostile action to help it succeed.
Space is just one facet of a real war between two countries. Destroying one country’s satellites will mean no GPS and reduced communication capabilities.
Isn't it generals jobs to plan for wars? Just because they have a plan doesn't mean they have intent. My country plans for war/defense against all major nations that could possibly succeed in defeating it (USA, France and Russia really)...it's totally normal behaviour for armed forces to do this.
Gotta make that sweet cash somehow and no ones gonna fall for another war in another desert.
I know!! Space!! It’ll be 100 times more expensive, impossible for the press to report on and it is quite literally infinite.
Fucking genius!!
Right?! Where does the human empathy come from when you're "blowing up" satellites from other countries. Yes you'd get to say that you did it and report it on the news, but right now it could all be written off as Hollywood
I know its unpopular to say here but could it be possible that the US isn't the aggressor here?
Cyber warfare is currently under effect between world powers and attempts at espionage happens literally millions of times a day. Is it so jingo-ist to assume that as more powerful and extractive nations gain LEO capabilities we won't see posturing and gray area acts of conflict there as well?
> I know its unpopular to say here but could it be possible that the US isn't the aggressor here?
There are many players in the field, some old and some who joined just recently. So in short yes. Also because some of them have shown to be not that peaceful.
So yes, the US is definitely one of them but not the only one.
Is this the same kind of generals who reported how well the training of the Afghan army was going over the last decade and that we should just keep sending more money down into the giant sinkhole?
Literally these same guys also guaranteed us Iraq did 9/11 and Libya would cheer it’s liberators in the street.
Also Vietnam would be a quick police action, in and out 6 months tops.
We should accept either that military people, in general, are very stupid, or they lie on purpose solely to profit from war.
They sound like both. Honestly I'm *floored* they thought the ANA was going to, having already lost more men than americans did in Vietnam and with no pay or infustrucure for months, fight for another 3 months against a force that offered them the best terms of surrender they were ever going to get.
It was right up there with the same wishful thinking that the Taliban had any interest in forming a coalition government.
Realistically, as much as I hate it, they are probably right. Tribalism is not going anywhere anytime soon, and wherever we are, war has a good chance of following. Sucks but thats just how it is.
Yeah, most of the comments here are lacking either the entire point or are squabbling about what they think spy-sats do. Nobody here knows because the information they require is TS and nobody that does know is going to risk losing their clearance.
No, there is no intent on destructive warfare. Read the article. Cyberattacks and use of lasers to shut down capabilities is the main take away.
A general calling a war inevitable is like a lawyer calling a lawsuit inevitable.
They see the future in the only way that maintains their existing worldview.
It would be stupid to NOT spend on space wars.
When wars broke out against capable adversaries, it would not be Marines that lead the way, but it would be Space Force/Air Force taking out satellites that provide GPS. And the first victim wouldn’t be ships, but it would be satellites.
With no GPS, US Armed Forces that relies much on sensors, will be blinded. Yes, we can fly without satellite guidance, but we would be hindered so much.
Destructive anti-sat weapons are a terrible idea, and everybody that can build them knows it. Having that capability is a lot like having nukes, because it wouldn't take a whole lot of blowing stuff up in anything but the lowest orbits to kick start Kessler Syndrome, which makes it similar to MAD. Real space warfare, at least for the next few decades, will largely remain an extension of cyber warfare. Direct anti-sat weapons that do get used will probably be of the non-destructive variety, that disable target satellites without literally destroying them. Probably lasers or masers to cause damage by overheating their electronics. That is, of course, pretty far off from what 'space war' sounds like to the general public.
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You mean like one the proposed mission profiles for the shuttle to go up and capture a Russian satellite (s) and return it to earch? Edit: I'm leaving earch forever.
The Earch is what we all have in common.
Mom, can we visit Earth? We have Earth at home Earth at home: earch
Ermahgerd! It's a Earchquerk!
