161–170 of 397 posts
… i thought international treaties explicitly say no space weapons. ughhhh fucking wh
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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…
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules. 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…
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
I expect "rods from god" to be used any time now.
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This just isn’t feasible it’s like wanting the ocean to be free of weapons. Space is most of what there is, nations that want to defend themselves will have to utilize space as a war fighting domain all we can do is put that off
Sounds like it’s finally time to start blasting random satellites out of the sky.
Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
… i thought international treaties explicitly say no space weapons. ughhhh fucking wh
And you think America cares about treaties?
Anti-nuke proliferation and CFC restriction treaties worked.
Treaties with native populations were ignored and violated whenever convenient; now they get occasional acknowledgement in speeches but no actual change or action.
I would’ve put space weaponry in the first category.
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Do you feel any embarassment coming from the previous generation, which set the stage for what we have now? I think it will be much of the same.
All the time. Politically speaking the past is quite embarrassing.
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Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. There will likely be some escalation in debris and damage resulting from that might eventually result in some kind of action. But most of the damage here would be economical and sending more stuff up is now very cheap. Manned flight is r…
SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.