Ad Astra: The coming battle over space | Hacker News Reader

Ad Astra: The coming battle over space

harpers.org

130 pointsHooke147 comments

The main takeaway from this article is that the militarization of space if moving fast. There is this document called the Outer Space Treaty that was written at the dawn of the Space Age. It has never been updated, and was written for a world divided into two Cold War spheres of influence.

The world today looks nothing like the world of the 1960s. It looks a lot more like the world of the early 1910s and 1930s. Multiple countries vie for advantage.

> Since 2015, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel, France, and North Korea have all established military space programs. China’s and Russia’s space commands are close on the heels of the United States, and according to the Secure World Foundation, the United States has idled certain of its offensive-technology programs while China and Russia actively test the same capabilities. ...

There's a theory of what causes war among major powers that goes like this. Wars result when one side miscalculates how the other side will respond. You can see elements of this in WWI. Certainly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fits the bill. And it almost did us in during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Combine multiple players jockeying for position, a close connection between space and nuclear weapon command and control, and a new domain that blunts the advantages of incumbants, and you get a fertile breeding ground for crisis.

Then there's the "use it or lose it" angle to consider and the fact the US has the most to lose in all of this:

> All military assets are surrounded by a “use it or lose it” ethos, says Joan Johnson-Freese, the author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century and a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. Once conflict begins, all holdings are seen to be at risk: you need to fire that missile before it’s taken out. “The military is taught to assume the worst, and to react to it,” she told me. “Because space assets are so far away, and there is a high potential to not be sure what is happening, high risk and threat must be assumed.” This is commonly referred to as “the tyranny of distance.” When the rules are not plain, whether in peacetime or war, the situation is “exponentially” more dangerous. ...

Well, if we've been more or less operating under a peace treaty for 50 odd years but technology and military technology "planning" programs have been pursued that entire time, well...

Yeah, if the gloves come off and all the "planning" projects are "actualized", things are going to change very quickly.

Orbit isn't like the ground though. You can see that offense is relatively straightforward (kinetic weapons and lasers), defense is practically impossible (hard to stop lasers and kinetic weapons), and the collateral damage is akin to nuclear fallout: space junk will persist for long after the seconds-long battle lasts.

I think what would be necessary is some sort of perverse royal kidnapping: you'd need high-level leaders of space factions have family and friends in all the habitats to dissuade military action.

The challenge to settle space is that civilian habitats are extremely vulnerable to extremely basic attacks, and we're simply too warlike.

But if we don't even get to the point of space habitats, and a long orbital war poisons near-space with junk, we may have imprisoned ourselves. It almost makes the need to get to mars and the moon even more paramount in the relatively brief armistice in space.

LEO junk can't really imprison us. First, LEO junk decays - especially if it's in non-circular orbits such as caused by collisions/explosions; Second, space is large - if LEO is "full" of junk then that means that long-term orbits have a high chance of some collision, preventing us from launching Starlink-like constellations, but launching a rocket through LEO (to e.g. Moon or Mars) would still be reasonable even if it's "full" of junk (i.e. a hundred thousand fragments flying around in undetected orbits) as such amounts of fragments still don't cover that much space, they don't make it impassable, launches would merely become not as safe - if a launch has a 1% chance of exploding because it hits something, that sucks but it does not really imprison us.

Hmm, according to [whee!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

Fifty years later, in 2013, some of the dipoles that had not deployed correctly still remained in clumps, contributing a small amount of the orbital debris tracked by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office. Their numbers have been diminishing over time as they occasionally re-enter. As of March 2020, 36 clumps of needles were still known to be in orbit.

I wouldn't want to be hit by that, while being in not much more than an inflated tin can ;)

Economics are a far greater risk to space habitats than any weapon.

Do hypersonic weapons give a new first strike capability and is this the end of the M.A.D. policy, do we actually need a new race, post-globalisation it looks like authoritarianism, closed borders and increased surveillance might be the focus, in which case the military industrial complex still has a good fit, just a new enemy, a constant war against people as it were.

As an aside, anyone know if Raytheon takes bitcoin?

No. Normal ICBMs are already hypersonic weapons.

Talking about "hypersonic weapons" is talking about gliding or maneuvering hypersonic warheads or cruise missiles. (btw. Space Shuttle was hypersonic glider)

China and Russia are developing hypersonic gliders to maintain their capability and create more variance. The US ballistic missile defense can't protect the US from Russia or China (nor it is intended to do), but it requires some adjustments. More ICBM's, warheads throw weight, and counter-countermeasures and different trajectories.

For example, the fractional orbital bombardment that China tested is an old concept. Together with a gliding warhead, it means that China can maintain deterrence with fewer missiles.

Is that another Arms Control Wonk listener I spy?

Naturally.

The reliable suprise first strike option been there for 30 years: slow, low flying cruise missile taking count command infrastructure.

Until the dilemma presented by ballistic missile submarines can be solved, there can be no reliable first strike.

