> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
The biggest assets space weapon wise has Musk? Anything that can become a particlecloud taking out a orbit counts- so two constellation sattelites, that aim for one another should count?
What would be the point? MAD relies on everyone knowing you can take them out if they attack you. What does a space weapon offer additionally that makes the huge expense worthwhile?
Are you serious? Just because you have nuclear weapons doesn't mean all other forms of military are useless. I don't even know how to parse that argument to respond in more detail.
MAD is not military doctrine and never has been. It's a philosophical concept that arose in the mid 1960s and gained column-inches in the press because it had a cool and ironic name. Even McNamara rejected it.
USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.
I would argue that despite not being military doctrine, it has been effective. Nuclear deterence is demonstrably real. It is a form of Nash equilibrium.
I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.
Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).
The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...
Controlling the high ground has been a critical element of warfare ever since the primary weapons were spears. If you want to claim that isn't the case then the burden of proof is on you.
Kessler trashes LEO and yes, "space tourism" because that means bare orbital joyrides and those would become unacceptably hazardous for a tourist attraction. But it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits, or for leaving if we, or more likely a non-human probe wanted to leave Earth's orbit.
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
Indeed. Ace Combat 7 (a great game) already explored this. Both sides destroy each others communication satellites at nearly the same time and it creates utter chaos on the battlefield. Had one side succeeded and the other failed, it would have been game over for that side. That seems the most likely space weapon to me, though IANA military expert by any means.
> it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
No. The reason this can't work is that "trashing" an orbit works by a long chain of random collisions which also put debris into different orbits at roughly the same altitude. The debris from a smashed StarLink for example goes into a thousand different orbits with a variety of different directions but all at a similar altitude to the StarLink and so they'll collide with other StarLinks and similar LEO birds. For LEO that works, so many of these orbits are also occupied, the cascade happens - but for GEO all of the similar orbits are empty except the one everybody uses. Orbiting Earth in exactly 24 hours but say North-South, or at 14° is fun but pointless, all of the GEO birds are in the exact same orbits because they're "hovering" over a specific point on the equator by travelling at the same speed at which that point rotates, that's the whole reason to be at that expensive altitude. So your trash almost invariably goes somewhere empty and makes little difference to anything.
I'm thinking of someone intentionally trashing an orbit. I still think ASAT is more econmical. But if you wanted to dump a bunch of sand around an adversary's GEO arc, I believe that's doable. It's not really feasible in LEO outside cartoonishly-aimless evil.
It's been quietly brewing in the background for a couple years with accusations out the US about Russia and China secretly testing systems to intercept and sabotage US satellites either temporarily or destroy them permanently.
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.
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if its space to ground, like an orbital missile platform or something, you are technically in the clear.
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
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 establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
What kind of evidence are you expecting? Detailed photographs of the satellites on orbit?
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
I'd like to see evidence which supports the claims and not have to rely on a call to authority fallacy[1] in order to agree with this collective-derived reality.
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
What evidence would satisfy you that there are weapons in space? You either have to check yourself somehow, or trust a third party. Is there a third party you trust to provide evidence?
Russia was at least planning to launch a space-to-space laser back in 1987, but the prototype (essentially just a mass simulator, no lasers inside) failed on launch quite spectacularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
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.
Yes, but again that was a conventional weapon, and would have been fine under the treaty. I don't exactly condone it but it was also crap and never flew again. This video https://youtu.be/e-n_V5iEwAs goes into some of the reasons it was a particularly crap idea
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 WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
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 they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values".
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
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 enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
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Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
> 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.
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; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
> 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 enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
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 human habitation, but when you're just passing through, the odds of getting punctured are probably still reasonable, at least for unmanned spacecraft. Keep in mind that the ISS maneuvers out of the way when there are several miles to a potential impactor, just in case. We have all our eggs in one basket right now, so everybody is really careful with that one basket.
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
>A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time
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 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.
> 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.
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.
The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2].
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?
Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?
