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Comment by n0mad01 | Hacker News Reader

and you think that getting x nuclear bombs into orbit is safe?

and even when all bombs go into space without incidents, having them there until start is no risk neither?

i think something more conventional would be better, even when less economically ...

As others point out, nuclear bombs do not spontaneously go off. If they were that easy to accidentally trigger, building them would be no big deal and we wouldn't be talking about nuclear vs. non-nuclear countries to this day.

Furthermore, everything is space is already a weapon. The very act of being in space and not falling back to Earth means you are loaded up with enough kinetic energy to be going several miles per second. You don't need nuclear bombs to be a weapon in space, a bucket of sand is a deadly weapon. Militarization of space refers to things other than merely putting "big bombs" in space, where they are surprisingly useless. (Even the EMP is less useful than you'd think; space is already a sea of radiation so everything up there is already hardened against it.)

You won't have an EMP in space - the EMP is generated by the motion of intensely electrically charged pieces of atoms acting against the magnetic field of the earth, and by electrons that were launched from atoms by the gamma ray pulse.

There is a solar magnetic field, but it's much weaker, so wouldn't make much of an EMP, and there is no atmosphere is space so the gamma rays don't accelerate any electrons.

You won't have EMP in deep space. Earth orbit is still "space".

High-altitude nuclear explosions (which produce the most intense EMP) work better above the Kalman line: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:High_altitude_EMP.gif

There are also special EMP weapons that don't require nuclear explosions.

That graph tops out at 300km, but even LEO is 2,000 km. (Although you can orbit as low as 160km - why would you for this?)

And I've never heard of a Kalman line and google comes up with nothing.

LEO is below 2000 Km, and is typically 300-500 Km. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_Orbit

I don't think anyone thinks it's a particularly practical idea these days - for the reasons you identify.

However, it seems a bit of a shame that for all of the 2000+ nuclear weapons tests and tens of thousands of nuclear weapons built we never did anything as constructive as flying an Orion.

You can pack materials so that a failed launch will not create leaks.

The real problems for the Orion are political and frying of satellite electronics, iirc.

Mostly political. You could presumably do the detonations with the moon in between for a while, and it's not like space outside the Van Allen belts is particularly low energy, either, so GEO satellites are shielded.

i hate it when problems are "political" - or more correctly, that the general public's ignorance and fear retarding progress.

If I had ~10k nuclear weapons, I'd no longer have political problems.

I think you would suddenly have a great many political problems.

Well, combustion engine in my car is not very conventional either by XIX century standards. Maybe we should ride horses?

Why you make assumption that bombs must be delivered to space vs constructed there from resources mined in asteroids?

Plutonium ain't easy, so you'd probably want to ship pre-made pits into orbit (we've got plenty already made), preferably one at a time so we don't get a big critical mass of plutonium sitting in a desert in case the rocket crashes.

Plutonium is a synthetic element, requiring a nuclear reactor to create, then must be purified. Uranium is currently unknown in asteroids, and even if it were found would require refining with thousands of large centrifuges.

Converting uranium to uranium hexafluoride, centrifuging it over and over, then converting it back requires massive industrial facilities, currently impossible in space.

What about moon?

I'm pretty sure that smart people will figure out the solution. I just wanted to point out that most probably we can find solutions that are safe enough and the only limiting factor is our imagination (or lack of it specifically).

Why wouldn't it be safe? Nuclear bombs don't just explode by accident or when they are hit by something, they need to be deliberately triggered, so I wouldn't estimate the danger of this to be very big.

Furthermore, nuclear weapons have been sent to space before, both for regular long-range missiles and for EMP-like tests.

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