Further, even if it were solved, one might imagine proliferating smaller nuclear delivery systems all over the place (as in anything that floats). Getting them all in a coordinated, near-simultaneous way to preclude a large number of launches would be difficult.

If your armies are already treading enemy's soil, I doubt that would matter, unless the enemy will be nuking its own land, if this even technically possible (ICMBs have not only maximum range, but also minimum ones too, and missile guidance, radionavigation, astrogation, etc is hardcoded at least in Russian missiles.)

Interesting that you mention it. Exactly that is the concept in the framework of 'nuclear participation/sharing' as practiced by the USA and Germany, with about 20 to 25 free falling B-61 warheads of the 3rd or 4th generation, while having no delivery systems to 'throw' them much further than about 1500km.

I guess the same applies for Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey.

edit: I mean 'nuking it's own land'.

[poof!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

I'm glad to read that starting a war has never been easier, how fked is that.

The weapons are under American control until the last moment. The host country can't even get them out of their vaults, much less arm them. There are also mechanisms for the weapons to be command disabled which bricks them until they can be rebuilt.

Fun fact: Permissive Action Links were originally conceived of to solve a fundamental problem with nuclear sharing: how do you keep a foreign rogue pilot/unit/country from starting general war with the Soviets when they have physical custody of the weapons?

Yes, Yes. That is known. But tell me why you'd want to have these, old, museal and free falling things, while having no delivery system to drop them much further than on your own country under realistic conditions? That's just making you a target. Why bother at all? Because of the thrall of rather dead than red?

Tomorrow, When the War Began, I'd rather rewatch both Red Dawn, Bushwick and have a real Dragon Day in The Divide.

Yee-Haw!

do they still put Humvees on the silo just in case, seem to have read that somewhere, what a clever fail safe, I'm sure every other bit was engineered just as well.

> China and Russia actively test the same capabilities.

> When the rules are not plain, whether in peacetime or war, the situation is “exponentially” more dangerous

That's a good thing. No doubt the US would win most wars but I'd be happier if countries with no bone in the fight could protect themselves from accidental annihilation. Development of Anti-weapons to disarm and disable potential space advantages up to an including complete destruction of GPS, Research sats (yes, including Telescopes) and even the ISS- wholesale.

It's quite likely that the US would lose to a regional power like Russia or China[1] inside that power's sphere of influence.

My personal hunch is that a Dune like destroy the spice gambit is Taiwan's best bet to hold off military annexation. They could rig their semiconductor fabs and the other things the CCP wants with thermite or something similar and make it known that if the mainland invades it all goes up in smoke.

[1] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl...

i would be very surprised if its not already done so in some way.

I would also expect all major powers having very detailed intel of where to strike to cripple it all with some staff working there.

It was super important long before covid highlighted its importance for whole global economy, now even average Joe heard about 'em chips shortage.

You don't need to rig it to blow. Just fire a couple cruise missiles and a ten billion dollar foundry will be unsalvageable rubble.

I think it should be pretty easy to destroy a foundry or damage it enough so that it's not functional, even when the power goes off or they run out of water they are significantly impacted, based on us foundry impacts in the past. Another interesting question is who would be hurt more by the TSMC Taiwan operations being destroyed. Would it be the West? China? Who depends on leading technology more? It would hurt both sides. I think in any shooting war it's inevitable that it would get destroyed. I think this is the reason why there's suddenly all these new foundry groundbreaking in Arizona and other places by multiple companies but also tsmc.

Then China invades, the fabs go up in smoke, and China is suddenly in a much better position to dominate in that field, too.

On a much lower level, sure, but now they are really competitive.

+10. Xi has shown the past couple years he has no problem hurting profit now - sometimes dramatically - for more power and control in the future.

China is a very long way away from being able to replicate ASML's lithography machines. Those fabs can't be replaced without European technology and the US would almost certainly manage to get an embargo through as a response to an invasion.

The US already has an embargo on ASML EUV tech to China, because the US funded it all in the late 90s with DARPA and an industry consortium (EUV LLC.).

Im so amazed DARPA’s bet worked, I had to listen to years of people lambasting that EUV is impossibly expensive to commercialize.

They didn’t realize the iPhone would make the economics work.

> rig their semiconductor fabs and the other things the CCP wants with thermite

You can't rig national pride with thermite. Western Germany wanted to reunite with eastern Germany not for any economic reasons but because of a sense of national unity.

Taiwan does NOT want to “reunite” with the mainland.

Yes of course, sorry if that came across wrong. Just wanted to give an example of one country absorbing another for non-monetary reasons.

Sure but a key difference is that both the East and west Germany wanted reunification. China invading Taiwan would be foreign occupation.

I know this is dangerous political territory, but my understanding is that neither would object reunification on their terms, and see themselves as the 'true' China [1]. The same was the case for Germany. Things just became so bad in eastern Germany that the government there accepted unconditional reunification in order to avoid total collapse.

