China has been complaining to the United Nations about it. https://press.un.org/en/2022/gadis3698.doc.htm
More details: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Starshield_(satellite_constellati...
If they wanted low key interception of civilian terrestrial radio signals, seems like it would be better to just rent a Uhaul or RV, load it up with radio gear, and drive it across the country.
Some hardware failure happens, but it's not that frequent, if it's like previous generations of cell technology, most of it will run until the operator chooses to shut down that particular service e.g. switching to a newer generation and freeing up the spectrum for it.
Or was it a joke I'm not American enough to understand?
US can always launch more and for these LEO constellations it's all about numbers.
China has a total of 600-ish satellites together for all purposes. Starlink has 3500-ish right now, and the already licensed plans are for 12000 by 2026. When(if!) Starship starts launching satellites, a single launch can put in orbit more military satellites than China has ever launched, and it does not seem have a comparable capability in the near future.
Like knowing what kinds of alloys turned out not to work and why, etc. So you don't have to repeat all that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00048-7#:~:text=1.....
2. These gaps would be measured in minutes, and are zero when you considered the combined coverage of all none-nato countries. Anything that we don't want seen is done under cover.
1. Some reports say that they've only been detected recently; referencing multiple undetected occurrences during the Trump presidency; o they've been working for X years already. If they're undetected, they can view into gaps referenced above. If this program has been going on for 5-10 years undetected then it still could have been of value to China/Russia/Whoever owns them.
I wouldn't expect to see spy satellites from the SDA; the NRO has always controlled those. I could believe small spy satellites if launched from NRO. There haven't been any details on how missile defense will work from space with small satellites. The descriptions I've seen have been about communication and detecting hypersonic weapons with infrared sensors. The latter is not what I would think of as spy satellite or missile defense.
The US government knows exactly what is going on up there at all times and most likely has the most advanced spying satellites and capabilities out of all countries.
The NRO has been doing this since the 60s!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office
>In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope.
I had a retired intel guy at DEFCON tell me the imagery is so advanced they could zoom in on a coin on the ground and tell if it was heads or tails.
Assuming a great number of things, a larger than Hubble 3 meter aperture, 200km orbit, red 750nm light, zero atmospheric distortion, the resolving power cannot be better than 6.1 centimeter resolution.
tan(750e-9/31.22)200000
= 0.061
If you want the best possible example of NRO's capabilities, the best example in recent memory is when trump unintentionally disclosed them with the highest resolution satellite image I personally have ever seen [2]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/05/758038714/can-president-trump...
But for your question, with LEO satellites you don't really target specific countries. They cover every country within a given latitude range. A round LEO orbit that goes over the US must also go over China.
However you don't need geostationary orbits to target a given part of the globe. Molniya orbits do the same thing more or less and work better if you want coverage further away from the equator. They were popularized by the USSR and the US and China use them to varying extents.
Idk how many companies/govs have this capability but: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/metaconstellation/
They did what now?
In fact, setting up as much automation as possible, pre-people, would be a good way to establish the human safety of Mars flights.
As well as supercharging the productivity and quality of life of the first Marsers when they finally do arrive.
From the first paragraph or two of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_SpaceX
> In August 2001, Musk shared a plenary talk with Mike Griffin at the fourth Mars Society convention where he announced his plans to send his greenhouse to Mars.[6] In October 2001, Musk travelled to Moscow with Jim Cantrell and Adeo Ressi to buy refurbished Dnepr ICBMs that could send the envisioned payloads into space.[7]
CubeSats are cheap and effective.
Because to achieve that you need to put a lot of stuff in orbit and the only way to affordably do that is cheap (reusable) launches.
Here is the submitted flight plan https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
https://x.company/projects/loon/
Rather than being all secretive, it would be just as easy to blame some new upstart company being a little more cavalier than Google.
UN is literally just a forum for countries to meet and discuss matters. Nothing more nothing less. I have no idea why people expect UN to take action, when UN is explicitly not an organisation for taking any actions.
