Myanmar's satellite held by Japan on space station due to spying concern
reuters.com
reuters.com
How do you put the satellite onto its intended orbit, like are only satellites intended with a polar orbit capable of this approach?
Do you need booster rockets to get in the right orbit?
Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoracks_CubeSat_Deployer#/me...
What I haven't figured out is how they get the sats far enough away from the ISS orbit with only one push.
However, after launch, the small satellite usually has no ability to course correct, and its orbit slowly decays to friction with the thin atmosphere. Meanwhile, ISS continues to course correct.
The launch imparts velocity on the satellite but that velocity difference doesn't mean it flies in formation with the ISS a few hundred meters or a few kilometers apart. If they were launched in the direction the ISS is going (positive delta-v), that extra velocity means a higher orbit; if they're launched backwards (negative delta-v), it'll be a lower orbit. If it's launched sideways, it's either higher, lower, or same depending on delta-v but a different inclination (angle to the equator.) I couldn't quickly find where exactly the deployer is located but I'm guessing it's aft because it's the same module the ISS launches it's trash out of now (the Bishop airlock,) and I'm guessing they wouldn't launch anything in a fast decaying slightly higher orbit just to get hit by it a few cycles later.
The whole thing it's pretty cool, and it's quite new, it was installed only 3 months ago.
[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9087/how-often-doe...
[Huh, if the cubesats are launched at 90 mph from the ISS (the speed of a fastball), it only takes ~12 days for them to come back around; that's quite a bit faster than I would have guessed, but still probably long enough for orbital decay and ISS adjustments to put them out of line.]
Again, I'm ignorant of these things but it seems like depending on atmospheric drag to provide for the additional correction is risking a lot.
What I don't understand here is how do they avoid the satellite hitting back the ISS? Once they are separated and non-propulsed, both orbits are elliptical with at least one point of intersection, and stay like that forever. If they have different period, it seems that the ISS and the cubesat might become arbitrarily closer in the future.
We've got a lot of work to do before our space "littering" can even dream of matching that level... and that's just a coincidental level that nature happens to have, not some sort of threshold for "real harm", which I'd guess to be multiple orders of magnitude higher.
Sounds like in most cases the satellites don't have any propulsion of their own, and are "ejected" onto their orbit from the ISS. Put simply, they get thrown out.
I'm sure some checks are done of the orbital mechanics to avoid any risk of a later collission, but keep in mind that the ISS makes frequent course corrections to stay in orbit, and at this low of an orbit drag is also a factor, so simply being a smaller craft will cause different forces to push you onto a different path.
Obviously this means you have very little choice in your orbit, but for many small satellites this isn't a concern.
EDIT: To answer your "use it as a garage" point, the answer is that it's way too impractical. In orbital mechanics, drifting apart from something is far easier than getting closer to it, and space is really, really big. Plus keep in mind that you need to not only be in the same place at the same time, but you also need to be moving at the same speed (relative velocities in LEO can quickly reach the order of kilometers per second).
But I guess the high velocities mean you need a really strong and light net and the rapid deceleration might damage the satellite anyway.
As their orbit decays, they would actually need tons of fuel to accelerate and raise their orbit to reach the station, it’s totally impractical.
EDIT: not geostationary
edit: I'm the third one to say this in a span of a minute, sorry.
There were studies on using the Shuttle to repair satellites, but aside from the maintenance mission on Hubble those plans were shelved. The cost of a new satellite was generally a lot less than the cost of a shuttle mission dedicated to repairing it, and it would often need to be dedicated due to the requirement to match orbits.
Even if the ISS released a smallsat, which it does from time to time, that doesn't help you. By the time you need to do maintenance on it, the cubesat will have dropped into a much lower orbit due to upper atmosphere effects.
The safest, and practically perhaps the only viable way for the ISS to do maintenance on orbital instruments is if they stay attached to the ISS.
Sorry to be pedantic, but modern rifle muzzle velocities are in the 1.2km/s range. Escape velocity in LEO is 11.2km/s, so your maximal closing speed is ~22.4kms. Which is maybe 1.3 orders of magnitude difference, not "quite a few". Orders of magnitude are big.
For the rest, you are right of course: we're talking closing speeds that can easily be one order of magnitude higher than rifle bullets (or armor-piercing tank projectiles, for that matter; those are at 1.7km/s or so).
Kinetic energy is ½m•v².
#ftfy
That's quite an overestimation.