Depends? Think southern part of the United Kingdom with London and some harbours, Belgium, Netherlands, German Rhine-Ruhr Area. All with one 'stone'. Use some more stones for other large agglomerations, like Frankfurt am Main, Paris. While were at it: Denmark+southern Sweden. Moscow, St.Petersburg. Greater Los Angeles would be as bad. As would be anything around NYC/Washington DC. Seattle+Vancouver? Great Lakes? Any Chinese megacity? India? All of this wouldn't need that much nukes.
All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.
I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.
If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react? I doubt they would assume "this is probably just an EMP and not a direct nuclear strike on our territory"
If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.
I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".
The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.
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 exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
Whipple Shields are a very important part of protecting things like the ISS, but are optimized more for chance high velocity impacts with tiny bits of debris than an adversary's targeted projectile or their robotic arm grappler, or indeed non-kinetic weapons like directed energy or EMPs which is probably the capability the US intends to imply here.
You fire a radar guided powerful laser pulse at the incoming object causing small surface ablation , intentionally a bit to the side, which will serve as a small reaction mass eject altering the trajectory of that incoming object.
This is not correct, and the experiment has been done a number of times with no real effect, most memorably in 01961, when Project West Ford put 480 million copper needles in 3500-km-high medium Earth orbit (MEO); but it's a little bit challenging to understand why.
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
The wires in Project West Ford weighed something like 40 micrograms, with a diameter in the low tens of micrometers. They don’t really fit the criteria of what’s being discussed here - they would not do significant damage to other satellites, and while they could reenter the atmosphere and hit a person, you probably wouldn’t even feel it.
…and for those unfamiliar with this fun project, the idea was to provide a radio relay system that wasn’t easily disabled by an enemy. This was before communications satellites were common.
Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2]
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
What is the point of any treaty with the current US administration which does not play by international laws? Rules and laws that the USA itself spearheaded after WW2.
The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.
Exactly. Most of these things are just big world politics. Same for AI, btw.
"OMG dont do this this is horrible" as the other country does it and hasn't talked about it or haven't been caught doing it.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
I have little doubt that the OST was circumvented by definitional tricks. That is how the game of treaties and power is played. Something like rods from God or a conventional bomb orbiting platform wouldn't be considered a WMD but most certainly are the types of weapons common folk would think the OST forbids.
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
Funny you mention Antarctica. Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized. Some Norwegian sailors has being severely punished for sailing boats there.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
Not really possible. For example, the Soviet Union had naval radar satellites (RORSAT) in space that could directly guide missiles to specific ships.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
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
That would likely require basically banning GPS, imaging and communication satellites too, if we get a WW3 I would be shocked if there weren't physical attacks against those assets by anyone with the requisite launch capabilities because they're just that useful to militaries. Maybe it gets relegated mostly to jamming them instead but I'd be surprised if that level of restraint happened.
Of course. But those are also limited to the areas around the jammers too. In a broader hot conflict there'd be a good reason to disrupt the opposition's GPS capabilities across the globe not just locally. It'd be pretty bad economically for many countries to lose GPS access in their homeland but difficult to achieve without a way to disrupt the satellites directly.
They're not dumb; everyone knows this. It's like the old "mutually assured destruction" image of two people standing in a pool of gasoline, each with matches at the ready.
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
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 relatively infrequent and aside from the space station and very short lived space tourism, most activity in space is unmanned.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
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
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
Space is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars.
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
That depends what you mean by "open ocean"? Vessels near ports or in defined traffic lanes frequently maneuver to avoid collisions as per the rules of the road. Outside territorial waters it's less common but still happens occasionally. Either way, those avoidance maneuvers are such routine events that no one really gathers data on them.
Debris from a collision on water won't spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds.
> The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US.
Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.
Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.
I agree with the principle but Russia and China absolutely already have armed satellites in orbit, so that needs to be negotiated before unilaterally stopping.
There's not really enough stuff up there to cause the kessler syndrome yet, maybe at some specific bands you could cause some annoyances... but ~75% of satellites are operating in bands that would decay into the atmosphere, fortunately it's just easier to operate in the decaying band anyway
> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
Isn't it easier to shoot them from the ground when they pass over? In space, the orbit must be adjusted to at least come close enough to the target, wait for the rendezvous, fire, then adjust orbit again for the next target...
