US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons • Hacker News Board

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#391

Post by frumplestlatz » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #389

nomel wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you're saying that this requires all people of the world get along and agree with anything that might cause war? That sounds like a reasonable plan! Thanks for the response.

That is not what I'm saying. There can be a lot of disagreement about a lot of things but there needs to be widespread agreement to not start wars and to use strong non-war mechanisms to stop war mongers. I know that it is far off from where we are today, but it is not impossible like needing everyone to agree with everything.

We tried that. League of Nations. The UN. How has that worked out?

Human order is fundamentally kept by there being a true threat of violence enforcing it.

If you forget that reality and abandon your ability to project violence, someone else will remind you.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#392

Post by notahacker » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

hunterpayne wrote: post #387

sesteel wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment on Russia and China is false.

The Chinese have been bragging about taking out one of their own satellites in a test of their capabilities for 8 years now. Russia would but they don't have the money to even try. This place is no better than X...seriously...it is just too small for the propaganda operations to target and yet it is still just as bad. I don't even think it is HN's fault, just the skew of the population HN attracts.

yawns

Not even sure who I'm supposed to be propagandising for here, but as the person that actually works on European dual use satellite tech I can assure you it's well established fact that all superpowers have taken out their own satellites with ASAT weaponry (Russia more recently than China fwiw, though China's in-space capabilities are likely a lot better). None of those are a violation of the very narrow anti-WMD proscriptions in the Outer Space Treaty, and whatever counterspace capability the US is vaguely announcing here (or indeed the capability they and their adversaries have had for years) is unlikely to be either.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#393

Post by CodeWriter23 » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #390

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all they have to do is move them into position to gather intel on the Iran region to have them destroyed as well.

You think the US will destroy 230 Chinese intelligence satellites? LOL

The DEW announcement is the message "we destroyed your satellite, Xi"

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#394

Post by nomel » Wed, Sep 16, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

FabCH wrote: post #353

nomel wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they did supply images, to supporting the attacks, that did or even didn't result in the death of soldiers, then they were first to commit an act of aggression towards a nuclear superpower. This is a measured response to that act of aggression. Asking politely, in that context, doesn't necessarily make sense, especially when you can just burn a few hundred million of their dollars to demonstrate why they shouldn't…

There is a meaningful difference between „providing information to a country currently being attacked“ and „blowing stuff up in orbit“. One is significantly more risk to the rest of the world than other.

Don't be naive. If a blind man is asking you where to aim his gun, are you responsible for the death or is the blind man pulling the trigger? In the context of war, BOTH of you are, and both are valid military targets, just as a spotter is, directing a sniper, on the battlefield, because the intention of both of you is to cause death.

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#395

Post by AndrewKemendo » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

kbelder wrote: post #173

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel resentment and contempt to every previous generation of humans and embarassment for my generation for sure Every human on earth should be embarrassed at the state of the anthropocentric world

I'm proud of our long and amazing climb upwards, from brutality to technological civilization. Thanks to all our forefathers that have passed their gifts onwards.

You have a propagandized version of human history

Life in a hunter gatherer tribe doesn’t look anything like your ignorance portrays

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#396

Post by mapt » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

gorgoiler wrote: post #211

mapt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While armor is indeed much harder in space, it is not impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated. My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple…

They're great for a 20mm x 5mm x 0.3mm fleck of paint or vacuum insulation weighing 30mg, not so much for a 10mm hex nut weighing 11g.

Armor can protect you against the smallest debris which post the least risk and decay the fastest. Everything else, not so much.

A question for you though - does that insulation vaporizing itself inside a whipple shield generate secondary debris comprised of the whipple shield and condensed aluminum droplets??

Re: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

#397

Post by mapt » Thu, Sep 17, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

Fwirt wrote: post #209

onion2k wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or hu…

LEO is relatively simple to destroy simply because it's already so populated with mass, and that population is growing rapidly, and because they all come pretty close to crossing each other's orbits. Collisions with even very small pieces of debris typically generate secondary debris, growing the population.

A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.