Let's be generous and say a rifle bullet is 50 gram (0.05 kg) and fires at 1.1 km/s, and a communication satellite weighs 5 metric tonne (5000 kg) and escape velocity is 11 km/s. We have 5 orders of magnitude difference in mass and 1 in velocity. As momentum is m*v, total difference is 6 orders of magnitude. Kinetic energy is 1/2*m*v^2, so that gives 7 orders of magnitude difference.*
The mass of a bullet is more like 5 grams, and the mass of a satellite could be around 500,000 kg (the ISS). A quick search shows the the largest commercial communications satellite is Telstar 19V, with a mass of 7,076kg; in my first estimate I guessed 50,000kg. Finally, the closing velocity of two objects in orbit could be up to 22.4 km/s.
rifle bullet: 3×10³ J
Telstar 19V, geostationary orbit: 3.3×10¹⁰ J
Telstar 19V, geostationary transfer orbit: 3.5×10¹¹ J
ISS, LEO: 1.2×10¹³ J
hypothetical fast ISS: 1.1×10¹⁴ J
14−3 gives 11 orders of magnitude, but good luck making the ISS go that fast. Also, don’t forget to add in the kinetic energy of the net; it’s not going to be zero.
Still, even 7 orders of magnitude qualifies as ”quite a few”. You don’t need very many orders of magnitude before you have too many.
Of course you can make the statement true by changing everything it's about.
I do agree that the ISS is not usually considered to be a communications satellite (though it does have plenty of communications gear on board, including a ham radio repeater if I recall correctly). But it is a thing that we might want to deorbit one day. Since we were considering the ridiculous closing velocity of two objects that are both on escape trajectories, I figure using the ridiculous mass of the ISS was fair game too. But like I said, I originally guessed 50t, not 400t. I was thinking more about the payload capacities of launch vehicles than the satellites themselves.
Whatever mass and closing velocity you consider, 7 or 10 or 11 orders of magnitude all qualify as “quite a few” even if the velocity itself only has 1.3 orders of magnitude of difference.
And anyway, none of this matters, because the relevant OP specifically said "speed".
So the plain and obvious conclusion is: False.
what caliber do you have in mind for that?
If a zombie satellite needed to be decomissioned, could it be shot down and left for the pieces to disintergrate in the atmosphere instead?
Otherwise, you risk just creating more high-v debris. At the extreme end of this, you could trigger the Kessler Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome) and make orbit practically unusable.
In fact the Chinese satellite destruction test in 2007 was a very good example of this:
“ Anti-satellite missile tests, especially ones involving kinetic kill vehicles as in this case, contribute to the formation of orbital space debris which can remain in orbit for many years and could interfere with future space activity (Kessler syndrome).[7] This event was the second largest creation of space debris in history after Project West Ford, with more than 2,000 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger) officially catalogued in the immediate aftermath, and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.[24][25] As of October 2016, a total of 3,438 pieces of debris had been detected, with 571 decayed and 2,867 still in orbit nine years after the incident.[26]
More than half of the tracked debris orbits the Earth with a mean altitude above 850 kilometres (530 mi), so they would likely remain in orbit for decades or centuries.[27] Based on 2009 and 2013 calculations of solar flux, the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office estimated that around 30% of the larger-than-10-centimeter (3.9 in) debris would still be in orbit in 2035.[28]
In April 2011, debris from the Chinese test passed 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) away from the International Space Station.[29]
As of April 2019, 3000 of the 10,000 pieces of space debris routinely tracked by the US Military as a threat to the International Space Station were known to have originated from the 2007 satellite shoot down.[30]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
* not actual butter, but you get the idea, some polymer, or maybe aerogel?
Wonder if there's a paper somewhere that computed possible Δv requirements for a collector if you squeeze your flight plan very tight.
(Also in-orbit refueling will change this equation a lot. You could keep a bunch of such collectors continuously in space, and wait for the trash to align right. There's no hurry.)
If not the sun then maybe the earth?
That would be a fun spacewalk.
In comparison, a deorbit burn is usually relatively inexpensive.
For comparison, the fastest bullets go like ~1,500m/s, and they are very very very small.
I don't think we should do either of those, but less mass is always easier to speed up.
Similarly, if a satellite is light enough in low-G to grab and manipulate from a craft that has straddled up along side it, would a single astronaut have enough strength to use his arms to put a satellite on a path that is effectively out of the way? Or could they just chuck it back at the earth so it can burn up on reentry?
edit2: actually now I'm not so sure, I might have had the right number initially. It's either 24k or 32k. Either way it's impractical.
24,000m/s is the difference in speed that the astronaut is already traveling with the speed necessary to get to the sun
Getting to the sun is really hard.
Chucking it back into the atmosphere is much easier, but GP was asking about throwing things into the sun.
But the speed of the baseball you just thrown out will be (ignoring air friction) that of the airplane +/- 40 m/s, assuming you're some super strong thrower.
> if a satellite is light enough in low-G
Microgravity doesn't mean the satellite is light now. It still has the same mass, it's just that you're both in free fall, so it doesn't pull away from you. For the purpose of throwing it, the satellite is just as hard to throw as it would be on the surface of Earth.