I believe that attribution is more difficult in strictly on-orbit activities. I would imagine that these weaponized satellites use radar stealth approaches similar to modern fighter aircraft. AFAIK, ground radar is basically what we have for space awareness.
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
Not if you want to hit your target before the other side can react and respond. Also if you expect your target to potentially shoot back, a rocket attempting to reach orbital velocity is a vulnerable target to any space based weapons or lasers because it has very limited ability to maneuver from its flight path and still reach orbital velocity.
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
> China responded on Tuesday by warning against an "arms race" in space.
> "We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
China and (maybe?) Russia are putting weapons up there no matter what.
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
So, it's a pistol on a robotic arm, or what? Kinetic weapon doesn't say much.
A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
Yeah im not sure what they are going on about, "Rods from God" and kinetic bombardment applies to things at the bottom of the gravity well getting hit from shit dropped from up above, it has nothing to do with satellite-to-satellite weapons. Like to launch up a few ton bullet of tungsten into orbit, then maneuver it in place when needed to deorbit and strike a major target, hits like a nuke but without the nuclear program.
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
Technically the US has had 'space weapons' for many decades, due to how an intercontinental ballistic missile works.
Incidentally, the Shuttle raised concerns in the USSR because they saw those large cargo bay doors and rocket thrusters out back, to think that this was a 'delivery system'.
In the modern battlefield, 'hypersonic' missiles are the new shiny. However, any ICBM is 'hypersonic', at least during the space phase. The new meaning of hypersonic means going at 'hypersonic' speeds through the atmosphere and in the final approach. Force equals mass times acceleration, more speed means more deceleration, which means packing a bigger kinetic punch.
Depending on how you want to define “weapon” the actual offensive capability of the shuttle may qualify. It was designed to be able to capture satellites and return them to Earth.
We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.
Sort of related: The Shuttle was designed for military use, but mainly regarding launching and capturing spy satellites. From a NASA report on the Space Shuttle's history ( https://www.nasa.gov/history/sts1/pages/scota.html ):
> One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.
> In addition to the Air Force's cross range demand, the military also wanted a larger Shuttle payload bay than NASA originally advocated. NASA wanted the Shuttle payload bay to accommodate modules for a future space station, which necessitated a payload capacity of approximately 50,000 pounds. The Air Force wanted a bay 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50,000 to 65,000 pounds and that had doors that could open out into space to deploy satellites easily. This payload requirement meant that the fuselage of the Shuttle needed to be essentially a large rectangular box with rounded surfaces. In general, NASA went with the Air Force's requirements because it needed the Air Force's support to help insulate it from the political charge that the Shuttle was really just a step towards human exploration of Mars or a permanent space station, which is precisely what some people at NASA wanted it to be.
The Air Force was working on a Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB in California, but after the Challenger disaster they decided that the Shuttle wasn't reliable enough and opted to instead use traditional disposable rockets to launch spy satellites.
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
As an aside - the word conspiratorial has become polluted.
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
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.
So, what solution do you have in mind, if China supplies military support to an adversary? Politely ask them to stop? Let them continue? Seems not so trivial to me, especially since everyone has satellites up there for this purpose, and there's a good chance China would do the same.
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 do that.
I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].
China is not Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela or some other third world country that the US has fought in over the past few decades. You can't just destroy one of their satellites for free. And I can bet the US didn't do it, because that would be a major escalation, especially now that Xi is coming to the US and there are rumors that the US wants a deal.
"The European Space Agency estimates that there have been more than 660 explosions, collisions, or anomalous events resulting in fragmentation. As it stands, there are currently more than 1.5 million space debris objects in Earth orbit.
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
So China's brand new recon satellite that was placed specifically in orbit over Iran just happened to self-destruct weeks after China was accused of giving Iran high-res satellite imagery that was used to kill American soldiers?
And the US just publicly told everyone they have weapons in space?
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 imagery of the same location checking for portable objects (such as vehicles) and keeping track of when they appear and disappear, and whether they're present in the imagery being analysed.
- Consideration of cloud coverage and weather conditions to rule out unwanted satellite passes.
