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ISS Communications Space The Military

Russia May Have Just Shot Down Its Own Satellite, Creating a Huge Debris Cloud (arstechnica.com) 176

Posted by BeauHD from the irresponsible-behavior dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The seven astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station sheltered inside their respective spacecraft, a Crew Dragon and Soyuz, on Monday morning as the orbiting laboratory passed through an unexpected debris field. This was not a pre-planned collision avoidance maneuver in low Earth orbit, in which the station would use onboard propulsion to move away. Rather, the situation required the astronauts to quickly take shelter. Had there been a collision during the conjunction, the two spacecraft would have been able to detach from the space station and make an emergency return to Earth. Ultimately that was not necessary, and the astronauts reemerged into the space station later Monday. However, as the crew on board the station prepared for their sleep schedule, Mission Control in Houston asked them to keep as many of the hatches onboard the space station closed for the time being, in case of an unexpected collision during subsequent orbits.

It appears likely that the debris field that had alarmed flight controllers on Monday was caused by an anti-satellite test performed by Russia's military early on Monday. [...] It appears that Russia launched a surface-to-space Nudol missile on Monday, between 02:00 and 05:00 UTC, from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northern part of the country. The missile then struck an older satellite, Cosmos 1408. Launched in 1982, the satellite had been slowly losing altitude and was a little more than 450 km above the Earth. This is a large satellite, with a mass of about 2,000 kg. As of Monday afternoon, US Space Command said it was already tracking more than 1,000 pieces of new debris. Although the satellite's altitude is higher than the International Space Station, which is about 400 km above the surface, a kinetic impact would spread a large cloud of debris. Satellite expert Jonathan McDowell believes the Cosmos 1408 satellite is the likely candidate for the space station's ongoing debris event.

During a daily briefing today, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said the test had created more than 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of un-trackable debris. "The Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites," Price said. "This test will significantly increase the risk to astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station as well as to other human spaceflight activities. Russia's dangerous and irresponsible behavior jeopardizes the long-term sustainability of outer space."
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Russia May Have Just Shot Down Its Own Satellite, Creating a Huge Debris Cloud More

Russia May Have Just Shot Down Its Own Satellite, Creating a Huge Debris Cloud

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  • Future of space warfare (Score:3, Insightful)

    by saywhat99 ( 8871297 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:15PM (#61991475)
    What if the future of space warfare was just blowing up your own, old satellites and letting everyone else deal with debris avoidance? Essentially exhausting fuel during emergency maneuvering and/or degradation by impact. I suppose you don't always need to just blow things up to win, you just need to make it unprofitable for others.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:24PM (#61991501)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Future of space warfare (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:38PM (#61991569)
        Stupidity and war frequently go hand in hand.

      • What if the future of space warfare was just blowing up your own, old satellites and letting everyone else deal with debris avoidance? Essentially exhausting fuel during emergency maneuvering and/or degradation by impact. I suppose you don't always need to just blow things up to win, you just need to make it unprofitable for others.

        That would only work, if you wanted to screw yourself as well, ie. that would be a really stupid way of waging war.

        And we are the really stupid people to do such a thing.

        The debris doesn't care who it came from as it'll hurt everyone in its path equally. Sure, it might work at first, but sooner or later there'd be so much debris around that it wouldn't be possible for anyone to avoid it anymore, including you, and then there'd be no space-funsies for anyone.

        Yup, and how are people going to download their porn with Starlink sats?

        I just do not think that enough people understand just how fragile that environment is. Orbit and open some bags of sand and you will mess it up for quite a long time.

      • Re:Future of space warfare (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @09:15PM (#61991965)

        >That would only work, if you wanted to screw yourself as well

        It's important to consider the relative level of screwery. Before jumping to conclusions it might be good to investigate just how much important orbital infrastructure Russia has compared to the other major powers, and how dependent they are upon it. Even if they'd rather not destroy it, they might be sending a message that they're willing to if the competition doesn't back off.

        Basically, if your military and industry is heavily dependent on orbital infrastructure, and mine is only modestly so, then I will dramatically reduce your advantage if I destroy the viability of orbital infrastructure for everyone. It's akin to burning cities or salting fields when you know you won't be able to hold them, but your opponents will. A time-honored military tactic.

