Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space? (reuters.com) 85
Reuters reports:
India expects space debris from its anti-satellite weapons launch to burn out in less than 45 days, its top defense scientist said on Thursday, seeking to allay global concern about fragments hitting objects. The comments came a day after India said it used an indigenously developed ballistic missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites at a height of 300 km (186 miles), in a test aimed at boosting its defenses in space.
Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years. G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.
Space.com shared a reaction from a national security affairs professor at Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. They argued that India's test "likely represents a feeling by other countries, specifically India in this case, that the weaponization of space is forthcoming, and India doesn't want to be left out of the 'have' category if arms-control agreements are eventually reached."
Critics say such technology, known to be possessed only by the United States, Russia and China, raises the prospect of an arms race in outer space, besides posing a hazard by creating a cloud of fragments that could persist for years. G. Satheesh Reddy, the chief of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation, said a low-altitude military satellite was picked for the test, to reduce the risk of debris left in space.
Space.com shared a reaction from a national security affairs professor at Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. They argued that India's test "likely represents a feeling by other countries, specifically India in this case, that the weaponization of space is forthcoming, and India doesn't want to be left out of the 'have' category if arms-control agreements are eventually reached."
India is a typical failed nation. (Score:1, Insightful)
India is a typical failed nation.
New Delhi wastes money on military satellites and nuclear weapons when most Indians live in poverty. By contrast, when Poland was an impoverished nation, Warsaw deliberately refused to spend money on military satellites and nuclear weapons; the Polish government spent most of its resources on economic development.
Today, India remains economically poor, but Poland is relatively wealthy.
Among the Russian elites, supporters of Vladimir Putin use India to justify rejecting demo
Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space
I thought it meant the dawn of a new era of peace, love, reason and understanding. No?
Re: Huh? (Score:1)
The difference is that the Crusades ended 600 years ago.
The rape and conquest of Europe and the West continue to this day unabated.
When white men take over your country it's evil colonialism. When Muslims do it, it's beautiful diversity and multiculturalism.
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
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Culturally speaking, one half of Slavs suffered war and slavery under Mongols with additional attempted invasions by Ottomans, while the other suffered slavery and war and stagnation under Ottomans; all of them kept being harassed by both the West and East; none of them colonized any brown or black regions with even Russia's annexation of Siberia being reparation for the Mongol Empire's deeds, making Slavic nations a greater part of the 33 European nations which weren't involved in colonization; they were n
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No. That's when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.
An easy mistake to make though.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does India's Anti-Satellite Missile Test Mean The Weaponization of Space
I thought it meant the dawn of a new era of peace, love, reason and understanding. No?
It means ugh. I'd love to see their math on how the know the debris will drop out in 45 days. Ohh wait they "expect" it to drop out. These must be smart people that know the pats of all the debris. Killing satellites is actually pretty easy. It is a broad side of the barn type accuracy needed.
Pretty much if you can get a rocket to orbital velocity and make it go kaboom, you are 90 percent of the way there.
The utter stupidity of humans amazes me though. The US and the old Soviet Union understood and worked within the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. China understands this now. Sending up Satellite killers is neither difficult nor smart.
Our first war in space will be our last one for a long, long time. And it will destroy a lot of things that are very beneficial to everyone, as well as destroy things that are beneficial to the country that thinks it is smart to put a lot of high velocity space debris in orbit.
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I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature. It's not like you're nuking cities or releasing deadly plagues - there's no survival-threatening fallout from destroying satellites, just a physics-enforced omni-lateral armistice on military (and any other) satellites if debris gets to be a big enough problem.
It also serves as discouragement against the nations such as the US that have already militarized orbit (spy satellites, GPS), and are quite possib
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I don't know - it seems to me that an anti-satellite weapon is actually primarily defensive in nature.
Oh hell yeah. It's an awesome defense. Send up say 500 1 ton payloads of explosive and various sized particles, timed to explode and scatter debris in various orbital planes, retrograde them, and enjoy the loss of just about everything in orbit. Take out all the GPS sats. This is why we are going to resurrect Loran.
And it you really want to make the future rosy, take out geosynchronous orbit areas.
This can be a first class offensive weapon. A long lasting one as well.
Are you seriously saying that you
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Are you seriously saying that you know all of the debris paths and speeds of both the explosive device and the satellites it destroys? Stuff flies everywhere, ad different speeds and different directions. Especially your direct hit scenario, which will be very asymmetrical, and send shrapnel all over the place.
