War in Space May Be Closer Than Ever
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
A number of scenarios start with just that, something happens and suddenly the space around the earth is so full of junk flying every which way that a new sort of "debris" belt prevents launching new Geo satellites or even people into orbit.
At which point the country that can build a space "tank" a hardened satellite which is designed to deflect damage from collisions wins.
Alternatively the ways in which things can be de-orbited can be increased. The laser idea has some good press going for it, I am partial to conductive tether tugs, but it is probably not going to be people up there taking out the trash.
And of course if someone does this deliberately how much of the US' military inventory is suddenly worthless? Predator drones, cruise missiles, gps guided bombs, auto-pilot features, iridium sat phones, gps laser designators, lots and lots of stuff. Not the kind of change that leads to extended space use.
What do you think would be the best strategy for defending the current fleet? It seems like 3 "tanks" in highly elliptical orbits could provide some defense against space based attacks, but not really against ground-based lasers.
Tether tugs basically have a glob of adhesive that works in space on one end, spool out a long conductor and then energize it with a small solar panel, it provides a constant back emf against the earths magnetic field. That slows you down, you orbit lower, and then the atmosphere takes over. Of course vacuum adhesives are quite a challenge.
I meant 10 km/s; LEO orbital velocity is around 7 km/s and in the example I took into account that you can go faster at those altitudes if your orbit is elliptical. Double the velocity if one of the object is orbiting retrograde instead of polar. Adjust accordingly for other relative inclinations. Is there any reason I should be off by 3 orders of magnitude?
No. I was - I was thinking km/hr rather than km/sec, and 10 km/hr was clearly far too low. My error.
10K km/sec is 0.03c. It's not a velocity that will remain in earth orbit.
3.336×10^-5
1000km/s is enough to escape the galaxy (in fact, about 2 times more than needed. it's ridiculously fast.) 0.03c is 8990 km/s.
Another thought - maybe the future is not in satellites, but in aircrafts, like Project Loon's balloons and solar-powered high-altitude drones. Both will be much cheaper to make and launch, could easily take over most of the Earth-related responsibilities of satellites (meteo, agriculture, communications, spying) and offer much more flexibility (you can't exactly tell the satellite to hover or circle over a location for a while, and then circle over another one).
But the big visible satellites? disabling gps, glonass or any of the communication satellites? That's a real bad idea. Messing with those looks a whole lot like starting world war 3.
Presumably, a modern conventional world war scale war would start with cutting the fiber optic cables, and disabling the communication satellites. Step 2, eliminate all of the gps type stuff. Maybe you'd pick off the spy satellites first. Stopping communications and navigation would disrupt economies a whole lot more than tipping your hand about troop locations.
The big asymmetry lies in the dependency that the US has on both civilian and military satellites. The existing satellite infrastructure will not be retrofitted with armor or other defenses, so the cost of protection is in the trillions of dollars.
Within 10 years all satellites will be armored and look nothing like current-day satellites... or perhaps smaller, more disposable sats will become the norm (like those launched by Planet labs).
Ground-based lasers are capable of emitting pulses of energy sufficient to damage or disable many satellites.
We are not 'closer than ever' to nuclear war, for example.
While I agree that in theory this is true I don't think in practice this is always the case. It speaks to a larger morality issue coupled with economic/personal conditions of the professional involved. For example is it moral to develop space weapons if you are sure your enemy is/may be doing the same (see: military industrial complex)? Or what if the professional in question is threatened with career ruin if they don't comply or even have their loved ones threatened?
I'm just trying to say this isn't the black and white issue some people want to make it out to be.
The answer NO makes sense only when ALL technologists do it. Prisoner dilemma.
Anyway, our technological civilization started when apes learned to use stone and stick as weapons. So, no surprise that most of the technological development is driven by weapons development. After all, Cro-Magnon had bow, and Neanderthal was physically stronger and had more peaceful spirit as result ...
Technologists is not a politically or economically homogenous group. You can find engineers who would like to work on anti-satellite weapons for all kinds of reasons: economic, political, patriotic, religious, economic or simply for its cool factor. Also, technologists are not universally pacifists or proponents of space exploration or progress in general (even though majority of them may be).
Thank you for putting it this way. People come up with all kinds of rationalizations to work on such things in exchange for a little more money.
They need to be shamed.
Well, if this is what he's comparing space debris to, then we're so screwed. We can't make most people notice or care about fish, acid rain, deforestation, etc. because the consequences are already too abstract - and space trash? That's gonna be an order of magnitude harder.
I wish there was a good way to make people care about things that are actually important; as things are now, the general population pays attention in inverse relation to issue's actual importance.
Fiction becomes reality.