        Right now the space race is heating up again, and in all likelihood the early adopters will be able to claim all the really valuable real estate before anyone else even gets off the ground. Shackleton crater on the moon, Ceres and 16 Psyche (likely representing a huge portion of the total wealth of the Belt between them) and the handful of other really large asteroids, etc. The US is well positioned as the home of SpaceX, China and the EU are busy throwing lots of resources into catching up. And Russia is still suffering from the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union, while their space program is crumbling under poor management, and has maintained an adversarial relationship with Musk and SpaceX since before SpaceX existed.

        Throw in the fact that Russia controls vast untapped mineral wealth here on Earth, all of which would be rapidly devalued by asteroid mining, and that they alone among the major powers stand to benefit substantially from global warming, and they could very reasonably conclude that their long-term interests are best served by denying their competitors access to space until they're positioned better positioned to compete on an equal footing. At the very least they're in a position to threaten such an action for political leverage, with the competition knowing full well that that they have no great reason not to.

        Now, obviously I don't know that's what they're doing - this could really just be a reckless anti-satellite weapons test. But it seems very dangerous to assume that's all it is.

        • You should remember that Putin re-started the Bear flights over the pole towards the USA, and is flying "intelligence gathering" flights over the Black Sea (and probably somewhere else too), tiptoeing on NATO airspace.
          The Russia has plenty to lose on this as fueling and maintaining those planes is expensive - yet, NATO loses more.
          The idea is not to win, but to make the opponent bleed.

          (just as the USA did, bleeding the Soviet Union dry in an arms race, space race, ... during the Cold War).

        • It's also possible that Russia is aware that it's getting left behind in terms of space tech and industry (US, China, EU, Japan, and even India, etc are catching up or already passing Russia when it comes to Space) and it's trying to make sure nobody else gets to ""play" in space when it's getting badly left behind.

          Of cos if anything happens to China's space station due to Russia's actions, I imagine Russia will be faced with some interesting repercussions. I don't really expect the US or EU to do much othe

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dasunt ( 249686 )

          Basically, if your military and industry is heavily dependent on orbital infrastructure, and mine is only modestly so, then I will dramatically reduce your advantage if I destroy the viability of orbital infrastructure for everyone.

          I'm not disagreeing that Russia seems to have that mentality, but the modern interconnected world is not a zero sum game. Diminishing other countries tends to create weakness in your own, not strength.

          Which may be one of the bigger problems with Russia today - it's so afraid

          • I didn't suggest otherwise.

            The question is, can you make your opponent hurt MORE than you do?

            That's the entire premise of "winning" a battle (or a war) - every engagement hurts everyone involved, but a successful engagement hurts your opponent much more than it hurts you.

            If your opponent currently has a huge advantage that you can remove at the cost of losing your own much smaller advantage, then doing so is a huge win.

            Meanwhile, don't think for a moment that the other major powers wouldn't walk all over Ru

      • If space-funsies is not your strong point, then taking it out for everyone is still a rational move.
      • It's worth it. You lose yours but the adversary may be more dependent on theirs.

    • There is no future. You can't win. You can only saturate LEO to the point where the odds of collision are unacceptable for crewed or even non-crewed craft. Optimistically, the insanity ends with a keyhole approach to higher orbits and/or very LEO clearing itself over several years to the point where we can go back with craft that require periodic boosting.

      There is no strategy for victory, only denial of a common resource. It would be like draining the oceans and calling that naval warfare.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        If your opponent's navy is vastly superior to yours, then draining the oceans is a great military strategy. Russia is under MAD with the US, their goal is not to win such a war, but to deny the US reasons for starting one.

    • What if the future of space warfare was just blowing up your own, old satellites and letting everyone else deal with debris avoidance?

      You could even design the satellites with optimal fragmentation in mind, like the warheads on missiles are already. They could be like pre-staged shrapnel.

    • Oh hey, wasn't that like the winning strategy for the first world war, gassing themselves?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      That doesn't really work, because it's not a reliable method of denial. Space is huge, while satellites are tiny. Future of space warfare is already known. It's doing what Russia did on Monday, and what Chinese and US did a few years ago. Having surface to space missiles take out known military satellites over a potential conflict area.

