The U.S., Russia, and China Prepare for Satellite Warfare
edgylabs.com
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Positioning satellites are likely targets of a satellite war. There was a strong emphasis to have the European satellite positioning system (Galileo) to use different frequencies than GPS (e.g: so they could be jammed without side effects on each other). GPS jammers have been a thing for a while too.
Then, spy satellites get occasionally targeted by light beams so they cannot take pictures.
Then, both China and the US have destroyed decommissioned satellites with missiles. When China did it, they were denounced publicly for increasing the amount of space debris.
So naturally satellite-on-satellite fun was naturally going to be a thing.
A predicted satellite weapon system are rods of tungsten (or whatever) dropped from space as a mean of very powerful kinetic bombardment... something that has received the name of "rod of god". Can cause large damage without side effects (e.g: radiation, public outcry).
Rods of god however have a prohibitive cost due to the cost of lifting objects to orbit. Eventually the first superpower to get their hands in a space elevator will fill space with rods of god. Space elevators however would need some shielding to pass through the nasty Van Allen belt radiation, since space elevators are slower than rockets exposing the payload to radiation for longer periods of time.
they could easily be just shot up into the orbit from a sufficiently large conventional gun (like the 150 m long one that Bull was building for Saddam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon) or a rail gun. The HARP project was firing the payload at 6Mach and at the 30km altitude (i.e. pass the most bulk of the atmosphere) it had a velocity about 5Mach (if my 6th grade physics calculation right) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP
There are several reasons, let's take them one by one.
1. Kinetic energy is not that high compared to chemical energy, and is completely negligible compared to nuclear energy. For a kinetic(non-explosive) projectile to deliver the energy of its mass equivalent in TNT, it needs to travel at about 2.9km/s, or Mach 8.5. In other words, a rod weighing one ton hitting a target at 2.9km/s delivers a destructive energy equivalent to one ton of TNT. Since kinetic energy goes up with the square of the speed, such a rod traveling at the first orbital speed, 7km/s, would have a yield of about 5.8 tons TNT equivalent. For comparison, the largest non-nuclear bomb used in WW2 was the Grand Slam, with a yield of 6.5t TNT equiv, and the Hiroshima bomb had a yield of about 15000t TNT equiv.
2. Losses due to atmospheric drag. An orbital body can't magically hit the ground with its full orbital speed. It will lose a lot of its energy to air drag. The wikipedia page on the "Rods of God" [1] mentions a 2003 US Air Force study where the terminal velocity of these rods was Mach 10. That's only slightly higher than the Mach 8.5 I mentioned above, so the final conclusion was a bit underwhelming: "the practical applications of such a system are limited to those situations where its other characteristics provide a clear and decisive advantage—a conventional bomb/warhead of similar weight to the tungsten rod, delivered by conventional means, provides similar destructive capability and is far more practical and cost effective."
3. You can't simply drop something from orbit. A fun little experiment is this: you are a cosmonaut doing an EVA (extra-vehicular activity) and just for the fun of it you throw a small object towards Earth, at about 10m/s. What happens to the object? The cosmonaut's name was Leonov, who told the story to V.V. Beletskiy, who did the math, and the story is told beautifully by V.I. Arnold in [2]. The object goes initially towards Earth, but then starts turning, and does a full ellipse, and meets again the space station about 1.5 hour later, coming from above (well, technically it doesn't meet it, it has a deviation of a few dozen meters). The moral of this story is that you need some sort of launching mechanism to make the rod leave the satellite and go towards its target, maybe a rocket or some sort of a gun. If you want to deorbit something in the optimal way, you use a Hohmann transfer; I did a back of the envelope calculation and the propellant mass needed to deorbit is a bit less than 10% of the mass of the projectile. However, with a Hohmann transfer we are talking about more than an hour from the start of the strike to hitting the target. If you want to achieve minutes, you need to pay a price. I don't know how to do this calculation, maybe a KSP aficionado can help here, but it would not surprise me if the propellant ratio shot up to 30%. On top of that you need propellant to maintain the altitude of the satellite over the years. This adds mass and complexity to the satellite. Let's say you want to have a bundle of 20 Rods of Gods up there, 10t each. You get 200t, and then you add propellant, rocket engines, solar panels, etc, etc, I can't imagine you get away with less than 400t. For comparison the current mass of the ISS (the biggest satellite every built) is 370t and that cost so far $150BN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment [2] https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Understanding-Nature-Phe...
As far as dropping something from orbit, the concept was each rod would have a tiny booster and be in its orbit. You'd put a few dozen (or a few hundred) in polar orbits, and that way you'd always have one lined up.
