Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future.
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
<1000km LEO would take a hundred generations to resume operations.
The collision you note, along with another couple that have occurred, dramatically increased overall trackable debris counts, by thousands, when we only had a few thousand satellites and under a hundred thousand debris items. Secondary collisions were much less of an issue than they are now, and they are now much less of an issue than they will be in five years per current plans.
Also, ball bearings or the military equivalent tungsten BB's, are prefigured for maximum lifespan and maximum distribution, as well as being untrackable from day 1.
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
[2] https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/articles/new-normal-componen...
[3] https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasst...
Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?
Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.
Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.
¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.
Humanity managed to do fine for millennia by existing in a state of frequent malnutrition and a not insignificant number of deaths from starvation. And it was never in a world with the population density we have today.
All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, but many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.
I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.
We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
Armor can protect you against the smallest debris which post the least risk and decay the fastest. Everything else, not so much.
A question for you though - does that insulation vaporizing itself inside a whipple shield generate secondary debris comprised of the whipple shield and condensed aluminum droplets??
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
I might have thought about this too much.
A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
You want an accretion disc around the planet like Saturn?
It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
I'm not that strong on orbital dynamics, but I think the answer is that you're right. The ball bearings launched directly prograde would be in a new stable elliptical orbit with the perigee at the explosion point. That means I was wrong about the debris only affecting the orbital altitude where the explosion happened. But most of the ball bearings would still re-enter the sensible atmosphere within a single orbit.
The Δv required to deorbit from LEO is surprisingly small. In https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-... we find that deorbiting the International Space Station to a controllable place in "a remote area in the ocean" from its current 415 km altitude requires only 57m/s of Δv. The more precisely controlled Space Shuttle re-entry used 90m/s of Δv: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/calculating-.... It seems crazy that a change in orbital speed of only 1% would be enough, but there it is. There's a lot of explanation in that SE question.
The ISS document also explains that even the enormous ISS will deorbit by itself in "roughly one-to-two years without reboosts", which is why most LEO satellites are in somewhat higher orbits.
Eh, you can do a lot better than that: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conksat_introducing-fragsat-f...
:)
A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.”
Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
> I think it's something similar with China
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.
Is your comment an example of this?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...
- "if you have a vehicle that can reach orbit and it has re-entry capacities to stear it to the point you want it", then you have an ICBM
:-)
Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people.
Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz_program#Defense_measures
> in the event that you land in a forest or similar.
I was very confused and wondered where this was going!
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
Not to mention the 23mm cannon on Salyut 3, in case you needed to take out the wild animals from orbit.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.
That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.
This place is no better than X...seriously...it is just too small for the propaganda operations to target and yet it is still just as bad. I don't even think it is HN's fault, just the skew of the population HN attracts.
Not even sure who I'm supposed to be propagandising for here, but as the person that actually works on European dual use satellite tech I can assure you it's well established fact that all superpowers have taken out their own satellites with ASAT weaponry (Russia more recently than China fwiw, though China's in-space capabilities are likely a lot better). None of those are a violation of the very narrow anti-WMD proscriptions in the Outer Space Treaty, and whatever counterspace capability the US is vaguely announcing here (or indeed the capability they and their adversaries have had for years) is unlikely to be either.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secretive-russian...
The US invasion of Iraq was also based on "strong evidence" of WMDs.
Got some?
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
I don't see any evidence.
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
Proxy at work is stopping me from reading most of grandparent links, so it'll have to wait for home.
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
This isn't how debris clouds work. The most-complex ones occur when entirely separate orbits collide were you get an X-shaped (versus cylndricla or conic) debris cloud. But the energies of the collision inputs sharply curtail the orbits and places in said orbits the debris fragments can generally reach.
[1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.
Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planes/comments/15fh5js/a_us_air_fo...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59299101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_...
The outer space is already a dumpster and a disaster.
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.
Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
https://san.com/cc/nasa-china-wants-military-moon-base/
Really at this point between conspiracy and official realize is just matter of a year if not just a couple months now.
To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?