Then write up a report and publish it, making it a believable and concrete finding instead of a finding that otherwise may just be perceived to be speculation/vibes.
the idea that the orange infant can order the use of weapons in space should be terrifying to everyone regardless of politics
no-one is stupid enough anymore to say "oh he would never"
or "only against people we don't like"
No, of course he would use it against Canada or Greenland if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or didn't sleep at all
He clearly has rage fits which is one of the early signs of dementia
He would most definitely order the use of space weapons
I am really surprised he has not nuked some part of Iran yet, innocent civilians be damned but there are still 800 days left so here's hoping we don't wake up to that headline
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.
Well, let's hope that these forces are going to get better outcomes than the forces that fought in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran.
It's so ridiculous to elevate the war zone when you were far away and out of reach currently. US is so target rich that I will be very surprised if US enemies leave those alone once US paved the way to the new frontiers.
Finding someone who is both willing and able to deliver explosives to a datacenter wouldn't be easy, the last stime something like that happen is 9/11. Throwing large masses on the other hand is not so hard as countries like Iran already have missile building capacity and are partners with actual space capable Russia.
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
There were suspicious rednecks shooting out power stations a couple years ago.
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
"Space weapons" here most likely means some combination of anti-satellite weapons and electronic warfare such as GPS jammers. AFAIK it's been widely believed that the USSR/Russia has had these capabilities in orbit since the 80s. I'd be willing to bet that the US has had them for decades as well, it just hasn't been publicly acknowledged.
For some reason they did not provide any details beyond that they have kinetic and non-kinetic means. Kinetik indeed can mean just ability to blow up satellites but IMHO it is good enough to trigger an arms race.
The arms race was always happening. Russia put a weapon on a space asset decades ago, basically for shits and giggles, but was recently practicing a space asset maneuvering and deploying a smaller asset, and there's very little justification for such a system other than "Attack another satellite", especially since no public cover has been offered.
Both Russia and China have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Ages ago.
Space being not militarized was always a fiction. Space was militarized first and foremost, and everything NASA ever did was to encourage and help that goal. This has only gotten dramatically less symbolic and more actually meaningful since recent massive advances in space sensor platforms and scale.
This is only a change in public messaging unfortunately.
This was always the inevitable outcome, because there's no "Bigger fish" to make independent nations follow any rule other than the rule of the jungle, and space is the highest ground.
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.
Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.
in the west older generations hold much more power over who gets elected, demographically speaking, and look at what's going on. They feel no shame whatsoever and are doubling down.
Sometimes. Depends who you ask. Some boomers are in glorious denial. Many are still in bloody office. The ones I’ve heard opine about embarrassment and failure are mostly those that’ve been trended towards fight-the-power for their adult lives.
Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.
There's the program called Starshield, that's part of the miltech side of the program. One of the military uses is using the starlink constellation signals as a passive SAR for the whole planet with millimeter scale accuracy.
I suspect this isn't true in any meaningful way, and relates to Trump's people deceiving him.
Seems 100X more likely that Trump said "what kind of weapons does space force have?" and they had to come up with something, rather than a clandestine space weapons program being successfully developed and deployed.
Behold, the real bull case for SpaceX: not space-based datacenters, colonizing Mars, or asteroid mining, but the thorough militarization of Earth's orbit by the US.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations.
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land.
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.
Traditional bombing campaigns did far more damage to Japan than the nukes did though. Also any plan that relies on dropping multiple nukes as an aggressor is a losing plan as the entire world will turn against you.
So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world?
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
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.
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.
Maybe they'll ask for a "slower pace of development" so it doesn't look as much like they're just asking for new regulatory barriers on their competition.
Historically it did, so long as the politically privileged class of USians were among the folks that would be advantaged by those 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.
FTA it says the treaty covers "weapons of mass destruction". But historically (at least prior to the 2000's), there was an unspoken rule of not weaponizing space. I think that's changed in the last ~20 years and recall covered of China sending kinetic weapons into space.