They have an active duty peacekeeping force of approximately 81K people. While that's similar in size to the active duty forces from a nation like a Peru or Chile, the Blue Helmets have had a de facto quasi-blanket immunity when committing war crimes, and have some pretty horrifying history in places like Central Africa. For example:
"Consider a small sample of heinous cases: in April 2016 Foreign Policy reported that, in the Central African Republic, a French commander tied up four girls and forced them to have sex with a dog. Soldiers from France, Gabon, and Burundi sexually abused at least 108 women and children in a single province. In July 2015, The Washington Post reported that peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in ‘transactional sex’ with over 229 women and girls in exchange for food, medicine, or other necessities.
"Most recently, it was published in the The Washington Post in February 2016 that ‘four peacekeepers had allegedly paid girls as young as 13 as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex in a different camp for the internally displaced’ and ‘as many as 14 troops from France, Chad and Equatorial Guinea allegedly raped and sodomised six boys ages nine to 15’."
https://www.ibanet.org/article/CEBC5F69-A238-49BB-B85A-5E8D8...
I'm guessing if one lived in any of the areas mentioned above, the UN would feel about as much like an invading force as just about anything.
The UN as a peacekeeping force was a great concept, but it's had a very mixed history when put into practice.
But it exists, so many people expect it to be a solution to their problems.
The original point to which I was replying is that they don't understand why people call on a mere forum to solve their problems. Some regions repeatedly look to UN peacekeepers to solve their problems and so the forum designation is insufficient to describe it.
But the UN is oddly violent for a mere forum, some would say immorally so. War crimes are as old as war, but war is war. The UN is this bizarrely unaccountable keeper of peace and rape. And many people really don't understand the UN's modest peacekeeping capabilities and the collateral damage they often bring to a conflict, and often wrongly believe the UN is a silver bullet when it's far from it. I believe that's why people repeatedly think the UN is a solution to problems it mostly isn't.
That's the scope of what I was trying to address. My added detail about its structural and fundamental flaw of having no real mechanism for recourse when its troops commit war crimes was just to properly frame what an inherently deficient entity it really is.
While it was a particularly poor showing for a UN mission, and badly handled at every possible level, I don't think it's comparable raping children. It wasn't the UN soldiers who murdered the civilians, they were just completely unable to prevent it, and provided only an illusion of defense.
If anything, the doves are way to often the pets of the butcher.
Maybe it depends if you're a UN member with a veto or not. It's possible that having a veto changes how one would perceive and interact with the UN.
I used to be in the 82nd Airborne and the inevitable problems when they got sent on peacekeeping missions in the 90s was no big surprise at all.
I can cite henious cases committed by London Police force. Just a couple months ago we've convicted 'bastard dave'. He was a cop and used his position to become a serial rapist and a murderer, and he had a nickname, which strongly suggests some of his colleagues knew something.
You have to assess three points to understand if the entire organisation is responsoble.
Have they commited significantly more warcrimes, than comparable situation suggests is, dreadfull to say, normal? Say during occupation of Iraq? For blue helmets I mean, I hope London police do not think of themselves that way.
Can these acts be traced back to some higher level of command, that is either turning a blind eye or is actively encouraging them?
When these acts become known, are the perpetrators punished, or are these acts tolerated?
I have not studied history of blue helmets, but these are the kind of questions you should be seeking to answer.
The rest is a different conversation.
That's atrocious
In fairness to the UN, it's not an easy problem to solve: who's going to volunteer to act as a peacekeeper in a place where if the wrong faction ultimately prevails, you will be subject to the local jurisdiction and all of the corruption that may entail? Unlike military service, UN peacekeepers do not have the same degree of national backing to rely on when things go south.
Nuclear powers play by whatever rules they choose to play by.
First, I don't think calling them "blue helmets" has the negative connotation you think it does.
Second. What's the difference between the UN peacekeepers and any other army? All have a mixed history and I'm pretty sure have let's say a high amount of immunity.
