In 1962, "Starfish Prime" space nuke destroyed 1/3rd of LEO satellites | Hacker News Reader

In 1962, "Starfish Prime" space nuke destroyed 1/3rd of LEO satellites

thespacereview.com

30 pointshilux14 comments

I'm curious - did the people testing space nuclear weapons predict the intense effects? AKA killing 7 satellites and more impressively to me, causing an aurora seen from New Zealand to Hawaii (!!!).

> I'm curious - did the people testing space nuclear weapons predict the intense effects

No:

> Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights

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

1/3 sounds big, the the event happened in 1962, so the actual number was probably something like 2 or 3 total.

From TFA: "During the Starfish Prime nuclear test there were just 22 active satellites in orbit", so ~ 7.

Yeah, but it was an Area of Effect type damage. The radiation formed belts. It’d affect the same area now, just more satellites.

Isn't LEO a defined set of parameters? Read: finite space. So, it wasn't that populated. Now? Oh buddy.

Numbers are funny without contextualization. Far more potential impact today while dropping the scary fraction

It’s weird that in this entire article, it doesn’t actually say which nation launched Starfish Prime.

Why, the #1 nation, of course.

My title became too much of a clown car, so I had to remove the country. (I didn't dream that it wasn't in the article!)

The nation that designed and built the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, that produced the most powerful human-made explosion ever recorded?

That was Russia.

"the #1 nation" depends so much on metric.

Norway leads the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

Switzerland leads the https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

Australia leads the US in the US's own "best country" ranking https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings

I think it was said tongue-in-cheek

"Destroyed by radiation" after 4 months is a bad joke. Virtually all radioactivity produced has decayed by then, so if something wasn't kicked out in the first hours and days, it will be safe later.

Long-term disruptions in the Earth's magnetic field resulting from explosion, effectively exposing satellites to space radiation as if they were in the Van Allen belt instead of LEO, could do that. But certainly not the radioactivity produced by the explosion proper. It probably didn't have any impact on anything, either short or long term. Certainly not on satellites.

> Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg, co-discoverer of plutonium and Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, wrote that, “To our great surprise and dismay, it developed that Starfish added significantly to the electrons in the Van Allen belts. This result contravened all our predictions.

You can see the official report here, it has a ton of detail and sources https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/00322994.pdf

In it, J Van Allen (the one the belts are named after) is cited saying decay happened much more slowly at higher altitudes, from months to years.

Calling their work a “bad joke” is… interesting.

Nothing ever impacts the rate of radioactive decay. That's basic school physics.

This isn't radioactive products of the explosion itself (that is, gamma quants and beta particles produced by decay of fission products). They probably had no impact at all on any of the satellites (prompt radiation - neutrons produced in fission reaction itself - of course could and probably had some impact - but it lasts milliseconds to seconds).

What they are speaking is impact on Earth natural radiation belts with the electrons produced in the explosion. Electrons of course, do not decay at all. After that it was due to natural processes in the Earth's magnetic field to return things back to normal. This is a geophysical process that has nothing to do with the radioactive decay of any of the fission products produced.

We seem to be in agreement then. The decay in question is the decay of the artificial belts of trapped radiation, not radioactive decay.

The energy trapped in these fields did affect satellites months later, and this is explained in detail starting around page 23.

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