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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder if something happened to the satellite necessitating destruction. Everything about this seems so unbelievably reckless that it feels like an emergency protocol being enacted. It's an old satellite but old encryption keys still need to be guarded for the sake of the historical data that might be decrypted with them.

I guess i just don't understand such a sudden move that's literally putting their own citizens lives (let alone all the others) at such risk.

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Not necessary. There is no spacecraft currently in operation that is capable of retrieving a satellite and returning it to Earth, and atmospheric drag would've destroyed it eventually anyway.

At best this was negligence while testing a weapon. At worst it was a deliberate provocation.

Are we sure the X-37 doesn't have a robot arm to grab interesting bits of satellites? x)

There was a alleged incident this month where a US spy satellite approached a Chinese satellite and the Chinese satellite did a avoiding maneuver.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3154496/chi...

Given how paranoid the Russians were about the Space Shuttle (they suspected it could take the entire abandoned Salyut V station into its cargo bay, "steal it" and return to the US with it so that enemy scientists could study it), they almost certainly have routines to destroy sensitive payloads and data at a distance.

Also, just changing the orbit so that the perigee is sufficiently low (say, 200 km) will basically ensure complete burnup of the satellite in a matter of weeks. Atmospheric drag is a significant force on the lower orbits and what matters is the perigee, where the remnants of the atmosphere are densest. They will act as a powerful brake.

The US lifted a wrecked Russian submarine from the bottom of the ocean with an incredibly complex covert operation. Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't means they are not after you :).

What are you talking about ? Do you have a wikipedia link ?

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

But indeed, the US currently has no capacity to grab satellites from the orbit, so they just could have deorbited the satellite, if they wanted it to be destroyed in a safe manner.

Exactly. See also "The Jennifer Morgue" for a fictional take on it by cstross.

This satellite series had operational lifetime of 6 months and this one has been launched back in 1982. It has been dead with no means of external control for ~40 years.

Now it's extra dead with no means of external control.

You could even say it's like a zombie, with the potential of turning more of the currently "living" satellites into more of its own, eq. to more rapidly expanding debris clouds.

Because if the US did have that capacity you or others on here would know about it already.

And the US had no capacity to grab submarines from the bottom of the ocean. Right up until they did!

This one, right ?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

Yes, it is an amazing story.

See the link else thread about the Glomar Explorer as well.

They weren't paranoid, they were right. The DOD specifically explored single orbit satellite grabs as a shuttle capability. I'm not sure if they ever made it a requirement though.

Scott Manley has a good video on this topic:

https://youtu.be/_q2i0eu35aY

How could the keys be recovered? I don’t understand how this action is the only choice to prevent them being captured?

The most conspiratorial part of my mind thinks the projectile coated the debris in some isotope they have tracking capabilities for to build a “safety” use case for Soyuz

Recovering enemy satellites was one of the design goals imposed on the US Space Shuttle program by the Air Force. The shuttle ended up flying to the Hubble telescope to fix/upgrade it half a dozen times, though obviously they kept it in orbit rather than recovering it.

The DOD probably has a replacement for the shuttle that does the same thing. I seem to remember a DARPA program over a decade ago

DARPA’s spacecraft became the x-37B, which probably has fuck-with-satellites capability via robot arm but a rather paltry 4 ft by 7 ft payload bay (The shuttle had 15 ft by 60 ft !)

What the x-37B lacks in payload volume, it more than makes up for in endurance: why temporarily bring a satellite to earth when you have weeks or months to remotely tamper in orbit?

Does the X-37B have the carrying capacity for the computer to replace the broken down one on Hubble and the humanoid bot surgical arms and hands to make the installation in place on orbit?

No.

> but a rather paltry 4 ft by 7 ft payload bay

IIRC there's a scaling limit with modern military/spy satellites on two axes: radar cross section and thermal output both grow with volume and make the satellite easier to target in a real conflict (which is ostensibly what many of them are for). The big ones like the satellite NRO donated to NASA with the 2.4 m diameter mirrors are easy to disable and AFAIK there's not much point recovering them anyway. The ones used for telecom with recoverable military encryption keys tend to be much smaller. For example, the 2nd gen Iridium constellation satellites are 30x40x70 cm.

didn't the shuttle also take a satellite back down and then they launched it back into orbit?

The DOD actually wanted to be able to do it in a single orbit. Like a smash and grab in space. Would have been amazing if they pulled it off.

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