[1] not sure how true this is these days for Taiwan, but it definitely was the case historically.

Are you Taiwanese and/or live in Taiwan?

To be sure I don't mean to imply that you can't have an opinion on it otherwise, but rather the public discussion online and in media regarding Taiwan is so insanely divorced from the reality on the ground that I find most people who are not in some way connected to Taiwan have a warped view of history and public opinion regarding this issue. A state of affairs which is very much on purpose due to mainland pressure and propaganda, and the one-China agreement which forces Taiwan and its allies to be mute regarding its status and the desires of its people in public discourse.

Taiwan was never meaningfully part of China. The people who historically lived in, who presently make up 80% of the population, never considered themselves Chinese nationals. They have no shared identity with mainland China. They speak a different language, they eat different food, and they are descended from people who moved to Taiwan specifically because it was a self-ruled frontier land very far removed from Ming dynasty. When the Qing conquered, they had a hell of a time governing these very independent people--there were uprisings and unrest against the government almost every other year. The Japanese didn't fare much better, nor did the foreign military junta that took over in 1949.

Never during any of this history or the present day did the Taiwanese people want to conquer China, peacefully "reunite" with China (how do you "reunite" when you were never united in the first place? It'd be like Afghanistan "reuniting" with the United States), or whatever other interpretation you might take from the one-China agreement. The foreign military dictator who ruled Taiwan with an iron fist during the martial law period did want to "reunify" with China. But neither this guy nor his army were Taiwanese, and his dream doesn't reflect in any way what the Taiwanese people wanted then or now.

The one single time that Taiwan moved ever so slightly towards "reunification" was in the early part of this last decade where the then-ruling KMT nationalist party entered negotiations with China to setup some free trade agreements (think: NAFTA but for China + Taiwan), and the public fear over possible reunification was so large that the legislature building was occupied in protest, the ruling party utterly lost the following elections, and had its assets frozen under a corruption investigation. The success of the Taiwan protest would inspire the Hong Kong protestors a few years later:

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

Taiwanese will riot in the streets if it'll prevent reunification.

To be clear, the only person in Taiwan who ever truly wanted to re-conquer the mainland was the foreign dictator who did in fact used to rule China before the communists. When he died and martial law ended, China forced Taiwan into an agreement to keep his policy as the official stance or face invasion, because a continuing "civil war" fit their desired narrative better than Taiwanese independence. The Taiwanese have had their backs against the wall ever since.

Thanks for the detailed response, I see I was missing significant context, and my perception was wrong. I am surprised because I got this notion from some relatively conservative podcasts I listen to. I will be better informed in the future!

In any case though, I think regardless of whether it can be called an invasion or a reunification, the point stands that there can be motivations for doing so that are not monetary (i.e. taking over the fabs) but have more to do with national identity and pride, and I think for the PRC this is such an issue, at least in part.

Does that sound like a fair statement to you?

Someone should do a case study on the propaganda surrounding this issue, because of I don't know of cases where the discussion regarding a political issue is so thoroughly controlled by one side of the discussion as is the case here. China not only controls their own narrative (Taiwan is a renegade province, etc.) but also has set up the opposing narrative as well (Taiwan is the last bastion of a free, democratic China in eternal conflict with the PRC) when the reality is that Taiwan is just Taiwan, an independent nation being bullied by its neighbor.

But Taiwan leadership goes along with the one-China nonsense because what other choice do they have? They can't stand up to China on their own, as the US has implied it will only intervene in a conflict if China invades without provocation. So Taiwan's free and independent existence hinges on them doing everything possible to make sure that they do nothing that can possibly be construed as "provoking" China.

But yeah, the PRC's reasons for wanting to invade Taiwan seem to be entirely around national identity, pride, and the personal legacy of Xi Jinping. I doubt there's much economic drive for doing so.

And for what it's worth, the Taiwanese desire to NOT be part of China (PRC or otherwise) are also driven by a sense of national identity and pride. It was actually economic arguments which led to the cross-straight agreements which caused the downfall of the KMT.

Are you Taiwanese and/or live in Taiwan?

Yes.

The ROC(Republic of China) aka Taiwan has always held a constitutional claim to mainland China, they were driven out after the communist revolution.

Your statement is inaccurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan,_China#Background_and_a...

Only about 10% of the population is descended from Chinese nationalists that arrived in 1949. The other 90% of the population doesn't want jack to do with China (nor, indeed, do many of the grandchildren of the nationalists, who have long since assimilated).

Genetics of the Taiwanese people is an absurdly spurious defense in this debate, I'd ask you to provide any sort of proof to your original claim that 'Taiwan does NOT want to “reunite” with the mainland.'

If you look at their history and policies it clearly does not feel the same way you do. There's a big wikipedia article that I linked there that says otherwise. Prove me wrong on this and I'll happily admit defeat.

A very well written cousin comment addresses your objections[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29063869

I linked a wikipedia article that clearly states the history of the ROC, you linked a rambling conspiratorial HN comment from the exact person I was replying to.