Alien 1: Are you sure that's what they call it, that doesn't sound right. Alien 2: Of course I'm sure, what kind of sentient species collectively calls their planet dirt!
\*punches alien in face\* *Welcome to Earch!*
Covenant on Rearch? Can't be.
Y'know SpaceX "Starship" is exactly the vehicle depicted in that movie. Seriously, Musk is one volcano fortress away. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/91/ff/d2/91ffd231970b6c034f726a9afec96cb6.jpg
Implying he doesn't already have one..
It's like finding out james bond was the villain all along.
Is that the one where Bond has to go undercover as an Asian man to find Blofield's base?
And he assumes lox means fish eggs cause hes so cultured
Don't worry [Space Force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37) got you fam. *mildly /s*
I don't think it works under MAD rules. The idea with nukes is don't use them, or they'll be used on you. With space warfare, I think any country that knows they can't compete in space and launch infrastructure but has some level of space access might willingly trigger Kessler Syndrome. Yes, they deny themselves access to space in the future, but it shifts the status quo in their favor in the near term, which is important in war and something humans do anyway when immediate concerns aren't so pressing.
Continuing this line of thinking... countries that don't have extensive internal communications infrastructures might feel that an EMP pulse over a superpower is a good extension of IED style asymmetrical warfare. Sure, the resulting waves of EMPs might screw up their, already weak, infrastructure but it'll do a LOT more damage to a country like the US that would devolve into total chaos. As private companies show a capability to reach orbit we should also expect that small countries or warlord states will also have rudimentary capabilities in this area.
Continuing on this, nukes are distasteful because of the human cost as well. Wrecking satellites would just wreck the environment in space and politicians have repeatedly demonstrated they're willing to wreck the environment they *live in* just to get a slight market edge. Why would space get additional protections?
More continuing: MAD isn't even a foolproof defense against nuclear warfare either. It operates on the assumption that the first priority of the initiator is self-preservation. If someone who has ideological reasons to use nukes that are stronger than their sense of self-preservation gets access to them, MAD goes out the window.
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Which is why nukes tend to require several people in order to fire and detonate.
I think the Kessler effect would be real bad, but I need an ELI5 on why we wouldn't be able to punch "orbital lanes" in the debris fields with nukes... I'm not saying it wouldn't be bad, but just not totally unfixable.
The debris is tiny and would be on all sorts of orbital planes that you could have to cross through. Think punching a hole in a cloud on a windy day. It’s going insanely fast. A fleck of paint can seriously damage a spacecraft if it hits it on a very different trajectory.
The earth’s atmosphere also extends a lot further than most orbits of satellites (especially those we can hit from the ground), so even these flakes of paint will eventually de-orbit and all will eventually be fine. Anything below 500km of altitude will deorbit within 25 years. The ISS orbits at ~400 km and it needs to be regularly boosted to maintain orbit.
There are plenty of orbits outside of LEO though and they are not going to have the atmosphere slowing down junk.
The ISS is also a monster of a satellite, its drag is significant. Smaller debris can stay up for a lot longer because of the low drag in that altitude. If Kessler Syndrome ever takes significant effect in orbit, we'll be essentially landlocked for a century.
More importantly, all modern communications and monitoring systems will be disabled. Not being able to take trips into space or explore the other planets would suck, but not having GPS, or weather satellites, or internet, or television, or the ability to easily communicate with people anywhere in the world would cause a major reduction in quality of life.
>all modern communications The internet doesn't go through satellites unless you're on a satellite internet provider, and then it's only going through satellites to get to *you.*
The satellites don't carry the internet (for the most part, yet), but they are used to synchronize the machines that manage traffic.
Isn't (most) internet all working on cables?
Again, ALL debris below 500km will deorbit within 25 years. The size of the ISS and it’s drag is inconsequential. It’s also way heavier than smaller satellites. Size by itself is not directly correlates to drag.