Hard to be certain due to Cold War secrecy, but the consensus seems to be that they conducted several test-firings before the station was finally deorbited.
using a 23mm auto cannon on orbit is more or less useless. There’s no way to reasonably shoot something when your relative velocities could easily be strictly greater than the bullets. Even if something is coming straight towards you it’s very difficult to aim when you have to take into account orbital mechanics. You would need a huge amount of RCS fuel in order to counteract the impulse from the gun. And even if you did shoot the gun if you miss, you now have a bunch of bullets that share your orbit and will at some point intercept your flight path again, if you don’t miss, you still have shrapnel sharing your orbital path.
The boom in private space companies all vying for USG cash was the initial indicator this was happening. The amount of mass sent to orbit so far for USRO and USSF has been huge. And it's not going to let up.
I have been getting occasional paywalls from the BBC asking to pay to read articles. Clearing cookies does remove the paywall for a while so I think it's some sort of A/B test they're running.
I have a feeling every major nuclear power probably does at this point. Russia definitely has global GPS jamming capabilities in orbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
Reagan and Gorbachev came within inches of abolishing nuclear weapons, but the sticking point was the US would not back away from building space weapons. As long as warmongers are in control we will continue to live in danger and fear.
You need to get a critical mass of people to despise war so much that they are ready to have disadvantages themselves to make a war free world a reality. E.g. complete stop of trade with countries starting a war or supporting such a country.
It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
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.
In which case, any country willing to fund a military and start a war would dominate the world.
Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.
"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".
Gorbachev's dead now and look who sits in his place. I'm not so sure such a treaty would still be respected anyway. As as for who sits in Reagan's place...
The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.
The capabilities of the "space weapons" didn't exist. Reagan used the threat of those weapons to perpetuate USSR's unsustainable military & defense investment, knowing the US could sustain it. Within 5 years, USSR was defunct.
People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.
The more practical approach appears to be fully on-orbit activities, as those are currently far harder to attribute. The field of "Space Domain Awareness" is still nascent and rapidly evolving.
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
It probably felt really hard decades ago. But we are already well into the era where you can target a particular seat of a car driving on a highway with a nonexplosive kinetic weapon.
That doesn't mean you can hit it too. The only case which I remember was well documented was for a turret gun "controlled by satellite" hit the passenger of a standing vehicle from the back of a truck in front of it (nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in Tehran in 2020 while his wife, sitting immediately beside him, was unharmed). Also those reports were pretty questionable at the time, there were multiple competing narratives, and I'm not sure the satellite gun story was ever independently verified.
Wasn't the shuttle originally planned to be a weapon as well, capable of intercepting and sabotaging satellites using its loading bay workshop? There are also the various "mini shuttles" the three letter agencies fly around the earth for several hundred day stints of doing who knows what exactly with who knows what capabilities (other than having a similar sabotage potential as the original shuttle perhaps).
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
As far as I know, a major issue with NASA space programs such as the shuttle was that each group held its own requirements. So, most likely the DoD had some additional demands.
The SIR-C/X-SAR was launched in the Shuttle Bay and used to map the entire surface of The Earth. Some would call that a munition. This article, following that event IS the confirmation.
>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
Ya, that's a hilarious comment from the Chinese after they have literally tested their own anti-satellite weapons. But then their diplomats have never been short of chutzpah.
but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive"
and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
North Korea was more prosperous than South Korea, until the US bombed flat over 85 percent of the buildings in North Korea. 20 percent of the population of North Korea died.
I'm going to bookmark your comment and read it instead of drinking coffee every day this month, thanks.
What a weird question, does that include Chiang Kai-shek? or limited to the "communist" party?
You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.
Once a country develops midcourse ballistic missile intercept technology, it's practically impossible to not own an ASAT weapon. It's just a matter of targeting and programming.
This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.
The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).
Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.
Russia mounted a gun on one of its space stations[0] but it didn't work out, and they were going to launch an orbital nuclear platform[1] but then everything went to shit.
Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.