Would you say the Republic of China does not claim dominion over what we in the west call mainland China? Yes or No? It's a very simple question that I doubt you will answer.

It is absolutely not a simple question given that the claim is made under duress.

To painfully ask yet again, does the ROC make claim to what we in the west call mainland China?

Is it really that hard to say yes or no?

There sure is a lot of "[citation needed]" in your vaunted Wikipedia article. I count 12 in the section you linked alone. Have you got any actually reliable sources, or just unsourced editorializing on a wiki that anyone can edit?

How about people in Taiwan do not want to have their free society and personal freedom destroyed by being taken over by communist China? Is that so hard to accept?

That has absolutely nothing to do with what we were discussing above and I suggest you read it again slowly.

It is exactly what is being claimed above at the beginning of the sub thread which you replied to.

It is completely tangential to my comment. Please take off your political blinkers and debate the issue reasonably.

Ok, but you changed the subject (what the Taiwanese people want and do is quite different from an outdated legal fiction maintained only because it is forced upon them). And I have no interest in debating that. Have a nice day.

I think this [1] RAND Corporation assessment is interesting. Saying just "X will lose" is a little bit too simple. You can download the PDF for free. I read the entire thing, quite interesting.

[1]https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html

Trivia: "Per ardua ad astra" (through hardships to the stars) is the motto of The Royal Air Force (first independent air force).

But when it was coined, I don't think they were concerned about satellites being blown up.

From 3 years ago: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/22941/russia-has-four-...

Russia Has Four Potential "Killer Satellites" In Orbit, At Least That We Know About

> The problem is that any satellite that can maneuver itself very close to another one, and may have small arms or probes to physically interact with its target, is inherently capable of being a weapon. Any such repair system could easily smash sensitive optics and other components, or simply slam into the target, acting as a kinetic weapon

The future of space warfare, as it's currently understood, will involve:

1- Satellites attacking other satellites with: 1a- robotic arms 1b- small projectiles 1c- jamming device 1d- lasers

2- missiles fired from the atmosphere

3- jamming stations on the ground (https://www.google.com/amp/s/futurism.com/space-force-first-...)

More generally, space isn't safe for blue team anymore. Russia and China have aggressive ambitions to be able to dominate space and aren't restrained by any code of ethics, something China is also doing in artificial intelligence research (not bothering with "frameworks" and "guiding principles for responsible AI").

Most experts agree that space will become another area of strategic competition where the major powers deter each other with mutual destruction doctrines, because the loss of global satellite communications, weather satellites and positioning systems, and the potential creation of millions of orbital debris that would result from a confrontation would be too dire to credibly contemplate.

Personally I believe the US is still capable of being extremely unethical as well, we just have to find ways to cover it up. So really we’re not at too much of a disadvantage.

The deltaV requirements for matching orbits with another satellite are seriously prohibitive. It’s vastly easier to simply launch a projectile on a collision course. Further, it’s even easier to launch up and into the path of a satellite than reach orbit. Especially if you’re launching from an aircraft in a large parabolic arch.

Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT

Critically launching from aircraft to orbit is not that helpful, but if you don’t need to orbit it makes a huge difference.

>matching orbits

You don't need to match orbits, for kinetic satellite weapons. You just need to change to an orbit that directly intersects, or comes close enough to it at some point to launch a daughter projectile.

For a kinetic vehicle, matching orbits actually decreases the net kill energy.

You want a head-on train wreck, not a following-too-close fender bender.

I don’t disagree, I was referring to why this was a bad idea:

“The problem is that any satellite that can maneuver itself very close to another one, and may have small arms or probes to physically interact with its target, is inherently capable of being a weapon.”

If your anti satellite weapon is in orbit you just wasted a lot of energy getting it there.

> Russia Has Four Potential "Killer Satellites" In Orbit, At Least That We Know About

As opposed to the operational ASAT system that the United States operates?

> space isn't safe for blue team anymore

'Blue Team' that's the good guys, right?

Besides the fact that space is inherently unsafe, it is the United States that has taken the lead in the militarization of space. Heck the US Space Force even has a website: https://www.spaceforce.mil/ , I'd assume they have some actual capabilities as well.

> something China is also doing in artificial intelligence research (not bothering with "frameworks" and "guiding principles for responsible AI")

Which of course doesn't happen anywhere else.

Really, I think your comment could use some balance. From the point of view of an inhabitant of a small nation that does not have its own space capability it sure looks like the United States is a very large part of the problem.

The establishment of "Space Force" is overblown as a story... but in ways that support your point.

It's basically a rebranding of an existing organization called US Air Force Space Command, which controls all military orbital launches and most military satellites (I believe NRO is its own separate thing). They just wanted it to be less specifically tied to the Air Force, and for its chief to be on equal footing to a service chief.

> The establishment of "Space Force" is overblown as a story

In the immediate sense yes: Space Force was just taking existing departments and putting them in a separate organisation.