      This will take out things like reliable navigation and communications over it. For example, missiles, drones and military aircraft all become far less capable without militar

  • Not the first time (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:28PM (#61991513) Homepage
    The US, Russia, China and India have all done satellite tests of a similar sort. And all have created bad debris clouds. That said, the US and India tests were both at comparatively low orbits, so the risk of a long-term debris cloud was smaller. The Indian one was especially low, at only about 300 KM up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Shakti [wikipedia.org]. The higher up the orbit, the more chance that there will be a lot of debris that takes a very long time to decay. That said, even given that, there's always a substantial danger here that some debris will move into much higher orbits. No one should be doing this.

    • Re:Not the first time (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:52PM (#61991623)

      The US, Russia, China and India have all done satellite tests of a similar sort.

      To be fair, the American tests were done before the problem was recognized.

      To be fair to India as well, India's ASAT test [wikipedia.org] was in low orbit and was designed to minimize debris. Nearly all the debris either immediately fell to earth or was in orbits that decayed within a year.

      • This is why the whole thing seems odd. Did Russia really need to do this test or is calling it a test just an excuse for some hidden agenda?

        • Re: Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)

          by NicBenjamin ( 2124018 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @08:19PM (#61991855)

          Putin wanted a thing portraying Russia as strong, Putin orders test just like American test, nobody asks the math guys to do math, *poof* Russia almost kills it's own cosmonauts. Now Russia is going "we knew they wouldn't die, you Americans are such pussies."

          He's probably somewhat panicky because Belarus is flaring up, and he's committed to Lukashenko so he can't replace Lukashenko, which means he needs something on TV besides Lukashenko's stupid dick-measuring contest with the EU, and he hadn't done the proper prep work. It's kind of like the situation the US ended up in with South Vietnam after their political leadership started shooting itself, except instead of having the resources of like 50% of the globe's economy to paper over the disaster he's got an economy that can't raise the retirement age because most of the men don't make it to retirement age already.

          • Re: Not the first time (Score:5, Interesting)

            by _0x0nyadesu ( 7184652 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @08:34PM (#61991887)

            Am American born in USSR so I know a bit about how toxicaly masculine some of these Russian guys are. Putin has some unresolved issues that he'll never confront because he's surrounded by yes men that murder for him. He's not necessarily panicky. More that he needs some outlet to show how much of a "strongman" he is. Typical dictator bullshit. Now he's getting into his paranoid old years so expect to see more and more irrational weird shit coming out of The Kremlin. Grab the popcorn.

            • Grab the popcorn.

              My microwave has a 'nuclear hellfire' setting - how long should i pop for?

              • Did you know if you put smoke in a microwave it creates a plasma... I have no idea what nuclear radiation would do in a microwave but I have a feeling it would be similar.

                Btw you can easily do this experiment at home. Take a glass bowl which you will place upside down. Take a match and light it for a minute before blowing it out, placing it under the upside-down bowl inside the microwave and then turn your microwave on for a few minutes. You will watch the smoke glow and swirl around in the bowl following t

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ghoul ( 157158 )
            EU put sanctions on Belarus for doing something the EU and US has done in the past - forcing down a plane to catch a fugitive. Their logic is EU is morally superior so its OK when we do it. So Lukashenko is messing with them using their moral superiority against them. If EU is so morally superior they should have no problems taking refugees fro Afghanist and Syria both countries NATO meddled in. Generally I dont like Lukashenko but the Schadenfreude s strong in this my young paduan.
            • Whatever EU or anyone else has done in the past, that does not make Lukashenko plane takedown ok.

      • >To be fair, the American tests were done before the problem was recognized.

        How do you figure? Kessler Syndrome was named and proposed by Donald Kessler in 1978 while working for NASA. The US has performed a number of ASAT weapon tests since then. Most of them in fact.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        There's also the American tests of setting off nukes in orbit. Turns out that creates temporary new radiation belts around the earth. Once again, done when there were not very many satellites. I'm going to say, in either case, they had engineers and scientists who could predict the bad things that would happen to some degree and they went ahead anyway.

  • Gravity (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blessedvirtue ( 7004110 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @06:29PM (#61991517)
    And another disaster movie becoming reality.

  • Didn't someone speculate North Korea or some country would launch tons of tungsten carbide ball bearings to trigger a Kessler syndrome and deny space to everyone?

    • Didn't someone speculate North Korea or some country would launch tons of tungsten carbide ball bearings to trigger a Kessler syndrome and deny space to everyone?

      I've been long noting that bags of sand will do the same trick. When travelling 24,700 km/hr sand will do just about the same damage. Put it in a retrograde orbit, and things will get pretty exciting.