"Putting" weapons in space, like in orbit (otherwise they won't stay in space for long) is not like putting weapons in international waters close in to the target. Any weapon that relies on moving some (projectile) mass from there will have to deal with the costly orbital mechanics, where the projectile will have to be pulled out of orbit with a lot of mass and time to reach anywhere on the planet. It's... not that good of an option for attack, compared even to existing ballistic ground-to-ground trajectories. For non-projectile orbital weapons, i.e. energy weapons, the physics are brutal, because the amount of energy necessary to reach any degree of destructive effect to a target on the ground is way too large. And all that has to also be weighted against the risk of having such weapon staying exposed in the orbit, like a sitting duck, for anyone on the ground to disable it in numerous ways. If there would be any case for having weapons in space, I don't think it will be to attack anything on the ground.
So what is it, just kill sats, or something more interesting like rods-from-god, briliant pebbles, orbit to ground laser cannon or somethong else entirely ? Inquiring minds want to know! :-)
The part where China "begs" the US not to weaponize space, and then talks of how China wants to militarily dominate space... Such typical tactics to delay US progress.
tristanj | 23 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
thrance | 23 hours ago
> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
huurtehoog | 21 hours ago
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf
bob1029 | 23 hours ago
thehumanmeat | 14 hours ago
whh | 13 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8
21asdffdsa12 | 22 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 22 hours ago
Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop.
This is fine.
consensus1 | 22 hours ago
markdown | 22 hours ago
MattPalmer1086 | 22 hours ago
porridgeraisin | 21 hours ago
MattPalmer1086 | 21 hours ago
>Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop
porridgeraisin | 20 hours ago
nonethewiser | 18 hours ago
trelane | 19 hours ago
Not every target is on the ground.
edgyquant | 18 hours ago
dingaling | 18 hours ago
USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.
MattPalmer1086 | 12 hours ago
I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.
Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).
The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...
consensus1 | 13 hours ago
_djo_ | 22 hours ago
https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/202...
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
wayeq | 14 hours ago
The Nukes of Damocles
chukar | 22 hours ago
alfiedotwtf | 22 hours ago
tialaramex | 22 hours ago
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
freedomben | 19 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
tialaramex | 12 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 12 hours ago
snickerbockers | 12 hours ago
rtkwe | 15 hours ago
jonkoops | 22 hours ago
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
voidUpdate | 22 hours ago
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
pwdisswordfishq | 22 hours ago
_djo_ | 22 hours ago
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 establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
aa-jv | 22 hours ago
Got some?
_djo_ | 22 hours ago
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
aa-jv | 21 hours ago
I don't see any evidence.
_djo_ | 21 hours ago
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
aa-jv | 21 hours ago
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
voidUpdate | 21 hours ago
aa-jv | 20 hours ago
There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.
voidUpdate | 20 hours ago
gowld | 11 hours ago
scottyah | 16 hours ago
etiennebausson | 19 hours ago
Proxy at work is stopping me from reading most of grandparent links, so it'll have to wait for home.
mc32 | 19 hours ago
voidUpdate | 22 hours ago
_djo_ | 21 hours ago
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secretive-russian...
notahacker | 17 hours ago
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.
sesteel | 3 hours ago
PorciiVorbesc | 11 hours ago
The US invasion of Iraq was also based on "strong evidence" of WMDs.
rjsw | 22 hours ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz_program#Defense_measures
voidUpdate | 22 hours ago
notahacker | 22 hours ago
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
spwa4 | 21 hours ago
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 they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
zenbane | 19 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 19 hours ago
brookst | 19 hours ago
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
ang_cire | 9 hours ago
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
willy_k | 19 hours ago
smackeyacky | 18 hours ago
victorbjorklund | 17 hours ago
somenameforme | 18 hours ago
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
feoren | 17 hours ago
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?
mapt | 18 hours ago
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; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
lr1970 | 18 hours ago
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.
onion2k | 15 hours ago
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.
Fwirt | 15 hours ago
onion2k | 13 hours ago
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
x______________ | an hour ago
You want an accretion disc around the planet like Saturn?
toast0 | 13 hours ago
It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P
waste_monk | 17 hours ago
Eh, you can do a lot better than that: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conksat_introducing-fragsat-f...
:)
wat10000 | 17 hours ago
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.
mschuster91 | 15 hours ago
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.
wongarsu | 14 hours ago
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...
mschuster91 | 12 hours ago
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
[2] https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/articles/new-normal-componen...
[3] https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasst...
LargoLasskhyfv | 9 minutes ago
Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?