But this has long term effects, cutting them free of the Air Force oversight means they are no longer bound to the Earth in a very concrete sense. It seems that while they were part of the Air Force, someone though it fun to put in their mandate that they should defend all US interests in space, which in particular means everything NASA has sent out.

Now that they are an independent organisation, that what they develop their culture around. Space Force is already putting out material with a view on how to fight around the moon! There's nothing much on the moon of course, but still they are anxious to know how to put weapons there for when there might be.

If given enough money, there's little question that Space Force would seek to achieve dominance over the Solar System.

And everything that is labeled 'defense' really should be labeled 'offense'.

Brilliant. That way we can never have any defense! It feels like you have an axe to grind.

Due to the particular characteristics of the environment the person your replying to does have a point. Everything labelled ‘defense’ in space’ also has significant ‘offense’ potential. You can call it the tyranny of orbital mechanics or gravity or whatever, but nothing any military does in space can be considered purely defensive. Which is why many smart folks, especially in the US, have advocated for the complete demilitarization of space because that would actually be the most advantageous in the long run.

I see what you mean but it is a rather tiring to refute it, many things have duality to their nature. Technology itself can be used for offense or defense. Semiconductors to nuclear fuels.

It's one thing to push back on the central premise - 'We cannot trust Blue team', but entirely delusional to also not take a deeper look at the situation of our adversaries and what exactly are they upto. If anything is unbalanced, it's your comment.

What, raising an objection without providing a full "both sides are bad" article is somehow something to be shamed about?

> Russia and China have aggressive ambitions to be able to dominate space and aren't restrained by any code of ethics, something China is also doing in artificial intelligence research (not bothering with "frameworks" and "guiding principles for responsible AI").

Are you implying that the US military has a code of ethics it follows more than Russia or China? I would advise you to read up on the recent history of latin America and the Middle East if you believe such fantasies.

Speak to anyone involved on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Strikes on valid targets were routinely frustrated by the chain of command worried about collateral damage. That's not to say there are examples that where it happened anyways(you'll link me the Kunduz hospital airstrike as an example).

Contrast with the USSR's occupation of Afghanistan, or their more recent contributions to the Syrian Civil War. Collateral damage is _not_ a consideration when they decide to go kinetic. Barrel bombing civilians _is the point_.

> More generally, space isn't safe for blue team anymore.

SpaceX bringing massive capabilities of orbital launch makes blue team stronger than ever. There's no competition anymore.

> and aren't restrained by any code of ethics

give ... me ... a break. are you seriously implying US (aka blue team) are good guys and have some higher standards?

Especially funny in this context as recent efforts to created a code of conduct for space have largely been rejected by the US in favour of the unstructured status quo.

I sure wish we had a code of conduct for space that could be ignored like the rules regarding sea and air.

It does have a point - a structured code of conduct would restrict USA more than others because they would at least try to cover up any violations and at least openly try to follow them for internal political reasons, while the potential adversaries do have the practical capability to just flount the restrictions whenever suitable, as internal political battles or budget allocation will not risk exposing such violations like USA did - if they had something like the equivalent of Nixon's Pentagon Papers event, they would just execute everyone involved and it would not get published.

Things like USA-USSR nuclear disarmament treaties only worked because they included mechanisms for strict verification by the other side. For not developing space arms, you would have to rely on trust, and (as the article mentions) international trust is in very short supply.

Why would you have to rely on trust? As the nuclear treaties show, its perfectly possible to include verification as part of the treaty.

No, the true reason too many in the USG sees a code of conduct as undesirable is that they believe the US is so far ahead its dominance would be restricted if it had pledged to no do whatever the fuck it wants in space.

And because opposition is grounded in maintaining dominance, something that's not yet entirely edible in today's political climate, they cannot muster more persuasive arguments than "we can't have common rules because then the US would have to follow them but the others wouldn't".

This is obvious trash: if the opposition breaks the treaty the US would not respect it either, and in any case the US has not shown hesitancy to withdraw from treaties even without violations as of late.

If you actually examine the war doctrine of the US, or consider that the US and its allies by and large provide for the stability of world trade through tumultuous regions, yes. Only if you've been engrossed in Russian or Chinese state media would you think otherwise.

“ In 2007 and 2008, hackers believed to be from China attacked U.S. satellites operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. In the latter case, they gained control of the craft, but stopped short of issuing it commands. The Russian government, meanwhile, has been accused of widespread, malicious signal jamming, including, in 2018, disrupting GPS transmissions during a NATO exercise in Scandinavia and disabling American surveillance drones in Syria.”

Would be so interesting if a nation state ever takes over a future starlink. Definitely cheaper to hack it than rebuild SpaceX.

>Would be so interesting if a nation state ever takes over a future starlink. What to do with it?

Only allow their military global internet…

Access and store any information flowing through it

I’m becoming concerned about how much we are going to pollute space in the coming decade due to Starship. Continuous launches of huge payloads will increase the material in orbit dramatically. The issues astronomers currently have with Starlink will be the tip of the iceberg. Will we need UNESCO World Heritage Orbits to protect our views of space?

