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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.

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Ya, that's a hilarious comment from the Chinese after they have literally tested their own anti-satellite weapons. But then their diplomats have never been short of chutzpah.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-anti-satellite-test

Once a country develops midcourse ballistic missile intercept technology, it's practically impossible to not own an ASAT weapon. It's just a matter of targeting and programming.

This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.

In human terms, there is a spectrum between knowing where to buy a firearm, owning a firearm, and pointing a gun at your head.

Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.

Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.

> Being the first country to put weapons in space

The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).

Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.

"Putting" weapons in space, like in orbit (otherwise they won't stay in space for long) is not like putting weapons in international waters close in to the target. Any weapon that relies on moving some (projectile) mass from there will have to deal with the costly orbital mechanics, where the projectile will have to be pulled out of orbit with a lot of mass and time to reach anywhere on the planet. It's... not that good of an option for attack, compared even to existing ballistic ground-to-ground trajectories. For non-projectile orbital weapons, i.e. energy weapons, the physics are brutal, because the amount of energy necessary to reach any degree of destructive effect to a target on the ground is way too large. And all that has to also be weighted against the risk of having such weapon staying exposed in the orbit, like a sitting duck, for anyone on the ground to disable it in numerous ways. If there would be any case for having weapons in space, I don't think it will be to attack anything on the ground.

Russia mounted a gun on one of its space stations[0] but it didn't work out, and they were going to launch an orbital nuclear platform[1] but then everything went to shit.

Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3

[1]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...

There was this article from several years ago but I don't believe anything came out of it:

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/08/pentagon-posed-to-unveil...

First country to admit putting weapons in space.

I was wondering, didn't they have something like this fifty years ago? Wasn't that the whole point of the space program?

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

> Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.

First to publicly announce it. However, Russia beat us to the punch.

Russian, China, India, and the US are all in this secret little club (but maybe not so secret anymore!)

The next logical step is to use AI to influence US voters with "no data centers in space" outrage.

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