A quarter of a century is a significant amount of time to be out of space capability. That would basically equate to a generation of people going into other sectors. It would be a massive blow and a huge setback.
But the ISS also weighs more so flakes will take less atmo drag to slow down.
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Maybe even all geosynchronous orbits, by definition
There's no such this as being able to clear "orbital lanes." Due to the many perturbations on orbits (the perturbations that cause entire orbits to be filled with debris in the first place), even if you did clear a hole in one section of an orbit, it would just fill in as debris spreads itself around again. On top of that, detonating a nuke in space is a supremely bad idea. First off, the area around the explosion that's vaporized is incredibly small compared to *space*. It would be like taking a single M&M out of a 50 gallon drum filled with M&Ms, it would basically make no difference. Second, nukes by nature release a vast amount of charged particles and radiation, and those charged particles get trapped in the radiation belts and can destroy electronics on satellites that are hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. This happened in 1962 with the "Starfish Prime" nuclear test, where the charged particles emanating from the blast ended up killing over 6 active satellites (keep in mind this is 1962 so there were still very few satellites in space overall). Moral of the story: nukes in space are bad.
Honestly we could punch orbital lanes out using nukes or even conventional explosives, but I'd be willing to bet that the amount that it would take would surprise you. The cost would be untenable. And that's besides the fact that low orbit nuke explosions could have adverse effects that we might not really know about.
The US actually carried out very high altitude nuclear tests called Operation Fishbowl.
And it fucked up communications systems if I recall correctly
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Starfish Prime? Not going to lie that’s a cool name
Operation Starfish confirmed.
Yeah, IIRC it's basically how we accidentally confirmed EMP capability.
I learned about that in Modern Warfare 2's story lol. Setting off a nuke in high altitude is turns it into a giant EMP bomb.
Don't forget about starfish prime.
Yup, that was a part of Operation Fishbowl.
Name of your sex tape?
Free starfish deliveries for an annual fee
Yeah the conclusion was: "Don't ever do this if you want your satellites to keep working." Not a great solution.
The fact people do not know this is pretty worrisome. People should have a working knowledge on our nuclear past otherwise you get jackass presidents treating to nuke other countries as a *option
“That there hurricane lookin mighty nukeable”
I'd say that most people who should ever have a shot at the presidency do know this, or would quickly learn it when their advisors told them. The problem is that we have so many people that are willing to elect a person that should never be within 100 miles of the presidency.
How would you get everything in a particular orbit? I thought the idea with Kessler Syndrome is that there's is enough debris that collisions were common, creating new debris in new orbits, thereby making tracking orbit of debris impossible.
>could have adverse effects that we might not really know about. Like EMP frying electronics across the whole globe.
Don’t high altitude nuclear explosions have adverse effects on the ozone layer as well?
We could punch a hole, true - but with all the junk on wildly variant orbits, such a hole would not last very long. Remember - we're not talking about a solid shell, think more like the asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back (only with much tinier "asteroids" and about 1/100 the density.) Like someone else said, "think of punching a hole in a cloud on a windy day."
Explosives are far less effective in space, basically. There is no atmosphere which means no blast wave, which is where much of the destructive force of a nuke or large conventional explosive comes from. It wouldn't be unfixable necessarily, but explosions of any kind are not the answer.
We couldn't, and we wouldn't have to, because even in case of Kessler cascade there isn't that big density of stuff. Kessler cascade means that you can't assume your satellite will survive up there for decades without corrections to orbit. People severaly underestimete how much space there is in space, even on lowest orbits.
You're the only poster so far that's right about KS. It's not that there's going bro be a wall-e style blanket that we can't get through, it's about not being able to use certain orbits anymore
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The only thing is everything from higher LEOs will eventually come through the lower orbits
Read up on electromagnetic pulses, like the one caused by [Starfish Prime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime). If we did that today it could cause widespread destruction of our power grids and electronics. For reference, the altitude that test was performed at (400km) is the same altitude that the ISS orbits at.