Some pollution is an inevitable consequence of economic development.

It would be great if we could move our most polluting activities (factories, refineries) to the Moon or Mars.

That’d be inconceivably far in the future. It’d need to be more economical to transport goods through space…

Two-way cargo transport through vacuum has zero net energy cost, just like a counterweighted elevator on Earth, only more so -- no vacuum here. With reasonable intelligence and infrastructure we should approach that limit.

Design sketch from 1978, with numbers: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/1976.skyhook/pap...

There isn’t energy cost between bodies, but there are huge energy costs getting into orbit, leaving orbit, and getting into the destination body’s orbit

Factories, refineries, and raw materials don't need to be on planets. There are disadvantages to siting on planets besides the added transport costs.

> getting into the destination body's orbit

I said round-trip energy costs. The delta-v for arriving cargo to enter orbit equals the delta-v for departing cargo. Over a full cycle of sending equal payloads both ways, the net change of energy and momentum is zero. I linked to an analysis of one way to harness this. When the skyhook in the linked example boosts a payload from Venus-Earth Hohmann to Earth-Mars Hohmann, the skyhook's orbit gets perturbed; but it gets the opposite perturbation on the boost on the opposite traffic.

(This is not the only non-rocket approach to free-space transport with potentially low marginal cost.)

Heavy industry in space is a ludicrous idea for the next few centuries. We will need to significantly rework industrial processes to avoid the heat buildup currently offset by the planet. No one will be operating a foundry in space anytime soon.

Niche applications like low-temperature ZBLAN manufacturing might make more sense.

I disagree about centuries because the rate of progress so far belonged to a regime of launch costs of thousands of dollars per kg or worse. (Though "centuries" is at least more realistic than "inconceivably far". People were conceiving it in the 1970s and earlier.)

Maybe we'll use mass drivers to cool platforms in a couple hundred years. Maybe we'll reuse the slugs to excavate other bodies.

> move our most polluting activities (factories, refineries) to the Moon or Mars

The delta-v required to move objects between planets is measured in thousands of m/s (e.g. just getting to low earth orbit requires about 10000 m/s), and the fuel required goes up exponentially with delta-v.

As Elon Musk put it: "If you had crack-cocaine on Mars, in prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here."

> Continuous launches of huge payloads will increase the material in orbit exponentially.

I don't follow how a linear process would lead to an exponential result, can you please explain?

What about the rate of improvement in launch costs we are observing is linear?

There's no starship 2 with 10 times the size of Starship in the plans.

Objects in orbit/day = min(objects per launch * launches per pad per day * number of working pads, number of objects per day anyone is willing to pay for)

There are diminishing returns as well. After a certain point there's no added benefit to put more stuff in the sky, hence not exponential.

It's not clear where the diminishing returns kick in. They say every curve is an S-curve, but without knowing the actual parameters, that's not helpful.

Debris breaking up could create many smaller objects.

I am not sure how the works out either, but Donald Kessler's paper [1] on the subject might help. Kessler syndrome [2] is named after him. The exponent seems to be controlled by the number of objects launched per year, i.e. the rate.

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[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110515132446/http://webpages.c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I'm aware of the Kessler syndrome but never made that particular connection, I always thought it came down to a feed forward mechanism that started with a single collision, but it makes good sense that the chances of such collisions go up as the number of launches increases.

So effectively, roughly paraphrasing GP's comment is that if the launch rate remains constant at its current historical high level (and it could easily go up further) and this leads to more objects in space (which is a safe assumption) then the moment of the triggering of the Kessler syndrome gets moved forward in time, would that be correct?

> the triggering of the Kessler syndrome gets moved forward in time

If you have a number of events, like meetings, moving one forward is putting it first, or earlier. But if you have a single event, with no notional queue, wouldn't moving it to an earlier point in time be "moved backward in time"? :)

Adding 1 to n existing objects (n => n + 1) increases the risk super-exponentially (n new collisions possible).

If n new collisions are possible when adding a new object to a population of n, that means risk increases quadratically (far sub-exponential).

I’m pretty easy to convince that the risk is sigmoid and the early part looks exponential. But this justification does not lead there.

Oops yeah, you're right, brain fart on my part.

Are you referring to N choose 2 possible collisions?

> risk super-exponentially

Sorry, wrong: very much sub exponentially in fact quadratic Sum_i^n i = n(n+1)/2

Well, SpaceX is attempting a 1/10th cost reduction with starship. That's one way to exponentially increase rates, drop the cost dramatically so a far larger number of use cases become feasible.

Then you might get space hooks, orbital cannons, asteroid/moon mining etc. It's kind of akin to Moore's "law" which really is an observation of continual investment, research, and production to enable larger and larger economic uses.