But even assuming it weighs as much as a fastball, when you throw it super hard, you'll change its velocity by... 40 m/s at best. Compare that with the orbital speed, which is many kilometers per second (e.g. about 7.6 km/s if you're on ISS). So e.g. instead of going 7.6 km/s, the thrown satellite now goes... 7.56 km/s. Which translates to one end of the orbit dropping by a couple hundred meters. So instead of 408km, it'll now go as low as... 407.5km, or something in that ballpark.
That's the limit of what you can achieve by just tossing things with muscle power.
Something in earth orbit is also orbiting the Sun. The Earth is traveling ~30km/second around the Sun. If you want to fall into the sun, you have to cancel out all that sideways speed.
(I've also had my fair share of high-orbit missions where in the middle of the launch I realized I'm aiming for a prograde orbit, where the contract specified retrograde. Instead of reloading game from launchpad, I just carried on, put my apoapsis at target altitude, and once reaching it, burned off couple hundred m/s of Δv to reverse the orbit's direction.)
(Ignoring smaller effects)
Unfortunately throwing things at kilometers per second by hand is not possible, 1 km/s is just under 2237 mph.
Of course with atmospheric drag for most low orbit satellites things will come down eventually, in which case throwing something the right way could add or subtract from the time it will stay in orbit, but that would be highly dependent on where you started. And LEO is already like 7.2 km/s or about 16,000 mph. Standing on a massive enough satellite using a large stick or like a sling staff would certainly help you get more speed in your throw though. A 100 mph baseball throw really wouldn't be that significant though.
I wish humans were less interested in the noisy, explosive things like engines and rockets, and more into subtlety.
Increasing surface area will (eventually) de-orbit due to drag.
The wire methods mentioned earlier could possibly offer the option for magnetic / induction drag.
Ion engines are an option, though they're spendy.
Geosync orbit is the tough one. It's much larger, but the sweet spots (equatorial orbits) are relatively scarce.
Mandating methods of clearing critical orbits (for GEO) or deorbiting (for LEO) implemented prior to deployment is probably the more viable option.
Still that will only prevent a dead sat in sitting in a valuable spot for ever, it migh still drift the wrong way and require active sats to do avoidance maneuvers, not to mention the chance of two inactive sats colliding.
There's also the problem of retaining propellants over long periods without experiencing some negative consequence (detonation, unintended firing, volatilisation, etc).
But in general, minimising the special-handling cases would be an improvement.
There are some ideas that could be repurposed from asteroid mining concepts. Many asteroids are more like pile of gravel loosely bound by gravity than solid rocks, and either way, trying to extract anything risk launching lots of tiny pebbles in a random directions. One idea I saw floating around NASA website was to wrap such an asteroid in a net or sheet of material, to keep it from shaking itself apart. I could imagine similar lightweight net being used to wrap a satellite.
Once wrapped, you can do two things with it. You can try to deorbit captured trash - for instance, with a light net and a solar sail attached (which would be used to increase atmospheric drag). Such trash would not only deorbit faster, but a sail would make it easier to track. Nets and sails would have to be light and disposable, they could be shipped to orbit in bulk, or (later) manufactured in space.
Alternatively, you can try to recycle the trash. If you have in-orbit refueling using propellant sourced from space, you probably already have - or are about to have - some facility in orbit that could reprocess parts of dead satellites. So you can move the trash to some designated recycling orbit.
--
Now that I think of it, you could probably make a recycling collector work without all the infrastructure in space. In orbit, you have time, you can take things slow. I can imagine a collector chasing light trash using ion thrusters, or whatever is most promising in high-Isp department these days (how small can a VASIMR get anyway?), grabbing it and parking at the recycling orbit. Might take weeks per piece of trash, but if you launch a bunch of such collectors and feed them trajectories from the ground, they'll eventually clean the orbit out of light trash. It might require some actual developments in the beamed power department, and perhaps launching a power satellite to microwave some electricity to the collectors, but think it would work in (sufficiently modded) KSP :). Anyway, the biggest problem isn't mission design, but figuring out who will actually pay for this.
Not sure what to do about the most dangerous space trash - the tiny bits that can't be reliably tracked. Track them better and vaporize with lasers?
Another very 'interesting' idea is deploying a large amount of fine dust on an appropriate polar orbit. Everything intersecting that orbit will be sandblasted, increasing drag; this will have the greatest effect on the smallest debris, and hopefully anything operational in that orbit will be well enough armored or able to dodge the cloud. The dust deorbits quickly for the same reason as the tiny debris (greater surface area/volume). One of the more metal ideas for space debros handling I've heard.
meet up with the debris, reorient yourself and the debris such that the debris is closer to the earth (reaction wheels, magnetic torquer bar and patience is all that's required), and then just mechanically kick it down (store up energy from the sun and then trigger a solenoid). the debris itself becomes your propulsion. you get a tiny boost up, perhaps towards your next target, and it gets a (admittedly!) tiny boost down.
obviously it doesn't instantly dispose of everything, but progressively pushing material further down the gravity well is the next best thing.
not claiming this would be cost effective.