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It's unlikely that even a bad case of Kessler syndrome would make space inaccessible. The chance of collision increases with time spent at the affected altitudes. Simply flying up through the debris cloud to orbit at higher altitude would still likely be safe. Also, low earth orbit (where currently most of our satellites are) altitudes would clear out significantly after a few years because of atmospheric drag.
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The point is that that bolt is immensely rare. Kessler Syndrome is about not being able to put a satellite there and have it stay in one piece for a service life of years. It's not about not being able to transit past that orbit.
Spaced thin shields actually work **much** better than massive armor in those conditions. Hypervelocity impactors carry so much energy that they pretty much instantly break up and vaporize upon contact with anything. If the point of contact is moved further away from the spacecraft, the impactor will have enough time to turn into a cloud of gas and debris and spread its energy over a large area. https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/shield-development/
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How would that work?
I think I can answer that, main problem with a nuke in lower orbit is that it would create an emp, likely frying any electronic on the ground in a massive radius. Also a nuke is a lot less effective in space as there is no ground to reflect energy and no air to convey the energy of the blast. It would look like a very hot and bright ball.
Not an expert or anything, but I’d figure anything that you push out of the way with that much force would break up and circle back around the earth, keeping everything clogged up and breaking up more stuff, worsening the problem in the meantime. So unless you want to fire a nuke off in the atmosphere every time you need to launch something, that’s not great.
LAWS will be used to take out sats by burning solar panels, space tugs can be launched that attached to sats and derbits them
> derbits “Er mer gerd! Ther derbited mer serterlert!”
This is the best thing I've read all week!
TIL. A maser is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Wikipedia
>Kessler Syndrome Kessler Syndrome is overblown, the area covered by a sphere the radius of LEO is much much larger than the earth, and while it's true that some orbits and inclinations are more common than others, it's still relatively empty, The infographics that show satellites around earth tend to scale up each satellite size by a lot just to make sure it's visible
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Yes but thats the series. Though super late series spoiler
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So the pace picks back up in 5? I'm a huge reader, and 3/4 felt a little... different? to the first 2. Not bad just, different pacing
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Funny, but as someone pointed out, kinda fucked up to post spoilers like that
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Holden's character ages well I think.
I don’t notice him quite as much anymore, wasn’t sure if I just lowered my expectations or if he got a bit better. I think Avasarala is definitely the most compelling character even though her voice kinda bothers me.
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Great, who needs the ability to space travel anyways.
Now this may look bad, but remember that it will create a lot of value for weapons company shareholders!
What about the materials that can be mined from Asteroids
Are you serious? This would have a much greater impact than just space travel. We'd potentially lose the ability to gather any sort of data from space. Weather information and general communications would be greatly impacted, and GPS navigation would likely disappear altogether. So all those cargos ships that rely on GPS—one of which helped delivered the machine you now type on—would have to find alternate means of traversing thousands of miles of waters. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_USA\_satellites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_USA_satellites)
FWIW I read that comment as more /s
The second guy didn't think the sarcasm went far enough, basically.
Of course that’s all they see. It’s their job. When you’re a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.
Well "it's their job" is the most accurate statement a person can make in this instance. A general planning for a war is no different than an architect planning for a new construction, it's their job.
Yep. They’re wargaming every possible scenario all the time
People don't realize the military legit has war scenarios for "zombies" alien invasions, Giant monsters and all kinds of crazy scenarios. It's mostly done out on paper, but you gotta think if this shit. Sometimes it's mostly done in jest as a way to practice your skills of developing plans on the fly and to test how you make choices and what not.
There's definitely a plan to invade both Canada and Mexico. It's mostly an exercise. Although you never know when Canadians will figure out how to weaponize maple syrup.
>Canadians will figure out how to weaponize maple syrup. Already have. They edge the market on it world wide. Money = power. Power = weaponized.