It's literally another space race if it's true, and we know how the last one turned out.
As they seek to destroy stuff in space (from Earth and from space), they'll want to do it as cheap and fast as possible, and that will be picked up by civilian space companies and enthusiasts in no time.
I highly doubt it will cause any big wars - but if it does, we damn well deserve it.
A space race to build weapons to destroy each other's satellites is not fun, and not good news. I don't see the higher probability of armed conflict with Russia or China as a good trade-off for development of space technologies. And going to war because "we damn well deserve it" is a terrible reason.
And space is very, very big. Similar problems to cleaning up the ocean. Even if someone comes up with an effective solution, now you need to launch a million of them to get the job done.
Maybe small space debris could be cleaned up by vaporizing it or pushing it around with lasers?
Performance would be sufficient, if, for a given interval of time, it would knock down at least as many pieces of junk, as there were collisions and new launches for the same period, plus some "margin"/"premium" to keep the counter going down.
When enough of the balloonlets are destroyed by collisions, you de-orbit the thing.
Obviously, a lot depends on the as-yet-unknown debris capture material. It would have to be very elastic, sticky, and UV-resistant.
If the capture material is sort of a slimy foam that can expand greatly in volume without losing cohesiveness, the inflatable support structure might not even be necessary. You launch the mother slime, then add the foaming agent in orbit. Anything that hits it either sticks to it or slows down while passing through, without generating additional debris.
Not with that attitude it ain't. :)
Any metallic or plastic bits can likely be melted down and turned into new parts. And even totally-unusable stuff - like perhaps that glove - can always be ground up and used as propellant in some sort of crude thruster (perhaps by ionizing the resulting bits of junk and pumping it out an ion engine, or perhaps by vaporizing it into various pressurized gases).
And there are plenty of abandoned satellites up there, too. If a satellite breaks down (often because of the sheer quantity of space junk pelting it every waking moment, by the way), it's not really feasible to go and repair it, so the usual approach is to wait for its orbit to eventually decay (which isn't entirely feasible in higher orbits) while possibly launching a replacement. There are likely whole satellites or significant fragments thereof ready for repurposing.
This isn't to mention the presence of things like launch stages sitting in orbit (at least one Saturn V launch stage, for example, is in a near-Earth heliocentric orbit and is tracked as if it were a near-Earth asteroid; Apollo 10's lunar ascent module is also - as far as we know - intact and in a heliocentric orbit, though its location has been unknown since 1969). That's a lot of stuff that's probably recyclable.
> it would be akin to building a car by walking a few thousand miles from your starting point and then trying to catch bullets that have been fired from a gun
IIRC, thousands (I forget the exact figure, and I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) of grapefruit-sized-or-larger chunks of space junk are actively tracked on radar by the likes of NASA and USAF (or maybe NORAD; I forgot exactly who manages the data) in order to be able to warn the ISS and satellite operators of possible collisions. The ISS also gets pelted by golf-ball-sized-or-smaller bits of debris regularly enough that all the modules are built with whipple armor designed to withstand such constant pelting.
It's really closer to walking a few thousand miles in a world where all the air molecules are replaced by bullets. The tiny bits can likely be caught pretty easily by setting out a large, flat ablative shield to catch them with. The bigger bits are tracked on radar and can therefore be sought after specifically by a recovery craft.
I think the Moon would be a much better prospect. Lunar regolith can be refined into silicon, oxygen, iron, alumnium, and other metals. With hydrogen and a few other key metals imported from Earth, the Moon could become the center of space manufacturing for satellites, spacecraft, and other products that require an ultra-clean environment during manufacturing.
If a space war means putting mass into LEO/GEO is much more expensive because of armoring, mining the moon for resources becomes that much more appealing - especially considering it costs 1/20th the fuel to put an object in LEO from the Moon than from the Earth.
And I meant if some dumbasses start a war over some spy satellites, there's little hope for the civilization that's been built so far...
Going back to the landmine analogy, imagine being unable to get to your local supermarket because two warring nations planted landmines at every possible exit outside of your neighborhood. A war in space would be much worse.
But I agree about the debris - then again, maybe they'll invent something to clear all that crap...
I was focusing specifically on the "war" part which, to me in part, means targeting enemy assets in space, e.g. artificial satellites for communications and other purposes. If it were a race between nations to accomplish a specific goal, then by all means, let the games begin.
We won't be going to space to get to the local supermarket, so I am genuinely unsure how your analogy makes any sense.
A recent edition of BBC Horizon highlighted the problems of space junk: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0656dbj
Someone has stolen "genderless no form factor options" from the populous, and are using them against us all...
There isn't much anyone can do.
:-(