This doesn't actually work. If you push something down in orbit, you just make its orbit elliptical. After half an orbit it will be at the same altitude as you again, and after a full orbit it will hit you from the top. If you want to lower its orbit, you need to push it back.
Orbital mechanics is weird.
Came here to say this as well! The only caveat to that I can think of is if you're already low enough in orbit, the push making the satellite's orbit elliptical could put it in a drag zone, and then air would do the slowing down for you.
Also, thank you Neal Stephenson for introducing me to the wonderful would of orbital mechanics via Seveneves!
The Kerbal never got back to his ship before running out of propellant.
if you want to lower its orbit, you probably need to take a lot of complicated stuff in to account which doesn't fit into a comment. i won't charge the orbital dynamacists implementing my idea more if they replace "down" with "the optimal direction for this target, at the optimal moment".
mass of the target, cross sectional area of the target, any out gassing it might be doing, where we're trying to maneuver to next, etc, etc.
if the optimal direction ends up being exactly "down" or "back", i'll buy you a beer.
You may be to do this with atospheric drag if you add enough ellipticity but they would only be lowering the orbit indirectly.
you know, in the wildly hypothetical world where this was implemented, i don't think the folks cutting the check would mind if you deorbited things directly, or indirectly.
Even though I couldn't make it myself by the usual orbit tools I also wouldn't be too surprised if it was possible to gather bunch of stuff with like < 100m/s delta v or whatnot.
KSP taught me that flying a rocket is "easy". But calculating the stuff is hard (well, computationally intensive. So it can be easy, but hard for humans in their head).
Docking itself has always been my favorite part, though I "cheat" by using a mod[0] that gives me a display[1] of relative velocities and orientations. My brain isn't designed to eyeball relative velocities from an outside-ship camera. But that's just the final part, applicable when you can literally see the target out of your window.
Approach, now that's another story. Took me a while to learn how to match orbits without carefully planning a series of maneuvers. My new way is slightly less Δv-efficient, but much faster in terms of both in-game and wall clock time. I plot a "good enough" intercept (say within 5-50km separation, relative velocity doesn't matter, as long as it's less than my remaining Δv), and then as my ship is a couple dozen to couple hundreds kilometers from the target, I start doing small adjustment burns to minimize distance at flyby and relative speed. The goal is to eventually reduce flyby separation and relative speed at intercept to something reasonable (say, flyby at 100 m, 10 m/s relative speed). From there, I can just dock easily.
It's not the way real docking happens today (though it's how it might in the future!), but I can execute a full intercept and docking in less than one orbit, which is more fun. Doubly fun to do this with transfers between celestial body - docking straight out of a transfer orbit, without first establishing a proper orbit around a moon/planet.
EDIT: Triply fun with planetary landers, if you don't have enough Δv to reach orbit, much less to transfer to a station/orbiter module. You launch the lander into ballistic trajectory that intersects your target's orbit at its peak, and pray you time it right, so that the orbiter/station can decelerate and do a suborbital docking, and then boost back to safety. One mistake here, and you can lose both ships. God, I love this game.
--
[0] - Docking Port Alignment Indicator.
[1] - https://i.imgur.com/J69AYEw.png. It looks trivial, but it packs enough information that you can easily dock looking only at that display. And something like this is what real astronauts would use, so it's actually making things more realistic :).
So, the issue is, in the low orbit environment there's no kinds of slingshot or other maneuvers available. You need to match height of the orbit at a point, and need to at least coarsely match velocity at that point, which means you're basically in the same orbit as the object. Sure, you can play games with slowly matching phase, etc, but the delta-v requirements are simply inherently high.
Lasers that act as a long term external pressure for small stuff, maybe. But the laser strength, object tracking and object targeting tech still has a long long way to go before that is viable.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order. We need to start applying it to space too. The most viable path to reducing space debris right now is not creating it in the first place. Through reusable rockets, miniaturization, and removing mechanisms that give off less debris during operation like stopping the use of explosive bolts or reducing the need for protective coverings. Lowering the regulated maximum 25 year lifespan of a satellite further would also be an option.
- setup orbital refueling of your tug - if you have enough time, let the tug drift by gravity anomaly and sun influence as optimal - use electric engines as much as possible to reduce fuel mass needed - make the thing aerodynamic enough to enable aerobraking or even orbit plane changes - add tethers for even more momentum transfer magic
These tricks could make the proposition of capturing and reusing dead satellite much more viable when applied. :)
De-orbiting satellites -- while necessary for well-discussed reasons -- seems wasteful. You spent umpteen million dollars getting that mass into orbit, and you're just going to drop it?