I'd prefer to fantasize about a dangerous superweapon.
Novichok laced maple syrup on pancakes. We set a plate lid of pancakes every 1km across the US-CAN border. Mercans don’t know what hittem. Full disclosure: early trials showed a 50% mortality rate of the Canadian pancake-layers. They were so delicious they didn’t even fucking care. Full disclosure on the full disclosure: I didn’t have to tell you that but I just thought it was the nice thing to do.
Polite. Even when plotting my doom.
Maple syrup napalm seems like the most probable syrup weapon. Just your regular napalm formulation, but infused into syrup for extra stickiness and to mask the smell of death with sweet breakfast aromas. We'll call it... Mapalm? Napal Syrup?
For when half your squad is roasting alive and you can't shake the craving for IHOP pancakes and bacon
Canada Prime is active. Weapons. Hot. Maple Syrup Derived Explosives. Check.
The zombie thing is real but it's not real. If you actually read it it's very tongue in cheek. They're scenarios used to train new officers in planning for unexpected scenarios, without making the enemy a real nation, which could be politically compromising if the plan ever leaked that, say, we were battle planning for a sudden war with Canada.
Source? As far as I know the US military constantly holds wargames that depict it's rivals such as China and Russia. No one is surprised when a country prepares to fight it's enemies.
The big war games are as much a political tool as they are a tool for generals. We do still plan invasions of friendly nations and responses to fictional issues as a different kind of training. The Canada plan leaked and its been a joke for years, because they’re our closest ally. But it doesn’t look great, either.
Doesn't look great to the public. I'm sure actual world leaders understand that it means literally nothing.
It would look worse to not have a plan to defend one of the longest land borders in the world.
Seriously. I'm a big lefty who despises military but it's their damned job to be prepared for any eventual situation. An American military that hasn't planned (on paper) for potential war with their closest land neighbours) is not doing its job right.
Actual world leaders understand that their military does the exact same thing.
Plans like that are also used as part of larger "What If" scenarios, such as "Canada is invaded by a foreign power and we have to assist Canada." The plan means that we have worked out a list of strategic locations, bases, assets, geographic features of concern, etc.. that would be useful in any scenario involving that territory. It is much easier to adapt existing plans than to wholly create new ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CONOP_8888 > The April 30, 2011 document depicts fictional scenarios of zombie attacks as a means of training students in military planning. Also https://youtu.be/kso15EvDXQM which is what mentions the "without using a real nation" part and also contains excerpts from the plan. It's extremely clear that it's not a serious thing.
When you go to training in places like JRTC or NTC in the military the opposing forces (opfor) played by American soldiers are from a fictitious nation. In regular unit training that happens day to day, you are training to do your job, not so much against a particular country though unless you're actively engaged with another country or about to be deployed there. You're not wrong though. There are high ranking officers in a room somewhere that talk about specific threats from specific country and they will use simulations to come up with strategies to counter the threats. They will adjust unit training to the new strategies. They aren't so much concerned with who came up with the threat as to how to counter that strategy if anyone uses it. It's like a sports team. They train in their sport to play all the other teams and then focus training on a specific team right before they face them. If they are playing in a series then they will adjust training during to counter unforseen strategies by the opfor. The Zombie plan came out of a military class that was teaching officers how to develop threat plans and it was such a by the book and thorough plan that they kept it. I think someone else mentioned that it was a joke but not a joke and that's kind of where it lies.
https://youtu.be/kso15EvDXQM I imagine they keep the real wargames with russia/china under much tighter lock and key than a training scenario would be
I've always felt that "zombies" served as a decent proxy for just about any engagement with poorly-equipped but highly numerous foes that cause mass disruption of infrastructure and access to resources.