LargoLasskhyfv | 19 minutes ago
All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.
I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.
ctkhn | 14 hours ago
wat10000 | 14 hours ago
freebsd_lovefes | 13 hours ago
Dylan16807 | 12 hours ago
ben_w | an hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.
jdougan | 8 hours ago
gorgoiler | 14 hours ago
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 exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
notahacker | 13 hours ago
freebsd_lovefes | 13 hours ago
trhway | 10 hours ago
kragen | 8 hours ago
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
antonvs | 7 hours ago
antonvs | 7 hours ago
pennomi | 7 hours ago
elnerd | 14 hours ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...
Tangurena2 | 11 hours ago
exe34 | 19 hours ago
> in the event that you land in a forest or similar.
I was very confused and wondered where this was going!
nojvek | 16 hours ago
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
ak39 | 16 hours ago
nickff | 15 hours ago
zobzu | 14 hours ago
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
SG- | 13 hours ago
varjag | 12 hours ago
tastyfreeze | 8 hours ago
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
reptileIllumina | 21 hours ago
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
https://san.com/cc/nasa-china-wants-military-moon-base/
Really at this point between conspiracy and official realize is just matter of a year if not just a couple months now.
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 7 hours ago
damnesian | 21 hours ago
preisschild | 19 hours ago
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
verelo | 19 hours ago
Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.
edgyquant | 19 hours ago
iAMkenough | 17 hours ago
rtkwe | 18 hours ago
scottyah | 16 hours ago
rtkwe | 15 hours ago
imglorp | 18 hours ago
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
jillesvangurp | 18 hours ago
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
hajile | 18 hours ago
jillesvangurp | 17 hours ago
hydrogen7800 | 16 hours ago
throwitaway222 | 15 hours ago
nomel | 15 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
beambot | 13 hours ago
[1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
eks391 | 11 hours ago
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
throwitaway222 | 13 hours ago
hajile | 7 hours ago
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
nradov | 12 hours ago
moffkalast | 11 hours ago
4gotunameagain | 35 minutes ago
Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.
Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.
bpodgursky | 18 hours ago
micromacrofoot | 17 hours ago
mikeweiss | 17 hours ago
gadders | 16 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
bilsbie | 15 hours ago
GiorgioG | 15 hours ago
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.
mytailorisrich | 14 hours ago
surfingdino | 14 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planes/comments/15fh5js/a_us_air_fo...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59299101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_...
The outer space is already a dumpster and a disaster.
JumpCrisscross | 13 hours ago
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Retric | 12 hours ago
BurningFrog | 8 hours ago
Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.
sesteel | 3 hours ago
snvzz | 2 hours ago
Steve16384 | 22 hours ago
poolnoodle | 22 hours ago
latexr | 22 hours ago
anentropic | 21 hours ago
M95D | 20 hours ago
consumer451 | 19 hours ago
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness
AngryData | 12 hours ago
junon | 22 hours ago
Trump seemingly cannot resist the classic opportunity for a "1up", can he?
d--b | 22 hours ago
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
tyrabound | 22 hours ago
> "We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
WarmWash | 18 hours ago
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
minipark | 22 hours ago
HelloUsername | 22 hours ago
Semi related "Rods from God": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
embedding-shape | 21 hours ago
A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
AngryData | 12 hours ago
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
Theodores | 22 hours ago
Incidentally, the Shuttle raised concerns in the USSR because they saw those large cargo bay doors and rocket thrusters out back, to think that this was a 'delivery system'.
In the modern battlefield, 'hypersonic' missiles are the new shiny. However, any ICBM is 'hypersonic', at least during the space phase. The new meaning of hypersonic means going at 'hypersonic' speeds through the atmosphere and in the final approach. Force equals mass times acceleration, more speed means more deceleration, which means packing a bigger kinetic punch.
adamsb6 | 18 hours ago
We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.
ndiddy | 17 hours ago
> One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.