Space has a near-infinite (relative to our experience) of "potential use cases": there's a lot of usable matter out there, boatloads of always-on solar energy without pesky clouds, atmospheres, or night-time, and of course a LOT of room, and no gravity.

So if you get economic profit from launching things into space, and the cost of the launching gradually goes down, even linearly, the amount of use will be a multiple of the linear cost improvement.

I guess Moore's law was what it was because what was being optimized was two-dimensional shrinking.

Space in orbit is a bit of two dimensional (orbital planes) with stacking, but then in deep space it will be purely three dimensional expansion. That's pretty exponential as a driving force.

As civilization spreads to space, it will be visible.

I'm glad we built cities over pristine nature. Hope we can do the same in space.

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

There is a limit to how much we can pollute space.

I personally think we're going to lose space for at least a 1000 years, along with every other disaster this century. It will be for some asinine, short sited reason, i.e., power or money.

That might not be a bad thing per-se. We are getting a bit addicted to our future selves bailing out our past selves from various fuckups, it might be nice to have a millenium of contemplation to deal with the fall out of previous messes so that we can learn how to be proper stewards of planet sized eco-systems. Once we manage that we are possibly ready to take off the training wheels.

With the supply chain disruption we might lose digital technology, too. I say good riddance. We'll still have the mathematics we figured out (Graph Theory, Matrix Math, AI).

Our food supply is still mostly human powered. Tractors will get better.

We'll have to do something other than surveil people and shit-post on the internet to fill our time. Oh well.

We'll just move to shit-talking on radio.

Basic electrical knowledge is way too widespread for anything less than total apocalypse to push us more than 50-100 years back in tech-level.

Schematics and parts to assemble simple TTL computers are sufficiently widespread that computing would definitely continue. Small-scale electrical infrastructure is very simple and easy to set up, especially with the large number of high-quality manual tools available almost everywhere.

And that's fine by me. I think this computer everywhere stuff is more trouble than it's worth. It's like when we put radium on everything.

People don't live long enough to plan for the future over such vast timescales.

we're going to have to learn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

It's either that or extinction at some point so even if people don't live long enough we have to start looking over the horizon of a single human life-span.

BTW, the best argument for longevity research that I've come across to date is that if people lived for a thousand years suddenly there would be a lot of support for stabilization of our eco-systems.

The lower orbits are fairly resistant to this because of the residual atmospheric drag. Any piece of debris whose orbit is under 500 km will burn up in the atmosphere within 5-10 years or so. That is known as orbital decay.

For something to stay up 1000 years, even a small object like a lost nut, it must orbit at least 900 km away from the Earth.

https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm

And the moon is 384,400 km away. So, we've sent satellites and probes further than that.

True, but my reasoning was that we cannot really "lose space" for 1000 years by Kessler syndrome alone. The lower orbits self-clean much faster than that.

And Kessler syndrome, even if fully developed, will likely not prevent you from flying to other celestial bodies. Compared to an orbit, you only spend a very short time in the region cluttered by debris when leaving the Earth entirely.

Remember that volume increases exponentially with distance. Even large objects out that far are needles in a stack of haystacks.

Remember that volume absolutely does not increase exponentially with distance, it increases as the third power, which is polynomial. In fact, the word we use for "the third power" is even a direct reference to the fact that it's volume: cubic.

Agreed about the needle-in-haystacks part, though.

Oh, good, we'll only lose space for 5-10 years.

Most satellites orbit at 1000+ km.

> There is a limit to how much we can pollute space.

Not really. The universe is about 93 billion light-years in size and won't ever be traversable in a finite amount of time.

Your comment seems to indicate that you think of "space" as earth orbit. Starship is specifically about going beyond orbit.

It's time to move beyond scarcity thinking.

We have no permanent living habitats in space. ZERO. The ISS is where people live temporarily before returning to earth to recover from the effects of zero gravity.

We are in a desperate race to expand to space vs destroy ourselves before we get there. If you think that race has been won while three nations have the power to end the human race at the press of a nuclear launch button, you're naive.

The Great Filter has a gun pointed squarely at our head and is very slowly pulling the trigger.

We have enough food for everyone. We should feed everyone. We have enough houses for everyone, we should house them.

Space fantasies aren't part of avoiding scarcity thinking. Space fantasies are a distraction to getting everyone's needs met.

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/

Our current "post scarcity" world is built on shaky grounds. But it doesn't have to collapse.

Having satellites is important to various industries and branches of government. As such, money and power will enable them to have satellites up there.

Even if we let Kessler syndrome run unchecked to the point of no return where it destroys a large portion of satellites, we will either start serious clean-up of certain orbits to allow military observation and communication satellites to go up again, or we will develop better collision avoidance or self-defence systems.

I find people's belief in Money's ability to solve problems hilarious. We've been patching over problem after problem and every bill is coming due. We need nitrogen. We started making it with hydro carbons. Now we have toxic algae blooms, AND now we're running out of fossil fuels to make nitrogen.

We've written a check we aren't able to cash. The solution isn't to keep writing checks.