People do bad things, especially soldiers who have power and the cover of war. This will never change. Of course crimes should be prosecuted as well but I don't know much about the details of the UN peacekeepers.
Their Rules of Engagement are also significantly different from those of a conventional military force.
The International Court of Justice (the IJC–not the ICC) is part of the United Nations System. At that body, at least, UN peacekeepers enjoy blanket immunity. To oversimplify it, it's another case of, "we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
The UN nominally expects host countries to prosecute the war crimes of their peacekeepers, but in reality the nature of deploying to somewhere needing peacekeepers is that the rule of law on the ground is already minimal, at best. So there's no real enforcement mechanism to prosecute these crimes.
It is not a trivial distinction. One can debate their virtue and utility value one way or the other, but the distinction is real and significant. They operate under a unique set of circumstances and saying war is hell and victors typically enjoy their own brand of immunity is true enough, but not entirely applicable here.
The legal framework surrounding UN peacekeeping is insufficient as the UN itself grants its peacekeepers blanket immunity, and expects host and/or contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by UN peacekeepers. But those nations are almost by definition unable to maintain the rule of law (or in the case of contributing nations, unlikely or unwilling to prosecute).
I'm not sure why "but other people also do bad stuff" is where everyone seems to go with that information. But to go along it, a more apt comparison would be the Mahmudiyah rape and killings: war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq, in which the perpetrators were tried, convicted and sentenced in American military and civilian courts. That's how that aspect of the inevitable evils of war should be handled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
Had the perpetrators been UN peacekeepers, the host nation likely would not have had the ability to prosecute the accused competently and fairly, and the UN would have given them immunity if expected to act. The contributing nation would not have wanted to prosecute for a whole host of reasons.
One can argue that the UN is doing what it can, but it isn't much: Asking contributing nations to prosecute war crimes committed by their citizens (not likely), shaming those nations [1], and trying to support the victims [2]. Which all goes to show that the UN is rather toothless on the matter. There's an asymmetry to their ability to contribute to violence but not prosecute the criminal abuses thereof. I think that's concerning.
Regardless, your comparison reminds me that even Abu Ghraib resulted in numerous prison terms. Make of that what you will.
Since this is HN I might as well provide the data:
In total 11 soldiers were convicted, of which 9 served time in prison:
- Former Spc. Armin Cruz - 8 months
- Former Sgt. Javal Davis - 6 months
- Pfc. Lynndie England - 3 years (released after 1 year and 5 months)
- Former Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick - 8½ years (released on parole after 4 years)
- Former Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. - 10 years (paroled after 6 and a half years)
- Former Spc. Sabrina Harman - 6 months
- Former Spc. Roman Krol - 10 months
- Former Spc. Jeremy Sivits - 1 year
- Former Sgt. Michael J. Smith - 179 days
And the two who served no prison time were:
- Former Sgt. Santos A. Cardona - 90 days of hard labor
- Former Spc. Megan Ambuhl Graner - Discharged from the army without prison time
We all know US will declare war on Belgium IIRC if international court of justice will ever sentence any US soldier, all pretty unique scenarios.
Blue helmets may not all be saints, but they did and do some important security work in semi-failed states ie in Africa where otherwise gangs would chop civilians from other tribes if left unchecked. Also kept Balcan states more stable after war. You are simply choosing to not see forest for the trees for whatever personal reasons.
The vast majority of the damage done by a war is not in massacres, or isolated incidents, but rather in the normal practice of warfare: attacks upon infrastructure, collateral damage, blockades and sanctions. These are the drivers that send life expectancy plummeting, and the idea that you can 'clean' war by avoiding some forms of violence, generally selected for symbolic reasons, is absurd.
So in the case of the UN, the reason why it's a good model is that the UN is unlikely to engage in wars of aggression, so even if the conduct of its soldiers are awful, they are ultimately less problematic than a national military.