It's kind of like the plans to throw nuclear waste into the Sun, or more realistically into a deep ocean subduction zone -- isotopes that heavy or unstable are rare, do you know how much work it is to find them?
Space Infrastructure Servicing (SIS) is a spacecraft being developed by Canadian aerospace firm MDA to operate as a small-scale in-space refueling depot for communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit.and also
OSAM-1 (short for On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1), a robotic spacecraft equipped with the tools, technologies and techniques needed to extend satellites' lifespans - even if they were not designed to be serviced on orbit.
During its mission, the OSAM-1 servicer will rendezvous with, grasp, refuel and relocate a government-owned satellite to extend its life. But OSAM-1's effect will not end there.
The benefits are many. OSAM-1’s capabilities can give satellite operators new ways to manage their fleets more efficiently, and derive more value from their initial investment. These capabilities could even help mitigate the looming problem of orbital debris.
They are put into orbit simply by being ejected at the right angle and speed from the ISS.
I didn't realize launching satellites had become so turnkey now where you don't have all the friction of dealing with NASA or any large space agency.
Nanoracks has an interesting list of customers, like Adidas and Double-Tree by Hilton?!
Probably the cheapest way to launch things. However, SpaceX has no interest in dealing with everybody that wants to launch a cubsat so you have to go to an integrator.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ex...
It is certainly not the norm for satellite launches, but if your mission meets the parameters and there is available space on a cargo supply that's already going to the ISS, you can potentially get a cheaper ride by going that route.
As far as I know the ISS doesn't have any facilities for "bringing in" a larger satellite or repairing it. NASA is pretty protective of the ISS and objects approaching it have to follow very particular procedures and be certified for the process (Dragon, Cygnus, etc.).
Also most satellites aren't in an orbit similar to the ISS. Things usually either get launched equitorially (east), polar (north/south), or are are much higher altitude in geostationary orbit. The ISS has a peculiar orbital inclination to make it more accessible to both US and Russian launch sites.
It's a commercial service, from Nanoracks.[1] They load cubesats into a container, have them shipped to the ISS, and the satellites are "launched" with a spring. So they're in roughly the same orbit as the ISS.
The price just went way up. NASA raised their price on transport to the Space Station from $3,000 per kilogram to $20,000 per kilogram. They also raised the astronaut labor rate to $130,000/hour. NASA was subsidizing the ISS launch scheme. So future cubesats will probably be launched from a Falcon 9 using one of Space-X's resellers.
[1] https://nanoracks.com/products/iss-deployment/
[2] http://parabolicarc.com/2021/03/05/nasa-jacks-up-iss-commerc...
>In announcing the policy change, NASA said it had previously subsidized transportation to and from the station in order to foster the development of commercial space applications.
>“Since making these opportunities available, there has been a growing demand for commercial and marketing activities from both traditional aerospace companies and from novel industries, demonstrating the benefits of the space station to help catalyze and expand space exploration markets and the low-Earth orbit economy,” the space agency said. “As a result, NASA has updated its pricing policy for commercial activities conducted on the station to reflect full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources.”
While I don't have any reason not to take this explanation at face value, I am curious about the timing. Did they just have too many potential customers to justify subsidizing the cost?
I was also surprised to see a "trash disposal" line item in the price catalog. It doesn't sound like ISS-generated waste. Does anyone know if this is literally people paying thousands of dollars per kg to transport cargo to space in order to dispose it by burning it up on re-entry? What could justify such a cost? Are there examples? What kind of restrictions on items are there?
(Perhaps I should just Google this myself! :)
That, or from a different perspective, as commercial launch capabilities increase, they don't want to kill competition by subsidizing a service that other companies want to be able to offer (at a non-subsidized cost).
Imagine having trash and sewage picked up only twice a month or once a month. That's about how often new vehicles visit the space station.
Some uncrewed vehicles (Russia's Roscosmos Progress vehicle, Japan's JAXA HTV, USA's Northrop Grumman Cygnus) are designed to burn up on reentry. SpaceX Dragon is designed to make it to the ground and thus would need to be unpacked after splashdown.
Nanoracks' Bishop airlock is supposed to offer trash disposal-to-orbit, but has not been used in orbit yet.
> Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
Moving the whole station doesn't really make sense. Even a vehicle would burn a lot of fuel, and would only really work, once again, in the same (or close to the same) inclination.
Inclination changes are so expensive that there was at least one case where an operator sent a satellite all the way to the Moon and back, because it cost less fuel that way.
To get a good rule-of-thumb for this in your brain, you can think of it in terms of vector mathematics.
