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US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

bbc.com

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

#141

Post by notahacker »

_djo_ wrote: post #29
pwdisswordfishq wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that the US ever gave a shit about international treaties.

To be fair, this move is coming after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years. Which the US has highlighted many times in the past. At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage. That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military…

Neither Russia nor China's known weapons deployment is likely to breach the very narrow restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty, and the latest capability the US has vaguely claimed probably doesn't either.

In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.

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

#142

Post by feoren »

somenameforme wrote: post #110
spwa4 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated. A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but…

A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enablin…

> Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?

Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.

> I think it's something similar with China

China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.

> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it

This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.

> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber

Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?

> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging

Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.

> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.

Is your comment an example of this?

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

#143

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

dhx wrote: post #126
nopassrecover wrote: post #46

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

Wouldn't it be possible to confirm who may be supplying imagery by taking some IRGC supplied imagery such as [1] and figure out which satellite(s) were overhead at the time and capable of taking the image? It may not be particularly straightforward to do so--but seems theoretically possible with: - Consideration of time-of-day/azimuth of overhead satellite based on shadows and perspective. - Comparison to other image…

That's exactly how it was revealed that a high quality image intentionally leaked by Trump came from a satellite and not an overhead plane.

Press article: https://www.livescience.com/secret-classified-satellite-trum...

Blog write up: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/09/image-from-trump-tw...

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

#144

Post by WillAdams »

C.J. Cherryh has a memorable quote on this in her _Downbelow Station_.

>They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.

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

#145

Post by cindyllm »

jonkoops wrote: post #8

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

[dead]

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

#146

Post by jillesvangurp »

hajile wrote: post #115
jillesvangurp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost

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

#147

Post by drnick1 »

cogman10 wrote: post #135
ciconia wrote: post #131

Why spend money on healthcare when you can spend it on being able to annihilate any country on earth?

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.

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

#148

Post by causal »

Man I imagine within the first few minutes of a hot war LEO and geostationary would just light up with assets pointed at one another. I know we will have bigger problems at that point in time but I hope we are at least trying to developed weaponry that doesn't Kessler-ify all of space for the next thousand years.

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

#149

Post by cogman10 »

drnick1 wrote: post #147
cogman10 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters.

To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.

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

#150

Post by 5upplied_demand »

WarmWash wrote: post #117
mrtksn wrote: post #61

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.

More unwise is doing nothing and letting adversaries have it.

The same logic that has spent decades providing us with poorly planned preemptive attacks and an ever-growing military budget. Meanwhile, the quality-of-life for the citizens who pay for it continues to decline.
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