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Comment by georgeg23 | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that, SpaceX is a major military contractor which had been working with the Trump administration to stage weapons in low Earth orbit.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/23733/spacex-exec-says...

Also see Starshield

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Glancing at the article, doesn't it say something very hypothetical and prospective?

SpaceX Exec Says Company Would Launch A Weapon Into Space In ‘Defense Of This Country’

It might not be a hypothetical question for long now that Congress has asked the US military to develop anti-missile defenses in space.

Elon founded SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and offered him the role of Chief Engineer but he declined. Griffin instead went to Washington to steer NASA funding to SpaceX, before they ever launched any rockets.

Griffin was Chief Architect of the Brilliant Pebbles 'missile defense using weapons in space' program and has been advocating for it his whole life. After NASA, Griffin started the Space Development Agency--what that article is talking about--and gave contracts to SpaceX. When Biden came in he deweaponized everything, and then the lines were clearly drawn between him and Musk.

Check out Michael D. Griffin and also Will Roper.

Anti-missile defences don't really sound like a bad thing to have though?

It has plenty of flaws and would be net destabilizing. "Iron dome in Space" doesn't work when it comes to nuclear weapons. Heck even Iron Dome can't protect against large barrage of small rockets from Gaza. It would just make first-use of nukes more likely.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense...

There's a balance: If you have enough defense to give you first-strike capability (i.e., you could nuke the other side and could destroy their reponse), then it's destabilizing. Other nuclear powers will be very alarmed thinking that you could destroy them at any time.

But you also want to be able to destroy a few rogue missiles, such as from North Korea. If NK nukes Los Angeles, the argument that 'we must adhere 100% to the principle of no missile defense' would be unconvincing.

There are plenty of ground-based missile defense solutions for NK (aircraft and drones near NK are also an option if boost-phase interception is considered critical when their program advances).

The problem with space-based orbital missile defense is it necessarily threatens the entire planet while being predictable and easy to shoot down with relatively small missiles. Those anti-satellites attacks, which are justified by threatened countries, lead to a cascade of space debris, that leaves an unusable space environment for centuries and may in itself trigger nuclear conflict.

Not everything has a technological solution. Staging weapons in space is not a path to world peace, it just heightens the stakes and shortens the escalation. As Israel learned, you can try to seal off your border and your sky, but there are always holes. There are many ways NK or Russia can deliver nukes besides ICBMs. Dreaming of a shield in space is a false promise. Building bridges rather than walls is the only path to peace.

If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!

I agree. I temporarily forgot what the topic was and was thinking of missile defense in general and not space-based particularly. My mistake.

> Not everything has a technological solution. ...

> If the U.S. can be a model for the world, it is not it's military might to emulate, but the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences. It is possible!

Here I abolutely agree. Even warfare ends with political solutions. It is possible, especially today. It's not the 19th century any more. It just needs us. Thank you for posting that; people need to hear it much more!

> ... the idea that people of all nationalities and backgrounds can come and live together and resolve their differences.

The idea is decent, and Australia has that mostly working ok.

Isn't the the US though well known for it's internal racism issues?

They break MAD, and there's a lot of people that justify the existence of XY,000 nuclear weapons with a yield of ~4,000 MT as 'It's fine, they'll never be used, they prevent war because of MAD.'

If MAD was what was preventing them from being used, and MAD is no longer a thing, it's no longer fine that we have them. Anybody pushing to destabilize that balance of terror is going to need a damn good and through review of that question.

This seems a strange way to say "they'd be amazing because then we could safely decommission some of our nuclear weapons".

And others would interpret it as "We could safely fire our nuclear weapons." And I'm not counting on the guys responsible for building the weapons to decide the more altruistic interpretation.

Maybe, or maybe not. It's complicated.

But what's certain is that it's politically polarized. SDI has support from [some/most?] republicans but not from [most/any?] democrats.

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