91–100 of 394 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.
You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
How is this smart? US was already able to strike any place on the globe, what happens if this motivates the US enemies also have weapons in space and then US mainland becomes strike-able. What was the thing that the US military previously couldn't blow up? The enemy now can have giant piece of hard metal in orbit and blow up previously %100 out of range data centers for example. Very unwise action on US part.
If we get to try and explain these times in like 30 years to our (grand-)children, I'm sure it will be with a great sense of embarrasment. I hope one of these days we can get our priorities straight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You actually think they don't already?
What would be the point? MAD relies on everyone knowing you can take them out if they attack you. What does a space weapon offer additionally that makes the huge expense worthwhile?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What extra would you want from the space review article that would constitute actual evidence for you?
[flagged]
Why do you keep avoiding the question?
Rather interesting timing after the US accused China of supplying Iran with high-res imagery used to support attacks on US bases, then a Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart
Yaogan-50 for anyone asking. Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if…
Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here. I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than…
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.