61–70 of 114 posts
https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1... Here is an impressive photograph that an amateur astronomer took in June/July of this year.
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Nah. Bolt cutters on an arm, or even just spray paint. You don’t need to be close to do an electronic attack. If you’re close, you might as well hit it with a hammer or snip the antenna and solar arrays off.
This kind of sudden malfunction, along with acceleration not due to firing of any engines, would be a signal for the self-destruction device, likely chemically powered (explosive) and mechanically actuated. It would be sure to shatter the interesting electronic parts, burning or detonating any remaining fuel for bonus points.
Anyway, who cares if the self destruct goes off? You're breaking the satellite anyway, and if you were really concerned, about attacker survivability, just launch a gun on board, like Salyut 3.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18187/her...
Cool a mini space shuttle that is still flying around for testing stuff. Any chance it has seats and can be used for rescues?
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The U.S. Air Force's former top civilian, Heather Wilson, said it dips into the atmosphere and uses its aerodynamic surfaces to change its orbit. Ref: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former-secaf-...
It uses an oblong orbit to gain a small window where the next orbit cannot be perfectly predicted by an adversary that can only watch half the sky. You can't gain delta-v by inducing additional drag on the craft.
Obvious missions for a long-mission mobile shuttle like this include * intercepting and deorbiting space junk * fixing friendly or sabotaging unfriendly operational satellites * future weapons platform for offense or defense (say intercepting ground-launched sat-killing missiles) * on-demand surveillance (with ordinary spy satellites you have to wait until your orbit is in the right spot, adversaries will know when y…
> NASA began the X-37 program in 1999; Maybe officially, but I definitely know people who were working on a Space Plane program in the early 90s.
There have been people working on spaceplanes continuously since the Nixon administration. Shuttle was a spaceplane but there were/are lots of other programs that fit that title.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_body#List_of_Armstrong...
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Space isn't like a highway where you can move from A to B at minimal expense. Switching orbits, both orbit heights but mainly orbit inclinations, comes at a very high delta-V expense and therefore propellant expense, which this craft simply doesn't have the volume to hold. This cannot shuttle between LEO stations and switch orbits to imitate multiple observation sats unless those sats and stations are very close in t…
Could it "scoop" matter out of the atmosphere that could be accelerated by solar or nuclear powered ion drive to use as propellant? Alternatively, thinking about the Earth's magnetic field, what if it had a big current loop that could be activated to generate a force and change orbit. I realize that the magnitude of these effects are probably too small to be significant, but could you in principle use them to repeate…
magnetic field? yes. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether
Obvious missions for a long-mission mobile shuttle like this include * intercepting and deorbiting space junk * fixing friendly or sabotaging unfriendly operational satellites * future weapons platform for offense or defense (say intercepting ground-launched sat-killing missiles) * on-demand surveillance (with ordinary spy satellites you have to wait until your orbit is in the right spot, adversaries will know when y…
Space isn't like a highway where you can move from A to B at minimal expense. Switching orbits, both orbit heights but mainly orbit inclinations, comes at a very high delta-V expense and therefore propellant expense, which this craft simply doesn't have the volume to hold. This cannot shuttle between LEO stations and switch orbits to imitate multiple observation sats unless those sats and stations are very close in t…
You could have a few shuttles up there idling in various orbits ready to do a small number of bigger maneuvers to achieve a mission.
Alternatively you could have shuttles doing a whole lot rather slowly with electric propulsion.
Obvious missions for a long-mission mobile shuttle like this include * intercepting and deorbiting space junk * fixing friendly or sabotaging unfriendly operational satellites * future weapons platform for offense or defense (say intercepting ground-launched sat-killing missiles) * on-demand surveillance (with ordinary spy satellites you have to wait until your orbit is in the right spot, adversaries will know when y…
https://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=1... Here is an impressive photograph that an amateur astronomer took in June/July of this year.
Too late to edit my comment but amateur astronomer was a poor label for the guy who took the picture. He is the best astrophotographer for satellites that I've seen. Here is his personal website where he has his collection: http://www.ralfvandebergh-astrophotography.simpsite.nl/home
1. Amateur astronomers like this guy.
2. Nation states who take clandestine photos of other nation's spy satellites. These pictures are better, but you haven't seen them.
For everything else, there's some guy working in the lab who's like, "oh, you want a picture of our satellite? Of course, there's like 40 of them on our press site. Do you need more? I can ask around and see if anyone's taken selfies from interesting angles." So there's no open institutional force behind it. So the only reasonable outcome of natural market forces is that amateur astronomers create the best pictures of satellites in orbit.
Amateur astronomer isn't a slur either, if that was your point. Take a look at the galleries on cloudnights, a lot of it wouldn't look out of place on NASA/ESA homepages.