How Do We Prevent War in Space? | Hacker News Reader

How Do We Prevent War in Space?

scientificamerican.com

18 pointsheadalgorithm29 comments

We don't. Conflict is one of our defining traits as humans. It's going to show up and drive us no matter what we do. Of course we should strive for peace, but total peace is not a realistic outlook of the world or even a remote possibility.

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Exactly this. We cannot stop on earth WTF would be different in space.

I have always found this quote [0] from 'Abdu'l-Bahá very thought-provoking:

> During the last six thousand years nations have hated one another, it is now time to stop. War must cease. Let us be united and love one another and await the result. We know the effects of war are bad. So let us try, as an experiment, peace, and if the results of peace are bad, then we can choose if it would be better to go back to the old state of war! Let us in any case make the experiment.

We haven't managed yet, and I'm not saying it's easy, but there are ways to prevent wars, if we collectively decide so. Conflict is unavoidable but may be resolved in many other ways that don't involve violence.

[0] https://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/ABL/abl-23.html

By littering space with so much high momentum debris that nobody can be safe up there even without a war breaking out.

Given how easy it is to disable satellites, does the US military not have contingencies? In the case of all out war between super-powers, it seems to me that all satellites would immediately be taken out. Not planning for that is simply stupid.

I can’t speak for the U.S. military, but Google accounted for GPS satellite failure (in response to the actions of a hostile power, solar weather event, or any other reason) in their design of Spanner, which relies on precise time synchronization between geographically-distant data centers. In the Spanner white paper, the atomic clocks used in case of GPS satellite failure are called “Armageddon masters”:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Yes they do. I don't know much about it, but it's been mentioned in some OSINT slacks that there are fallback terrestrial or sea-based systems for things like ordinance guiding. Also, ICBMs use star constellations and other sources of information for guidance.

The military isn't so stupid as to ignore Kessler syndrome.

I know that at least the Minuteman III ICBMs are inertially guided. They program the coordinates into it and hit "send". No remote control, no flight termination.

I would be more worried if one party was not a super power. Disabled satellites are a danger to your own and your future space plans because the orbit of any part that breaks off becomes unpredictable.

Non superpowers don't worry about how their actions will affect they future abilities, but superpowers do.

It's very hard to track where all the satellites are. Military satellites generally have manoeuvre capability so keeping track of them can be quite challenging.

Also launching an anti-sat missile is a comparable problem to launching a satellite into the target orbit. A bit cheaper, but within an order of magnitude. That makes high orbit satellites, particularly in GEO very expensive and time consuming to target.

Put it this way, the US and Russia have had decades to put up all their satellites. You're not going to do enough launches to take all of that out in a few weeks, or even months.

Some space stations of the USSR had a gun [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz

There is a gun onboard the ISS.

A gun port, but not an actual gun, AFAIK.

Soyuz crafts contain a survival kit that includes a handgun, but it's not easily accessible until landing.

They've supposedly stopped in recent years;

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/h...

Modified from a bomber's tail gun?! What was the point of expending fuel to launch such a heavy thing into orbit? The Soviet space program lost its mind after the US beat them to the Moon.

Space is controlled by nations and their military so I don't see why there will not be conflicts and escalations. Only way to prevent war in space is humans not going to space.

It's not per see controlled. Once we get strong enough drives, then space is too big to be effectively controlled by anyone. Some planets or objects may, but many others won't be.

The war in orbit though, that will likely happen sooner rather than later.

interesting that this is coming right on the heels of this recent article:

https://aerospace.org/paper/physics-space-war-how-orbital-dy...

Here's a pretty interesting website from the creator of "Children of a Dead Earth" which focuses on near-term space combat ships.

https://childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com

and for a longer term focus, there's project rho realistic designs page http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns.php

Why would we? It seems the only reasonable place to wage war. Much better, at least, than on land occupied by people.

We should, because the purpose of war in space would be to cripple an enemy's communications and data infrastructure, which would create massive civilian casualties and financial chaos and make terrestrial war even easier.

Not sure how this can be worse than straight up bombing cities as we do today.

I can see this being a big thing for China or N. Korea who already don't communicate much outside their country and are more protectionist and have parts of the country that are 3rd world. I mean, what do they have to lose? Not a whole lot, they already censor tons, and I'm sure they'd have redundancies in place on earth to replace tech they'd lose in a space war. While whoever they attack, will not be as prepared for those losses.

If a country could control space -- as in destroy all satellites that they don't sanction, or require 'taxes' for satellites, could be hugely profitable endeavor as well for the country. Space itself is a resource.

Best to avoid Kessler syndrome, where debris in low Earth orbit - such as space warfare might produce - knocks out satellites and makes space travel more hazardous:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

Say you're china, where part of your country is 3rd world, part industrialized. Say all your competitors are 1st world countries reliant on technology. You already censor the internet, if you could 'survive and thrive' without satellite/space tech, while other countries couldn't (or would have a hard time), wouldn't you be the winner if you could simply knock out space satellites by creating a Kessler effect? You move the countries tech back space-wise and communications wise, but you make it easier to win wars/battles on land potentially and expand your territory, or at the least cripple adversaries like the U.S. or Russia.

Yup. We are not going to spend less if you cut aerospace money from the military budget.

We'll spend it on some other ill-advised "peacekeeping" venture. The intent may well really be peacekeeping, but frankly that's moot if the results aren't peace.

ci vis pacem...

Puto quod illa 'si'?

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