I'm not saying "let's ignore all problems and continue to party". Rather I'm saying "well funded people have a vested interest in solving this before it becomes critical. Our energy is better spent solving problems where that isn't the case"

Lol, like climate change and disinformation.

There is no one with money who is interested or capable of solving our problems.

If you think that Starship will massively increase objects in LEO due to lowered costs then you should also believe that more of those objects than before will be astronomical satellites. I.e the space industry pollutes the view from the ground at the same time it makes alternatives to that view much more viable. Personally, I’d much rather have the benefits of orbital industry.

The telescopes work better in space anyway. The cost of dropping a telescope in orbit will drop, and they won't want to be near-earth anyway so they'll be in lesser valued orbital real estate.

> I’m becoming concerned about how much we are going to pollute space in the coming decade due to Starship

You should be a little more concerned about the pollution on Earth.

Maybe the same huge payloads will enable astronomers to go to space to do their studies for months at a time? Seems like a win if that does happen.

Starship also offers the best potential for depolluting space...

Certainly a concern to think about, but also consider how vast space actually is. The area around earth in space is very significantly larger than the area on earth itself. Think of just how far the moon is away and still orbiting earth. You basically have ($max_orbit_distance - $min orbit_distance) all the way around earth. That is so much larger than the area we can build on earth, which is just a relative handful meters above or below the crust. And we’re not even close to utilizing most of earth’s surface area! Beyond that, the amount of activity in space will definitely be minuscule compared to the activity on earth.

Put together, I space pollution will basically be a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, at least for a very, very long time. And beyond that, space is empty, so we aren’t even destroying anything to do stuff

Elon already won this for the US. Excluding China stealing the Starpship technology so they can match the lowered cost per tonnage, there are no competitors.

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

How is that at all relevant to the asymmetric vulnerabilities the US faces in LEO & GEO, which is the focus of the article?

Starship would allow the US to quickly and cheaply replace any lost infrastructure in space, therefore that vulnerability would be mitigated. (I'm not sure this would be an advantage for long though. Once a working cheap launch system has been demonstrated, it will soon be copied.)

Just because you have launch capability doesn't mean you have the payload to utilize that.

If launches are expensive (e.g. 400M USD for a Delta IV Heavy launch) then you have to engineer the payload to make it worth that launch cost. It needs to be super reliable and last a long time, it needs to provide a lot of value, and you may get only one shot to get it right. There's not going to be a backup James Webb telescope if there's a glitch with the first one.

If launches are cheap (e.g. a few million USD targeted by Starship), you can use more off the shelf hardware and iterate to see what works. Replacing satellites is not such a big deal.

Starlink, which can be used for both communication and geolocation (and some observation), does, though. I think people don’t understand the scale that Starlink operates at. SpaceX is planning to ramp up Starlink manufacturing capacity for STARSHIP, too. Falcon 9 does 40 200kg satellites at once. And plans to operate them eventually at below 400km, which makes them resistant to debris.

Are there actually asymmetric vulnerabilities in space?

I also don't think that's the focus of the article and doesn't pertain to space. The article gives lots of examples of new competition from china & russia, but explicitly says for example that "the United States has idled certain of its offensive-technology programs while China and Russia actively test the same capabilities" which implies parity if not advantage.

To me that asymmetric quote from Oriana Skylar Mastro seems to more reference what I do genuinely find scary: the US military's heavy heavy reliance on technology and tech controlled via space.

can any of our planes even fly without computers? I assume all major powers can hack basically anything.

I would hope the smarter than me military advisors have thought that through...

"China attacked U.S. satellites operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. In the latter case, they gained control of the craft, but stopped short of issuing it commands"

"Among the spacefaring nations, the United States is by far the most exposed"

"I think it’s no-holds-barred. Because the U.S. has the most to lose."

Just by growing from behind technologically adversaries might have an advantage in they have stuff that works without computers & satellites.

Though I would personally bet we might still have a small asymmetric advantage in space defense and offense.

we obviously have an advantage in rapid deployment. Have been flying a mini shuttle for over 10 years. Have SpaceX. Seems wise to me to have extra satellites lying underground for rapid deployment. And hopefully we have more stuff that isn't trackable - it seems some of the shuttle stuff we know about is at least hard to track by amateurs.

The asymmetric vulnerabilities are simply because USA has so much more satellites compared to everyone else that give it various economic and military advantages.

This means that an escalation that wipes out all space resources for everyone is effectively a major loss for USA, as they lose a lot of capabilities, investment and comparative advantage, while those who had less resources up there did not suffer much because they had much less to lose; If anyone would be starting a major land/sea/air conflict with USA, then taking all space stuff out of the picture would be very useful for them.

Reproduction does not imply theft. National pride, sufficient resources, and prioritization are sufficient to replicate the technology.

Spend less money on spy satellites and more on spies. I wonder how many agents the CIA are running in China?

Not as many as the CIA might like [1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...

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