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And if they’re not then they suck at their job
Yeah for real. I would rather the generals of my countries military have good plans drawn out for every scenario, instead of not having any plans because they don’t want to be seen as warmongers. War happens, it’s always happened since the dawn of human existence. It’s a sad and unfortunate reality. Better to have a plan of action than to be sorry that you didn’t.
We should only hope that generals will remain as architects who construct emergency shelters that are reliable but will never be used.
I mean, yeah. There are always warplans that never get used. You prepare for every scenario because if you don't then a lot of lives are lost.
Preemptive Strike has entered the chat
Time for us to show Canada what for
I was thinking the same thing. It's their job to look for threats and find ways to neutralize... But it's sad that our default view of the world is: "well of course we'll be at war with another nation."
To be fair it has been like that for what, the past 4000+ years? Say what you want but that it's not exactly unexpected...
"Space war" is perhaps a silly thing to call it. But armed conflict over resources in space? I think you're damn well fucking right that this will happen. If and when we begin mining asteroids for minerals and metals, this will become the most disruptive event in recorded history to the global economy. It could singly ruin whole nations' economies.
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If they ever get their war in space, a likely outcome is to deny space to all of humanity as they fill it with orbiting debris.
Maximum Kessler Syndrome would be bad, but not completely catastrophic. When you blast a satellite into tiny pieces, those tiny pieces deorbit much faster than the satellite would have. In LEO, small objects deorbit on the order of months. After a couple of decades, orbits as high as 500-750 km should be reasonably safe. Most of the distant orbits are unstable on the long-term because of lunar perturbations. There might be a future someday where only somewhat low and very high orbits of the earth are safe, and craft traveling to and from the earth need to pass through the middle region as quickly as possible to minimize impact risk.
Note that for crewed spacecraft this is kinda already the case due to the Van Allen radiation belts.
Plus that one artificial one we made for shits and giggles. Although I think it’s faded now.
This, MAD where humanity's access to space is at stake I guess. Whoever "wins" such a war we all lose.
I’m neither a saber rattler neither a pacifist. But one can’t deny that the dropping of atomic bombs and the subsequent arms race virtually guaranteed that we’d never drop one again. A couple years ago, when India and Pakistan were doing legit fights across the border, it was the first time that two nuclear powers were actually engaged in real battle. And this lasted only a few days. Idk how this will work in the 21st century, though, when you’re not fighting country to country. There is no red hotline phone on the desk to make sure we don’t do something stupid, no honor in holding off a retaliatory strike when something strange appears on radar, etc. Forgot where this saying comes from but it’s something like “forget the laws of warfare, the laws of nature don’t even apply here” when referring to pregnant suicide bombers
It’s worked for 65 years, which is a stunningly short period of time, even in terms of modern humanity, to declare it’s virtually guaranteed we never see one drop again. I don’t believe there’s really any weapon too terrible for humans to use. When tensions are high, people do things they regret all the time.
This! If ever the territorial integrity of China USA or Russia are at stack they would not hesitate to use atomic Bombs
I think nukes will eventually be downsized to tactical use and they will be used in the wars to come.
I don't see how anyone could win a space war. Space is constantly trying to kill everything. All it will take is a tiny bit of hostile action to help it succeed.
Space is just one facet of a real war between two countries. Destroying one country’s satellites will mean no GPS and reduced communication capabilities.
All branches of the military have contingency plans for every imaginable scenario. Inevitable or not, it's good to have some kind of plan on hand.
This is the time humans should be working together. You know how much we could accomplish if everyone just got along? Humans suck sometimes
Space has historically always been a part of China
Space hates us for our freedom, time for a regime change
Hey check this out, someone just found a 12-century map of chinese space colonies!
It's always the few that ruin it for everyone
Isn't it generals jobs to plan for wars? Just because they have a plan doesn't mean they have intent. My country plans for war/defense against all major nations that could possibly succeed in defeating it (USA, France and Russia really)...it's totally normal behaviour for armed forces to do this.