Consider a circular orbit. Now consider two vectors: one in the direction of that orbit, one perpendicular to it. A naive inclination change from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, with no other change to the orbit's dynamics (i.e. same eccentricity, same periapsis / apoapsis), require the velocity to change from parallel to the first vector to parallel to the second, at the same magnitude. That's a total change of SQRT(2 * starting_velocity^2) ~= 1.4 * starting velocity. If we consider a velocity that is LEO (about 7.8 km/s), our total velocity change would have to be about 10.92 km/s.
Putting a satellite into LEO from Earth's surface only costs between 9 and 10 km/s from gravity loss, steering, and wind resistance. Earth is a deceptively expensive gravity well to be doing inclination change maneuvers in.
Sometimes CubeSats will launch as ride-alongs on the rocket itself (it's more common on rockets not already going to the ISS) and others are designed to be launched from the ISS itself depending on how they're being paid for. In either case they'll wind up in the roughly 51 degree inclination of the ISS.
> Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
They can't really capture satellites because very few actually orbit at that level it's mostly the kind of short term cube sats that they launch out not larger satellites. Those live in higher orbits so getting to them to fix is not a small task. Another big hurdle is the orbital inclination changing that is extremely expensive to do, basically everything is placed into it's final orbital inclination at launch because of the fuel requirements to change it once you're in orbit. It's why the ISS is at such a high inclination to begin with, so that it's easier to get to from Baikonur where Russia launches it's vehicles from.
I completely understand why they're doing this, but it's tough to see how it's legal.
If that's not the case, or if the Diet passes a new law that protects their countrymen in this dispute, then yeah it becomes the type of conflict you describe.
It's supposed to have seven judges, a minimum of three judges are required to issue rulings, but since 2019 there are only two judges left [0]
So any ruling the WTO main body makes, like for example declaring US tariffs on China illegal [1], only needs to be appealed to be stuck in procedural limbo, which is exactly what ended up happening with the WTO ruling on US tariffs [2]
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/wto-judge-blockage-could-prove-the-beg...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/global-trade-china-archive-donald...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-26/u-s-appea...
This situation is an example of what they mean by that.
Would you really think to yourself "Well the contract doesn't say I can't do this"?...
The reason why they can't reach the rector of the MAEU is because he might have been arrested or is in hiding (https://www.myanmar-now.org/en/news/soldiers-raid-aerospace-...).
So, all in all, Japan is being careful and the situation in Myanmar is "undetermined". I think it is questionable where the "spying concern" is coming from, aside from being clickbait.
>Officials at JAXA could not be reached for comment. MAEU did not respond to calls seeking comment, nor did a spokesman for Myanmar’s junta.
It could be used for spying, because it's a satellite with cameras. If it has the capabilities to be used for spying is unclear, all the data would go through Japan anyway. Japan does not want to comment on it, persons responsible at MAEU are in prison or in hiding and the junta would probably lie anyway.
I dare you to find a quote by anyone familiar with the satellite citing military use.
Nice bit of goal post rearrangement there, given an explicit direct quote in the article stating the satellite could have military applications. On what basis do you assert that Human Rights Watch are not capable of assessing the satellites capabilities and possible uses?
How do you get "the satellite could have military applications" from "The satellite was not designed for that"?
>On what basis do you assert that Human Rights Watch are not capable of assessing the satellites capabilities and possible uses?
You mean aside from "We won’t get involved in anything that has to do with the military. The satellite was not designed for that"? Why do you think the HRW has any capability to assess the possible applications of a satellite? Nothing on the HRW website either...
https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/the-soviet-union-and-t...
Mistral class helicopter carrier, payed by Russia, built in France, delivered to Egypt instead due to the War in Donbass. France had to compensate Russia.
Are any of those players restricting anyone from buying imagery of Myanmar? If no, then this is pretty much a pointless thought exercise for them to engage in?
Lol, are we going to bomb their corn fields next.
Exactly how could it be used by the military?
I don't know, but I feel like a satellite worth only $15 million and released from the space station wouldn't do much, but I might be pleasantly surprised tech has advanced enough.
I don't get how on such a low orbit if would be useful to one country? I think it's called the MMSATS-1 (Lawkanat-1)
https://www.global.hokudai.ac.jp/blog/collaborative-developm...
https://www.ft.com/content/c7e00344-111a-11e8-940e-08320fc2a...
The concern is probably that satellite images could be used to identify and keep track of Rohingya and other ethnic minority settlements in jungle areas, and target them for attacks like the ones the military have been carrying out since 2017.
Here's photo's from Diwata-1 and Diwata-2 which is the same Japanese team and the Philippians. Similar costs, same project. https://www.goodnewspilipinas.com/diwata-1-2-view-from-space...
Diwata-1/Diwata-2 have a High Precision Telescope (HPT) which I see no mention of on the MMSATS-1, only a super multi-color imager (SMI). But I can't see the exact specs.