The equation you're looking for in your third point is this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis-viva_equation
Exactly how long it would take for the Rod to arrive on target depends on how much control authority you have at hypersonic speeds. Not really sure what's possible there.
The vis-viva equation doesn't change what I was saying in my third point. I didn't know about it, thanks for pointing to it, but implicitly I applied it. I found a Hohmann calculator online, and I got that the delta v for going from a 400km orbit to a 100km orbit is about 175m/s. I plugged that in the rocket equation assuming a decent solid propellant (APCP used in the retrorockets of the descent stage of NASA's Curiosity and Spirit, for example, an application similar to the retrorocket needed here) and I got a propellant fraction of 6.7%. Now, at 400km you still have atmospheric drag, and you need a delta v of about 25m/s per year to maintain your orbit. If you want to go to 600km, you pay a price in the deorbiting delta v. At any rate, let's say the optimal poster that brings you down from space is between 5 and 10% of the mass of the Rod. We can agree to tall this "tiny". But this will need at least a revolution around the Earth (at 7km/s that's more than 95 min). The fact that you have plenty of Rods all over the place doesn't help you. A perfectly place Rod will still take 95 min to get from LEO to surface.
If you want to hit the atmosphere in minutes instead of 1.5 hours, you need to pay a price in delta v, but you don't have a problem with the control at hypersonic speeds - we are still in vacuum. Once you hit the atmosphere you need control to hit the target, not to get to the target faster.
Now let's see what happens if you put a few dozen or hundred in space. What can you do with a single Rod? Sure, you can destroy a civilian building, and that could be a skyscraper and you kill a few thousand civilians. I don't think either the US or Russia would adopt such a strategy (North Korea maybe). But in terms of military targets, what good are these? Remember, they are tiny in comparison with nuclear weapons. You can't destroy nuclear bunkers, you can't acquire mobile targets.
If someone could solve the mobile target acquisition problem, these would be really good at killing tanks and armored vehicles. This could be useful, but this is hardly the application the alarmists on the internet have in mind. The typical perceived threat is some type of decapitation strike (alluded by the comment I was answering to). This simply is far from realistic.
If you're in low orbit you'll drop into the atmosphere almost immediately when you burn retrograde. And you can hit your target faster by entering the atmosphere later than you otherwise would and steering down. The question is when you really have enough control to make that happen.
>Now let's see what happens if you put a few dozen or hundred in space. What can you do with a single Rod?
The earth turns. Within 24 hours all your rods will have been in a position to hit any target on the surface.
>But in terms of military targets, what good are these? Remember, they are tiny in comparison with nuclear weapons. You can't destroy nuclear bunkers, you can't acquire mobile targets.
You could most certainly destroy missile bunkers if your targeting was accurate enough even with a relatively small rod. But there's no reason to assume the rods are small - 50 tons is a nice round number. Assuming you can't get volume pricing SpaceX will loft 100 of them for about the price of a carrier.
And I don't see why you think you couldn't hit a moving target (assuming there exists a moving target worth destroying that way). The MRBM missile the Chinese have developed to destroy carriers can hit a moving target, and that's substantially the same bit of engineering.
>If someone could solve the mobile target acquisition problem, these would be really good at killing tanks and armored vehicles.
As I pointed out, this is already a solved problem. That said, it would be pointless to use something that expensive to destroy a tank. There are all sorts of ways to kill tanks and armored vehicles for a tiny, tiny, tiny (and that's not really enough "tinys") fraction of the cost. You're already a sitting duck in a tank.
No, the role for the Rods would be strategic - bunkers, ports, airfields.
I think SpaceX's revenue is inevitably going to be tainted with money derived from major military purchases.
Would love to know Musk's views.
Neither.
Instead of flashing an applause light (on HN, that would be "The United States Government is evil!" but, to be fair, in lots of other places it would be yelling about the evil Chinese) we can look at the situation as it develops and why. It would depend on how the war came about, it would depend on the different actors' behaviors and motives. It would require thinking, and honesty.
That whole world-weary "well, who knows what the distinction is between patriotism and terrorism really?" is quite foolish in general, and an excuse to avoid making hard moral choices or, worse, to avoid siding with people who are unpopular in one's social milieu. Yes, there are gray areas. There are also areas which are quite black and white. Should satellite warfare ever happen, something we should all hope is not the case, there's every chance will be able to figure out who was right and who was wrong.
Also we need orbital brooms, even second-class powers these days can trigger a Kessler syndrome. Several powerful laser installations, maybe on ships, will do fine.
Lasers would not be used to destroy the debris. Instead, they would be used to burn off particles from the space debris causing them to prematurely de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
[0] www.space.com/29271-space-station-laser-cannon-orbital-debris.html