India Developing Vehicle To Knock Enemy Satellites 178
Frankie70 writes "Star Wars are back in fashion. With perennial (and nuclear armed) foe Pakistan always teetering on the brink of political collapse and neighboring regional superpower China taking greater strides into space technology, India has announced that it is developing an exo-atmospheric 'kill vehicle' that will knock enemy satellites out of orbit."
Oh great, more orbital shooting gallery! (Score:5, Insightful)
With everyone "testing" their antisatellite weaponry and creating ever more orbital debris, pretty soon there'll be so much debris up there we won't be able to keep any satellites operational.
China's test of a year or two back may have already generated enough debris to start a chain reaction, any more and we may definitely go over the brink to where nothing is survivable in low earth orbit.
--PM
India announces a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)
India and Russia both have this habit of announcing these awesome things, and then never actually doing them. If India and Russia would have done everything they said, India would have five aircraft carriers and a man on the moon, Russia would have mach 15 planes for everyone, and more.
Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, even if you knock down their satellites they're going to retaliate on the ground in your largest populated cities. And they don't need their satellites to do that.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Does Pakistan have satellites? They've had some put up for them, but it looks like it numbers a total of three that have been put up there, and it looks like they're all dead or abandoned now.
It seems more to me they're concerned about China.
Re:Oh great, more orbital shooting gallery! (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that is the least of any government's worries if the alternative is letting his enemy freely communicate, spy, command and bomb their positions as they wish. If you absolutely need to point out the responsibility of turning space (well, the earth's orbit) into a shooting gallery then put the blame where it should be put: those who started putting there military equipment/targets there and not the ones needing to take them down.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
It is, unfortunately, true that Pakistan has nukes and (despite being our ostensible buddy) a fairly large and influential class of religious enthusiasts with a penchant for explosive politics.
However, there is absolutely nothing about that situation that is improved by spending a big pile of cash on whizbang space weapons. India and Pakistan are right next to each other. Even if Pakistan's team jihad decides to use missiles(rather than just putting a warhead in the back of a truck under a pile of something boring, or chartering a small cargo plane, or any other cheap, prosaic, and quite plausible method) this isn't going to be some "NORAD gets several minutes of warning while the ICBMs fly over the north pole" thing. This would be a very short range job. If anything could intercept in time, it wouldn't be grand space-based satellite killers.
As for Pakistani satellites generally; satellites are all kinds of useful, and it can be prestigious to have your own(and, if you need certain specific capabilities, you pretty much have to build them yourself); but basic GPS and GPS equivalent services, as well as reasonably high resolution images in a variety of wavelengths, are close to commodified. It isn't as though Pakistan is going to build the "JihadPS" satellite positioning system that India can then knock out. Anybody who doesn't have the cash to build their own vertically integrated defense complex is just going to use off-the-shelf GPS/GALILEO/GLONASS receivers and hope for the best. You think India wants to go knocking out some or all of those?
India faces some very real security issues, Pakistan among them; but the value-for-money in using satellite warfare to confront them seems absurdly slim, even by defense contractor standards.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
At best, they have a penchant for using fanatics as cost-effective proxies. At worst, they are actively sympathetic to them(They are hardly alone in this, it isn't a huge secret that the CIA has had a major hard-on for every tinpot right-winger who promises to hate the commies for some decades now; but that doesn't really make India feel any better about it).
Re:India announces a lot. (Score:3, Insightful)
India and Russia both have this habit of announcing these awesome things
The Americans started the tradition, at least with regard to anti-satellite and space based weapons, with the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka "Star Wars") under then president Ronald Reagan. It has been speculated by some that SDI hastened the decline of the Soviet Union by promoting even more military research and spending on counter-counter measures at a time when the Soviet Union could least afford to "keep up" with accelerated US defense spending. The Soviets bought the artist renderings and animations of SDI laser satellites (peew, peew, peew) hook, line and sinker. They thought that not only were the Americans capable of building such things, but that they would work exactly as advertised (the Soviets had long had an inferiority complex when it came to western technology). It worked for the US during the Cold War so now other countries are taking a page out of the US playbook and touting their own "advanced" weapons or counter-measures programs.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
India is not weaponising space, India is developing ground based anti satellite weapons. This is perfectly acceptable as it's not banned by the treaty that prevents the militarisation of space (cant remember name).
Besides, Russia, China and the US (Japan by proxy of the US) already have this technology. In addition to this Russia and China don't give a crap what India is doing within it's own borders (and I don't think Japan does either).
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Pakistan is militant, Muslim and therefore a threat. There is no reason to be politically correct and accord Islam respect it does not deserve.
India should be ready to destroy Pakistan if attacked. It would be doing the rest of the non-Jihadist world a considerable favor should it come to that.