If you can find a photo of the underside of the MMSATS-1 you could see if it has a HTP by comparing it to this -
https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missio...
Here's a (commercial grade) satellite of a before and after of one of the settlements being burned https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-insight-...
The rate of photos of the MMSATS-1 is low (if it has a HPT, I've seen no confirmation of this), and you can see from the photos you can't see a car. You can see the boats.
If you want to look at the example of Diwata 1 leading to the detection of a disease in bananas, it's seems PR. Landsat-8 seems to play the greater role - https://confit.atlas.jp/guide/event-img/jpguagu2017/HTT21-05...
How is MMSATS-1 going to magically give you better than "Google maps images typically only update every 2 to 3 years" ?
What orbit do you think MMSATS-1 would be in?
You have yet to show it has a HPT. Can you link with the specs?
> to track agriculture patters
I've given you a link showing it can't.
You seem like you just don't want Burma to have satellites. That's fine, but just say it. It's just a shitty cube sat to give it's youth something to be proud of and to train it's current scientists. The end plan is to have many of them in the consortium to help the region. Obviously this one will fall out of orbit before then, it's just a step.
It's up to you but I suggest you go on a holiday to Thailand for a few weeks, it's easy for tourists, cheap and it's a culture change. Next holiday spend a few weeks in Myanmar. I don't think you have to know a culture personally to be a Hawk on them, but why not. If nothing else it makes you a better Hawk.
Not hundreds of floating around ... I only concern in the past how it affects by astro photo. But if it goes back to this low orbit floating how these ideas come around and how to choose one from others.
More important how it work across national boundary.
Japan: That's not your government.
No I don't. What's your point?
If aiding genocide was a concern Japan would have stopped development of the satellite at any point during the last 5 years.
Article VI is most relevant to your question; here's a law review article summarizing some of the issues: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
The name alone suggests militarization of space which is a horrible idea. The only thing that kept us alive through the 20th century was mutually assured destruction, and more importantly, the capability to detect ICBM launches and retaliate within the 30 minutes before your continent is glassed. Space launched nukes don't give you any warning, you get at most 30 seconds to detect the shock heating in the high atmosphere before it's game over. It's an actual slippery slope, the very first payload containing weapons in orbit is a direct path towards space launched nuclear weapons.
Unless you have your own space-launched nukes and satellites?
Now, if someone figured out how to reliably detect submerged submarines from orbit, that would be truly MAD-breaking.
Another factor is that sub based missiles can launch from relatively close to their target and just skim out of the atmosphere, well below the orbits of even fairly short lifetime low orbiting satellites. That makes for quick trajectories. A satellite based weapon up there for extended periods would need to be in a relatively high altitude to avoid orbital decay. It turns out you don't actually get much advantage in terms of strike time even for a target that happens to be at an optimal position relative to your orbit.
Finally, what do you do when the weapons reach the end of their service life? With terrestrial weapons they can be refurbished, upgraded or the expensive nuclear material recovered for remanufacturing. I know space weapons are sexy and cool, and I love me some Goldeneye style James Bond super-weapons, but they're not actually all that useful.
It's one of the reasons the Star Wars missile defence project wasn't really viable as well. At any given time at least nine tenths of your defence satellites are over Australia, Africa, the Pacific, the Antarctic, or somewhere else peripheral rather than the Russia - USA theatre.
Oh, you mean that other Space Force? That I'm not sure of, but I hear it was just a much-needed reorganization of who does what in the US military.
It doesn't look like the government cared too much about the well-being of the genocided population. This is a hallmark in most genocides in history. The government doesn't have to order a massacre, most of the times it's just doing nothing.
On one hand I want to say the "government" didn't care and should be held accountable for not speaking up about the genocide.
On the other hand I see how they might have been too scared to call it out for fear of a coup. Fears that seems to have been well founded...
As with most things it's not black and white.
Not a good reason. Whenever I hear or read something about a group allowing, being silent in face of an event like that, I remember Srebrenica massacre [1]
I clearly remember how Aung San Suu Kyi defends Myanmar from accusations of genocide in UN [2]. She and her government are as much party to the genocide as those who pulled the triggers. I hope I live long enough to see the day they are brought to justice.
1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre 2- https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/12/1053221
But when you have to choose between the genocide of one ethnic communities AND the genocide but by a non-accountable government, you may risk choosing the former.
There are a few books that I can recommend if you would like to read more.
After the last elections, the military were supposed to loose some more of their positions and hence the coup.
so where does that leave us to form an opinion and activism about it? just because we have a democracy-boner doesn't mean we can ignore a country's constitution, even if it is flawed, does it?
and if our democracy fervor is really so strong for us to actually do something about it, then its hypocritical because we don't do anything meaningful about it in country's that are more relevant, and it makes us picking on the little country.