Even the Nosiour square massacre in 2007, which was a particularly atrocious, and not conducted by a military personnel, took a whole year to file charges (despite overwhelming evidence) found five Blackwater soldiers guilty, but had the charges dropped on technicality in 2009 (despite taking a whole year in preparing the charges). Now later rulings found this was an error, and four of them were finally charged with the massacre 2014 (seven years after the massacre). Charges were as such:
- Dustin Heard - 12½ years in prison
- Evan Liberty - 14 years in prison
- Nicholas Slatten - Life without the possibility of parole
- Paul Slough - 15 years in prison
Additionally Jeremy Ridgeway got 1 year and 1 day in prison in a special deal by pleading guilty and testifying against the other.
Predictably all four (not Ridgeway) were then pardoned by Trump in 2020.
This is a clear case of the US justice system not actually wanting to press these charges, and only did so reluctantly after an immense pressure from the electorate.
If you also compare the Nisour Square Massacre to the helicopter murders of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh (as leaked by Chelsea Manning). The only people that answered for those murders were Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, and that was only for revealing the truth about those murders.
Article 43 of the UN Charter would, if it were ever implemented, create a military force under the control of the UN Security Council.
>The potential of the United Nations and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to protect member states "against violators of the peace." Chapter VII dealt with enforcement action: Article 39 first authorized the Security Council to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression"; Article 42 was designed to respond with "air, sea or land forces as may be necessary"; and Article 43 committed all UN member states "to make available to the Security Council, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security." Although much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA514849456&sid=sitemap...
"Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage [of WW2]" (page 2)
"The Soviet ambassador... was even stronger than the others in pleading for a security council with teeth" (page 9)
"Chopping the air with his hands to emphasize his words, Truman said the new UN must keep the world 'free from the fear of war'." (page 19)
More generally the ongoing theme of the book is the extent to which the UN has been successful, and unsuccessful, at ensuring world peace in various conflicts that have flared since its founding.
I did get the impression that not a lot of thought was put into the design of the UN, and there is the possibility that it could've been much more successful with a radically different design.
[Edit: To be more concrete -- Google tells me that global military spending was $2.1 trillion in 2021. You'd think it would be worth putting a mere 1% of that $2.1 trillion, something like $21 billion, into essay competitions, agent-based simulations, online diplomacy games, academic literature reviews, etc. in order to design an optimal UN structure that minimizes the risk of war. But the actual structure of the UN was designed using far, far less than $21 billion worth of analysis, based on what I recall from the Meisler book.]
That's not to say that the UN being a forum is bad or unnecessary. But it's interesting to me how everyone seems to have forgotten its original eutopian aspiration to create a world free from war. Maybe has something to do with the fact that people who lived through WW2 are mostly dead now, and few living people understand at a visceral level how horrifying war between great powers really is.
It's worth thinking about this context when considering the Korean War when it was UNC (UN Command) that was the primary defense force: https://www.unc.mil/History/1950-1953-Korean-War-Active-Conf...
I think it is maybe only after the Iraq War that people stopped thinking of the UN as an alternative to conventional war politics. IIRC, Bush acted unilaterally without UN approval, and now it kinda seems like the "you should get UN approval before making war" norm has been lost? I don't remember anyone even discussing the possibility of UN approval for any more recent US military actions like in Libya. And the UN hasn't played a large role in Ukraine either -- I suppose that might be because Russia is on the security council?
The UN courts can issue judgements…
Human Rights Courts: e.g. Slobodan Milosovic, Radavan Kardzich etc
A lot of the global treaties are kicked around there
They also enforce peace zones (poorly) like Lebanon, Israel demilitarised zone.
They coordinate aid programs UNRWA etc
It's all to appease the major powers to not use their nukes.
To a degree, it also gives the lesser players a voice to feel heard so that they continue to participate in the economic system that benefits the big players. Again, this keeps the big players from acting unilaterally, imperialistically, etc. in a way that threatens the use of nukes.
A side benefit is that this lets the bigger players test their geopolitical strategies without dangerous surprises. If tensions can be expressed and gently eased into a final state, that prevents a flash bang.