If you consider the facts that only debris with only inclination changes isn't brought deeper into the atmosphere at some point and that most debris is small and even less aerodynamic than the original satellite, it becomes clear that around 300 km, several weeks or months does indeed seem like a reasonable estimate for a large part of the debris. Here's an analysis for a comparable US test. [celestrak.com]
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You are talking orbital flak for the specific purpose of rendering an orbital shell unusable, which is an entirely different thing than shooting down a specific satellite. To destroy a satellite cleanly you want a relatively low payload weapon - something that's not going to send debris flying off at speeds anywhere near even a single km/s, and thus won't radically alter it's orbital trajectory. Leaving the debris cloud to slowly expand to fill a ring around the original satellite's orbit, restricted by t
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And then there's the $10M question:
Why would a space power capable enough to comprehensively flak the entire orbital sphere, wish to do so? To deny a larger space power their advantage? If they're exploiting their advantage so ruthlessly that someone else is willing to shoot off their own foot to stop them, then maybe hitting the reset button and taking a hiatus for a few generations to reflect on what went wrong would be a good thing.
Let's say you were the leader of a rogue state - there are a few. One way to punish countries like the US is to take away our toys. Seems some people in government agree since they are ressurecting Loran-C.
And we do have the example of India launching one. As well, you don't have to have much guidance, just a couple ton fragment space grenade.
While I don't thiink this is all that likely, hey - strange stuff happens.
More than explosive satellite killers, I'm concerned about EMP events.
But I'm sor
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Anti-satellite weapon. Ever seen a solar power array, the old ones where they reflect light and generate lots and lots of heat. So set up 1 square kilometre mirror array, wait for daylight and point that daylight at the satellite, you'll cook it for sure. Creating debris in space in orbital paths should be considered an international crime and India and any other nation that does it should be punished for doing so and denied access to space.
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Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee
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Moving from a low orbit to a higher orbit typically requires two delta-Vs. The first one changes your circular low orbit into an ellipse whose perigee (lowest altitude of the orbit) is the same as the original orbit, but whose apogee (highest altitude in the orbit) is at a higher orbit. The second delta-V is done at apogee and converts the elliptical orbit back into a circle, now at the higher orbit.
Elliptical or not, there might be another satellite that ends up intercepting the debris.
Is this even a serious question? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Is this the weaponization of space?"
"Space" has been weaponized since at least 1966, when Robert Heinlein wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... Remember dropping grain carriers loaded with tons of rocks?
Just as geosynchronous satellites became a foregone conclusion once Clarke postulated about the math for them in 1945.
Duh
Re:Is this even a serious question? (Score:4, Interesting)
India is just following others anyway. Last week the US tested an anti-ICBM system, and both the US and China have tested their own anti-satellite systems before.
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Anti-ICBM systems don't leave crap in orbital space, it's all sub-orbital, on both sides.
You can't fix Kessler Syndrome [wikipedia.org] by turning it off and on again. Who would've thought it would be India that started it.
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Think of it a little differently - Kessler Syndrome itself "turns off" the militarization of orbit - a physics enforced global armistice on orbital military hardware that lasts for generations, barring active cleanup efforts. Whether we "turn it on again" afterwards - that's up to us.
I suspect It would be extremely difficult to achieve in any meaningful way though - explosions and collisions aren't going to dramatically alter orbital energies, except downwards. So while you would develop "shells" of debri
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True, and that would be inconvenient. Most orbital services though could be delivered from high-altitude balloon instead - in many cases that would even be an improvement. And relatively unattractive extreme high orbits are unlikely to be affected, with the possible exception of geostationary. So as long as the cloud density is low enough for rockets to get through it, space will remain accessible. And you'd need many orders of magnitude more debris to exclude rockets that spend a few hours passing thro
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Sure - and India hasn't made any motions in that direction. Being able to destroy orbital resources from the ground is, if anything, a great way to *discourage* the further militarization of space by the US, China, Russia, etc. All of whom have been heavily militarizing it for decades with GPS, spy satellites, etc.
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If you're gonna go there, then space has been weaponized since the 1930s, when the Lensmen took out Helmuth's base.
Re:Is this even a serious question? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... Remember dropping grain carriers loaded with tons of rocks?
It is a lot harder than "dropping". From the moon, you need a gun with a muzzle velocity of at least 2.3km/s. (or ballistic missile delta-V)
Current rail-gun technology can do this, but only for much smaller payloads, and we are a long way from getting the required battleships/frigates to the moon.
Ehm... Yes! (Score:2)
What other objective can you see there?
Weapon not in Space (Score:2)
This sort of missile is already bad enough since destroying several satellites could create a huge amount of debris in orbit. However, putting weapons in space - which is usually what we mean by the weaponization of space - is a lot more troubling
Re: Weapon not in Space (Score:2)
How do you call it when weapons reach the space on purpose?