You can check this for more info: https://melissacrouch.com/2021/02/07/the-illegality-of-myanm...
That professor is an expert on the constitution.
It's entirely possible for there to be no such authority in place, without requiring "external intervention". In that case the people who live there might create such an authority, or they might not.
Eventually we might realize how all humans are harmed by subjugation to authority.
There is an elected representatives that have the people's support.
A branch of the government thinks its actions are constitutional, the people and the elected representatives don't.
Just because we are conditioned to favor outcomes that are more inclusive and democratic, doesn't mean it is the legally compliant option.
Just because a scholar and constitutional expert has an argument, doesn't mean it is the only interpretation.
So is there a court that can take the arguments from the scholar on behalf of the people, and the arguments from the military, and make a ruling?
There are no strong independent institutions.
I definitely found that strange at the time, especially since said democratic part had previously gotten a peace nobel prize, but considering she was imprisoned by the military before and after this whole semi-democratic experiment, is it well accepted now that she was mostly under the control of the military and had very little choice in any of the matter? Or do people still think she was mostly complicit for not speaking up, at the risk of compromising the little bit of democracy they had.
I am - it was wrong.
Her position went beyond making a hard choice, she defended the genocide and the generals. Describing the generals involved as ‘sweet’ and the victims as ‘terrorists’, she is part of the problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/23/aung-san-suu-k...
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/nov/12/a...
There must be a more modern term than "1st world", I just don't know it.
Because pretty much every other country with a security service is either pursuing similar operations or wants to be. Sure when something becomes public a fuss gets made, but oddly enough no concrete repercussions ever follow.
Outside of that, who could do anything diplomatically to the US that wouldn't just be laughed off?
Like most history, it's a bit more complicated than it first appears.
It let some fascist boneheads put themselves forwards as canonfodder when it was invaded which Russia loves to focus on but I can hardly blame them for that.
Might dictating outcomes has always been a fact of life. Why would anyone attempt to deny that aspect of living in reality? What good does it do to pretend reality isn't what it is?
Might determining outcomes between nations will never stop being true. Everything else - the UN for example - is merely a very small (often laughable) influence, and at best reduces the brunt of the might factor.
Pick a major country at any point in history. Might is huge part of their equation and there are no exceptions.
The US and China can freely ignore the world, freely ignore the UN, freely ignore all rules, international laws, anything they want to. That's because there is nobody that can do anything about it. That fact of how things actually work merely lessens as you scale downward with nations (as the nation in question gets weaker), it never goes away. Weak countries can pick on weak opponents, see: Armenia vs Azerbaijan. Might always ultimately determines the world, including in defeating Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in WW2. The strongest nations even have the most influence at the UN, so even soft politics is always backed by might.
Actually, according to TA, it seems Myanmar's government hasn't quite decided what to do with the thing. It's probably quite low right now on their list of priorities. And the Japanese still have to consider whether to toss it out or not. After all, the thing is up there already (sunk cost fallacy and all that). It seems possible they can work something out.
If you're so egalitarian as to ask the question, why not go all the way and ask why individual Myanmarese are't negotiating with the USA directly? You inherently privilege the Myanmar military while calling into question the legitimacy of the western democratic governments.
Harm to you: Not having a gun. Harm to me: death.
Smart money is on maintaining a gap.
How do you feel we should update '1st' world? Change '2nd' to refer to allies and vassals of China instead of Russia? Add '4th world' to indicate some other relation other than allies/enemies/unrelated?
Xiaomi, the Chinese consumer electronics company, which definitely does only consumer products, is restricted from buying microchips. The excuse was an award that was granted by the CCP to the chairman of Xiaomi, a type of award that is given away to 100 people EVERY year.
Sure if you buy semi-durable items: clothes, shoes, electronics, etc.
Besides, this is silly. Firms operating in China obey Chinese laws for the same reasons that firms operating in USA obey USA laws. If they didn't operate in accordance with local custom, they would not continue to operate. Presumably many manufacturers in China (or USA) could have had a "Are we the baddies?" moment, but if so they are now necessarily no longer manufacturers in China (or USA).
Your fear and distrust of the Chinese government is perfectly rational. Even more rational would be to fear and distrust USA government just as much.
https://theoutline.com/post/8610/united-states-russia-whatab...
http://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/02/01/xiaomi-sues-us-to-overtur...
The ban on Xiaomi is more of an attack as part of the economic war. The supposedly military ties due to a silly award were definitely shoehorned into this.
Xiaomi's ties to the military are not _only_ expressed in some silly award.
Several of their, and their subsidiaries, have found to have servers operating out of IP ranges generally assigned to China's APT teams and so on. (Several times. Like this one: [0]).
It's worth noting that the reason given for adding them to the list of companies is to prevent the Military/Civilian fusion that is taken as normal when doing business with China. It does not stop them operating in the US - only investment.