201–210 of 397 posts
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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.
At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.
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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…
> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
I might have thought about this too much.
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
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Yaogan-50 for anyone asking. Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
A major provocation? "Oh, you deny using your satellites to supply them with imaging? All right, then it wasn't us who blew up your spy satellite that wasn't supplying imaging." That is, China's in a bit of an awkward position to complain very much.
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Even worse, Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are. Cool, we have a weapon in space that cost $1B and 6 months to re-arm. That's not super helpful when who we are fighting is flying $20k lawnmower powered drones to take out all our bases in the region. We are basically the modern version of the Spanish Armada.
> Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are. Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.
Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s.
America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will.
Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale.
The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed.
If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs.
Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day.
And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that
TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHave...
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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…
It's not quite as bad as that. Space is big and hitting stuff is really hard. Your hand grenade scenario has effectively been done a few times and it (obviously) didn't make LEO unusable. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision 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…
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
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> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out…
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
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.