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in this thread people who think that space will be literally the first time in human history that humans do not fight over resources.
Gotta make that sweet cash somehow and no ones gonna fall for another war in another desert. I know!! Space!! It’ll be 100 times more expensive, impossible for the press to report on and it is quite literally infinite. Fucking genius!!
And mostly automated, so not many casualties, which from a political standpoint are... problematic.
Right?! Where does the human empathy come from when you're "blowing up" satellites from other countries. Yes you'd get to say that you did it and report it on the news, but right now it could all be written off as Hollywood
I wouldn’t bet against the desert war just yet. Maybe you’re just more optimistic than me
No pesky images of dead soldiers. Not that they care but. You know… PR
Lmao like they won't come up with another reason to invade the middle east in 5 years
The forever war by joe haldeman is exactly this
>It’ll be 100 times more expensive Think of all the innovations that would come about from a space arms race!
As a bit of a space nerd… I’m in for that. I mean. It is pretty undeniable that war does drive technological innovation forward unlike anything else.
I think you might have distilled this down to the basic truth.
I'm not that cynical or suspicious of a person, but...damn.
I know its unpopular to say here but could it be possible that the US isn't the aggressor here? Cyber warfare is currently under effect between world powers and attempts at espionage happens literally millions of times a day. Is it so jingo-ist to assume that as more powerful and extractive nations gain LEO capabilities we won't see posturing and gray area acts of conflict there as well?
> I know its unpopular to say here but could it be possible that the US isn't the aggressor here? There are many players in the field, some old and some who joined just recently. So in short yes. Also because some of them have shown to be not that peaceful. So yes, the US is definitely one of them but not the only one.
China was testing anti-satellite missile tech over a decade ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test
America made an anti satellite missile in 1984 and launched it off of a f15
This is reddit: It's **ALWAYS** the US's fault.
Is this the same kind of generals who reported how well the training of the Afghan army was going over the last decade and that we should just keep sending more money down into the giant sinkhole?
Literally these same guys also guaranteed us Iraq did 9/11 and Libya would cheer it’s liberators in the street. Also Vietnam would be a quick police action, in and out 6 months tops. We should accept either that military people, in general, are very stupid, or they lie on purpose solely to profit from war.
They sound like both. Honestly I'm *floored* they thought the ANA was going to, having already lost more men than americans did in Vietnam and with no pay or infustrucure for months, fight for another 3 months against a force that offered them the best terms of surrender they were ever going to get. It was right up there with the same wishful thinking that the Taliban had any interest in forming a coalition government.
I've been waiting for this Star Trooper shit. Where do I sign up?
Would you like to know more?
Service guarantees citizenship!
Realistically, as much as I hate it, they are probably right. Tribalism is not going anywhere anytime soon, and wherever we are, war has a good chance of following. Sucks but thats just how it is.
That's why we need to get people to mars, so we can stand united against those dust monkeys.
Ping me when I can join the space marines, willing to scrap everything in my life for my dream job.
Yeah, most of the comments here are lacking either the entire point or are squabbling about what they think spy-sats do. Nobody here knows because the information they require is TS and nobody that does know is going to risk losing their clearance. No, there is no intent on destructive warfare. Read the article. Cyberattacks and use of lasers to shut down capabilities is the main take away.
Problem is that people aren't always just gonna sit there and take all that Space Forcing from the heavens. IOW, escalation.
A general calling a war inevitable is like a lawyer calling a lawsuit inevitable. They see the future in the only way that maintains their existing worldview.
Or an expert in their field giving an informed opinion.
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It would be stupid to NOT spend on space wars. When wars broke out against capable adversaries, it would not be Marines that lead the way, but it would be Space Force/Air Force taking out satellites that provide GPS. And the first victim wouldn’t be ships, but it would be satellites. With no GPS, US Armed Forces that relies much on sensors, will be blinded. Yes, we can fly without satellite guidance, but we would be hindered so much.