      • I've been long noting that bags of sand will do the same trick.

        Sand would not work as well as tungsten.

        Sand is has a density of about 2.5 g/cc. Tungsten's density is 19 g/cc. A particle of tungsten will have a quarter of the cross-sectional area and four times the orbital lifetime.

        Of course, the tungsten is more expensive (~ $30/kg), but that expense is negligible compared to the cost of launching and dispersing the particles in a retrograde orbit.

        • I've been long noting that bags of sand will do the same trick.

          Sand would not work as well as tungsten.

          Sand is has a density of about 2.5 g/cc. Tungsten's density is 19 g/cc. A particle of tungsten will have a quarter of the cross-sectional area and four times the orbital lifetime.

          Of course, the tungsten is more expensive (~ $30/kg), but that expense is negligible compared to the cost of launching and dispersing the particles in a retrograde orbit.

          Surely. Sand is just a cheap alternative. The point isn't that you need sand, Tungsten Carbide or Depleted Uranium. The point is that just about any hard and small material you place in the retrograde orbit in different orbital shells is going to take care of a lot of satellites. Getting any hard material into an orbit where it can simply "interact" with satellites will do the trick.

          • You don't need to just get the particles into orbit. They need to stay there.

            The atmosphere doesn't stop at the Karman Line. It just thins out. The friction at 300 km is negligible for a satellite but significant for a grain of sand. It will deorbit in a few months or a year.

            A particle of tungsten has a quarter the area of a grain of sand with the same mass, so it will experience a quarter of the friction, stay in orbit four times longer, and therefore four times more likely to hit a target.

            • Yup, another way to say the same thing is, for a given size, the tungsten will have more mass and thereby be less affected by drag (the more mass something has, the higher its terminal velocity -- a plastic ping pong ball falls slower in air than a lead ball of the same size.) It will also impart a higher force in collision.

              • Also, the "hardness" is completely irrelevant.

                An impact with a particle in a retrograde orbit will have a delta-V of roughly 20 km/sec. It will immediately turn into a jet of plasma with no atomic structure.

  • Still f-ing up like the Soviets. I hope everyone sends Russia a bill for all their damages.

  • Is the future of space exploration important enough to nuke Russia or depose its current leader?

    • Is the future of space exploration important enough to nuke Russia or depose its current leader?

      Is it important enough for YOU to take a nuclear exchange? Because if we fling ICBM's at Russia, Russia and China's missiles go up too.

      That's the essence of "Mutually Assured Destruction"; you bring the apocalypse to their cities, they bring it to yours. And then everyone is living like a character in Escape from New York.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

      False dilemma. They blew up 1 satellite, it's not the end of space exploration. Frankly even a full Kessler Syndrome situation is not the end of space exploration. You can still slowly collect the debris and end up with clean near-Earth space. Or you can build your spacecraft to withstand impacts. Both expensive but doable.

      • False dilemma.

        The established term is "Strawman Argument". (which it isn't)

        They blew up 1 satellite, it's not the end of space exploration.

        That is your rationalization. They will continue to blow up satellites until their autocrat is happy with their anti-sat weapons.

        This is the same culture that allowed a nuclear plant meltdown to occur because they wouldn't spend money to hire sufficiently competent nuclear plant personnel, regulate that industry to prevent said incompetents, and did not implement nuke plant designs invulnerable to the meltdown situation that eventually transpir

  • SAT test go up to GPS satellite go boom. It’s EZ target practice

  • My job is satellite collision avoidance; AMA (Score:4, Informative)

    by GPS Pilot ( 3683 ) on Monday November 15, 2021 @07:24PM (#61991713)

    Thanks for moving us closer to the Kessler Syndrome [wikipedia.org], Russia.

    BTW, the U.S. and Indian ASAT tests created orders-of-magnitude less long-lasting debris than the Chinese test in 2007 [wikipedia.org].

    • I mean, if that's really your job, there are tons of fun questions to ask you.

      However, let's start by simply saying are there any proposed solutions for cleaning up Kessler Syndrome that you think are feasble?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ghoul ( 157158 )
        Bumpers on Satellites so they can take the small fender benders without failing.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GPS Pilot ( 3683 )

          Debris is traveling at several kilometers per second, and recall that kinetic energy is proportional the the square of the speed. So there are precious few small fender-benders in orbit.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ghoul ( 157158 )
            Relative velocity is what matters not absolute velocity

            • Debris is not orbiting parallel on a plane, so even two absolute velocities in the thousands of kilometers per second will have relative velocities reaching close to 1000 km/s. Even at a few hundred kilometers a second, this is a stupid amount of energy.