It's kept us from having another world war. Or nuclear exchange. Here's hoping we keep it up.
UN decisions are more like a veil or facade of moral Authority
Ignorant, cynical claims on the the Internet do a lot of harm to real people, by tearing down valuable things that people need.
Not so; "veil" or "facade" implies fakeness or concealment. The U.N. does not hide its mission or its position on human rights.
> One of the great achievements of the United Nations is the creation of a comprehensive body of human rights law—a universal and internationally protected code to which all nations can subscribe and all people aspire. The United Nations has defined a broad range of internationally accepted rights, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. It has also established mechanisms to promote and protect these rights and to assist states in carrying out their responsibilities. [1]
The lack of consensus and consistency is an ongoing challenge, sure, but it doesn't make the goals fake. Countries are flawed and have competing interests, but it is important to nudge the world in a better direction.
The UN also handles much more than military missions, including health, technical coordination, and much more.
Right, that's why we should only ever trust Radio Free Asia for our news sources about what's happening internationally
Otherwise (for example) the Apollo missions would have violated USSR's airspace whenever the moon's orbit was above it's territory, which would make space unusable for everyone.
So yes, Ballons are by definition in airspace because they use lighter than air buoyancy to rise and sattelites do not.
A balloon could also be in the way for airplanes. A balloon could also drop its payload, on purpose or by accident. The recent balloons have been reported to carry a load the size of up to several buses so I guess if that falls to ground it could cause quite some damage.
Not sure satellites can shoot missiles or drop bombs that could hit earth in any effective manner.
Check your source, per your cited wiki page: > The shootdown, and the subsequent creation of a record-setting amount of in-orbit debris, drew serious international criticism.[15][16][17][18][19]
The shootdown refers to the ASAT test on FY-1C
For the reference [15] http://www.centerforspace.com/asat/, cannot be opened, the site is unreachable.
For [16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17497766 It's referring to a debris from Russia rocket, itself is a routine affair in the space. > The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) briefly took refuge in escape capsules as a piece of space junk hurtled by. > The debris - a discarded piece of Russian rocket - was detected on Friday when it was too late to move the ISS.
For reference [17], a piece from BCC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6276543.stm BCC's reporting on China is about as accurate as Fox's reporting on Democratic party. Go figure
For reference [18], an intro page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse AFP Not sure what's relevance with a ASAT
For reference [19], https://www.npr.org/2007/01/19/6923805/chinese-missile-destr... > The governments of Britain, Japan and Australia are voicing concern over China's apparent test of an anti-satellite missile. The United States says China shot down one of its own aging weather satellites last week, in a kind of target practice in low Earth orbit. > "I was surprised that they were able to do it," Kristensen says. Seems about routine as any space tests...
Then the conclusion is that China's ASAT test is "the worst in history." With evidences that are as substantial as web3's value to society.
This type of post on HN is simply not passing the quality bar on HN...
> The single biggest debris-generating event happened in 2007, when China used a missile to destroy one of its own satellites. The explosion created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
Also, comparing the BBC to Fox on coverage of anything is disingenuous at best. Even if they have clear biases, the BBC is one of the most respected news outlets in the world, and have been very rarely just lying about facts.
Edit: also, reference 15 includes an archive link, so the fact that it is currently unreachable is entirely irrelevant. Here is a sample from the archive link you misleadingly ignored:
> The official debris count from China’s anti-satellite missile test has reached 1,337 pieces big enough to be tracked and NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office is estimating more than 35,000 pieces larger than 1 cm [...] This makes the January 11 test the largest debris-generating event in history, surpassing the previous record set in 1996, according to Dr. T.S. Kelso. Dr. Kelso serves as Senior Research Astrodynamicist in the Center for Space Standards & Innovation (CSSI) and webmaster of CelesTrak, a site dedicated to tracking space objects and monitoring them for in-orbit collisions.
Are your brain's logical circuit working correctly?