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BFR AKA Big Fucking Rockets.
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I like my version better, Musk must have been high when he wrote falcon.
Don't kid yourself (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah those Russians certainly held back from deploying weapons in space [wikipedia.org]
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I will say that I knew about Almaz, but I was thinking it was before the treaty, not after.
Election year (Score:1)
The general election in India is scheduled to start in a couple of weeks, and they recently had yet another big row with Pakistan. Just saying.
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Yah, nothing sez "I am standing here with my Big Dick" in Indiana politics like lighting off a sat. killer and helping to contribute to the crap in near Earth orbit. By gum, he'll show those Pakistanis just what will happen to their future satellites. Maybe the Pakistanis will get their China buddy to lend them one of their sat. killers...errr...and a satellite to aim at...and a ground launch pad...with some extra equipment it make it go.
Re: Reason for test (Score:2)
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"Forthcoming" ? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are too many security launches with classified payloads to pretend that the USA and Russia have not been launching at least anti-satellite weapons systems. Too many peaceful but energetic projects are also potentially weapons to be unwilling to acknowledge their danger. Solar mirrors can be aimed at space targets or ground targets, as can the "flying crowbar" project known as Project Pluto. The LEO cleanup tools, still on the drawing board, could take down accidental or obsolete debris in low Earth orbit. They could also destroy satellites.
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And there could be pink unicorns as well...and they too could also destroy satellites.
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Solar mirrors can be aimed at space targets or ground targets, as can the "flying crowbar" project known as Project Pluto.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Firstly, solar mirrors aren't a practical weapon. The sun subtends an angle of 0.5 degrees, so any beam of reflected sunlight must have a beam size of at least 0.5 degrees. From low Earth orbit, at an altitude of ~1000 km, that means the spot size of the beam on the surface will be at least 10 km. If you want to (say) double background sunlight in the target area, your satellite mirror also needs to be 10 km across. And from low orbit it will only spend a few min
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Are you sure about that minimum spot size? I'm not that well versed in optics, and not quite sure how to phrase the question to get google to offer a relevant answer. Most discussions seem to only consider point sources. It's an important detail for a lot of orbital technologies though, so I'd love to get a better handle on it if you can point me at anything useful.
Assuming you are right, there's still more than the total spot size to consider. There's the brightness distribution. Pretty much anyone wh
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Sorry, I've seen enough Mythbusters to know they should only be taken seriously when they prove that something is possible. They're entertainment, not science. The mirror shield episode was an excellent example of that - their failure was entirely due to incompetent implementation, rather than theoretical limitations. They had light-spots dancing all over that ship, while they should have all been focused on the same point - a computer-controlled solar concentrating array would have fried that boat like
Do bears run in woods? (Score:5, Interesting)
Weaponization of space has been a reality since Sputnik.
Weapons were the whole POINT of the exercise by both sides though the 70's, regardless of the propaganda saying otherwise.
The treaties that keep weapons from being based in space is very clearly only limiting WMD type weapons (nuclear bombs, chemical weapons etc) but they do not address conventional weapons, anti-satellite weapons or much else for that matter.
So India's actions are not evidence of anything new, just the continued realization that national defense *requires* a significant focus on controlling space in some way. Denying your adversaries the high ground, as we used to call it.
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So India's actions are not evidence of anything new, just the continued realization that national defense *requires* a significant focus on controlling space in some way. Denying your adversaries the high ground, as we used to call it.
Unfortunately it's more like a scorched earth scenario with no real prospect of cleanup, this is just one more nation that can fuck it up for everybody. Even just in LEO any mass destruction of satellites would fuck it up for a century or two. The horror scenario is someone intentionally launching a debris cloud the wrong way into GEO, since they're all in the exact same orbit it'd be like shooting them all with a shotgun creating a debris ring that'll last a million years or more. That would be a lasting p
If India's rockets are made by their elite IT (Score:1)
They will explode on the launchpad.
Space Force to the resuce! (Score:2)
Don't worry, citizens- the new Space Force (powered by Clean Coal®) will save the day and enforce our Space Borders!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Stupid question (Score:2)
Countries will weaponize everything they can — and use it against an adversary, whenever suitable. Those who wouldn't, have lost the evolution race countless generations ago.
Did you know, that a crossbow was once believed to be so horrible a weapon, a movement was afoot to ban its use in Europe against fellow Christians?
Like, yeah, I'm gonna just let him kill me, but will not shoot him with this loaded weapon I have here, because he is a Christian like myself?