              I mean I would love to hear solutions for a "deflector dish" but as far as I understand nothing is even reasonably close right now. And even absorbing that kind of velocity would require making extra orbital burns to compensate.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GPS Pilot ( 3683 )

        are there any proposed solutions for cleaning up Kessler Syndrome that you think are feasble?

        Yes, systems like these seem feasible:

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

        OneWeb and Starlink plan to deorbit their satellites at end of life. (Without that plan, I don't think they would have gotten regulatory approval.)

        Here are comments from forum.nasaspaceflight.com that I'll elaborate on:

        OneWeb had even gone further, and promised a "Plan B" space tug pickup approach in the event "Plan A" (self-deorbit) failed to work, as it inevitably would some small percentage of the time.

        Nice, but OneWeb is short on cash, which raises doubts they can keep that commitment.

        Nation-state governments are not moving toward committing to deorbit their own satellites as fast as the private mega-constellation operators have committed to.

        This is true.

        Cause for optimism: hopefully Starship will slash the cost of putting everything in orbit

        • Very interesting. Thanks for the reply.

          The ClearSpace-1 wiki seems rather sparse. It looks like this is a capture and de-orbit method. I am guessing the object being captured is rather large and thus this is the most feasible for such a target but isn't this rather impractical in a sense of cost?

          The laser broom is more like what I was thinking the future would look like. However, the wiki still seems sparse on comparing such a system between land and space. It seems again rather unfeasible for such a system

    • I'm curious how quickly are satellites able to do avoidance maneuvers, and how often do you have to move them to avoid debris?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GPS Pilot ( 3683 )

        Starlink has automated the process of doing avoidance maneuvers. Those things react fast and early.

        Most satellite operators still have human(s) in the loop, which adds hours to the process of planning and executing maneuvers.

        Warnings of possible collisions come in at random times. You never know when you'll get one. Some altitudes are much worse than others. As you can see from https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net], if your satellite's altitude is ~770 km, that's the worst possible place to be. You'll be d

  • The only question is whether it's stupidity or malice.

    Given Putin's involved, I suspect stupidity. The person who knew enough about where the ISS was going to orbit was simply not informed that this was a bad idea, so they did it despite the fact it's a bad idea, and are now gonna swear that almost killing their own people was part of the plan the whole time.

  • How many times The Russian space agency should show incompetency before we take some action.

    I am not asking booting them off from cooperation, but really helping them raise the standards.

    They used to be really good, but now they are sloppy at best, dangerous otherwise.

  • This comes days after US conducted an unannounced NATO military exercise off the coast of Crimea. Russia was going to do something.

  • Expect more if the US becomes too space dominant (Score:3)

    by jaa101 ( 627731 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:01AM (#61992307)

    The more SpaceX and other US companies drive down the cost of access to space and have tens of thousands of satellites in orbit, the more competitors like China and Russia will be tempted to deny space to everyone using debris. Currently there's a modicum of balance in space but if it becomes much more valuable to the US than to competing nations then making earth orbit operations non-viable becomes relatively more attractive. Doing so can even be deniable; you just stage some accident and say "whoops, sorry".

    Hopefully we're safe enough from this threat in the current environment but too much of a return to a cold war or regime instability could change the situation.

  • Ok this might be a stupid question but if so please help me out.

    Why demonstrate the ability to shoot down a satellite? Shooting down an object in LEO seems way easier than, for example intercepting a missile. In LEO you can track the satellite for a long time and predict its position extremely well without needing to model atmospheric density effects (in the short term). It seems to me that you only need to be able to get an explosive charge (or just a heavy object) up into orbit, and even then it doesn't

  • I see a lot of similarities to the anti-satellite incident with USA-193 [wikipedia.org]. Both it and Kosmos 1408 were spy satellites, and were obviously carrying sensitive equipment. In USA-193's case, the US government claimed it was shot down to to worries about the onboard hydrazine tanks.

    I suspect Kosmos 1408 ran out of fuel early, and was running out of electrical power, making it harder to track later, so the Russians decided to shoot it down before it crashed down to earth like Kosmos 954 [wikipedia.org], another reconnaissance s

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