> In addition to the Air Force's cross range demand, the military also wanted a larger Shuttle payload bay than NASA originally advocated. NASA wanted the Shuttle payload bay to accommodate modules for a future space station, which necessitated a payload capacity of approximately 50,000 pounds. The Air Force wanted a bay 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50,000 to 65,000 pounds and that had doors that could open out into space to deploy satellites easily. This payload requirement meant that the fuselage of the Shuttle needed to be essentially a large rectangular box with rounded surfaces. In general, NASA went with the Air Force's requirements because it needed the Air Force's support to help insulate it from the political charge that the Shuttle was really just a step towards human exploration of Mars or a permanent space station, which is precisely what some people at NASA wanted it to be.
The Air Force was working on a Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB in California, but after the Challenger disaster they decided that the Shuttle wasn't reliable enough and opted to instead use traditional disposable rockets to launch spy satellites.
nopassrecover | 21 hours ago
fnands | 19 hours ago
Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
willy_k | 18 hours ago
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
AnimalMuppet | 16 hours ago
That is, China's in a bit of an awkward position to complain very much.
rl3 | 15 hours ago
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
nomel | 13 hours ago
FabCH | 10 hours ago
nomel | 9 hours ago
I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].
[1] https://spacenews.com/china-says-it-remains-opposed-weapons-...
FabCH | 3 hours ago
One is significantly more risk to the rest of the world than other.
lossolo | 15 hours ago
chinathrow | 12 hours ago
lossolo | 12 hours ago
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
willy_k | 5 hours ago
Edit: Its a perfectly valid response to the question that was asked.
boc | 7 hours ago
And the US just publicly told everyone they have weapons in space?
Hell of a coincidence.
hn_submit | 19 hours ago
dhx | 18 hours ago
- Consideration of time-of-day/azimuth of overhead satellite based on shadows and perspective.
- Comparison to other imagery of the same location checking for portable objects (such as vehicles) and keeping track of when they appear and disappear, and whether they're present in the imagery being analysed.
- Consideration of cloud coverage and weather conditions to rule out unwanted satellite passes.
Then write up a report and publish it, making it a believable and concrete finding instead of a finding that otherwise may just be perceived to be speculation/vibes.
[1] https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-jordan-strike-at-u-s-aircraf...
3eb7988a1663 | 17 hours ago
Press article: https://www.livescience.com/secret-classified-satellite-trum...
Blog write up: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/09/image-from-trump-tw...
CodeWriter23 | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 8 hours ago
xtiansimon | 21 hours ago
ck2 | 21 hours ago
no-one is stupid enough anymore to say "oh he would never"
or "only against people we don't like"
No, of course he would use it against Canada or Greenland if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or didn't sleep at all
He clearly has rage fits which is one of the early signs of dementia
He would most definitely order the use of space weapons
I am really surprised he has not nuked some part of Iran yet, innocent civilians be damned but there are still 800 days left so here's hoping we don't wake up to that headline
mrtksn | 20 hours ago
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.
Invictus0 | 20 hours ago
mrtksn | 19 hours ago
It's so ridiculous to elevate the war zone when you were far away and out of reach currently. US is so target rich that I will be very surprised if US enemies leave those alone once US paved the way to the new frontiers.
ajsnigrutin | 19 hours ago
You don't need space weapons to hit datacenters, you need one van full of explosives and someone willing to die to deliver it to a datacenter.
To temporarily disable them, you just need a cheap drone with some explosives.
mrtksn | 19 hours ago
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
MSFT_Edging | 18 hours ago
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
lithos | 19 hours ago
Merad | 19 hours ago
mrtksn | 18 hours ago
mrguyorama | 14 hours ago
Both Russia and China have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Ages ago.
Space being not militarized was always a fiction. Space was militarized first and foremost, and everything NASA ever did was to encourage and help that goal. This has only gotten dramatically less symbolic and more actually meaningful since recent massive advances in space sensor platforms and scale.
This is only a change in public messaging unfortunately.
This was always the inevitable outcome, because there's no "Bigger fish" to make independent nations follow any rule other than the rule of the jungle, and space is the highest ground.
WarmWash | 18 hours ago
5upplied_demand | 17 hours ago
motbus3 | 19 hours ago
ChoGGi | 19 hours ago
Might be a good thing for humanity if we all get stuck here, and have to figure out how to get along or die trying...
physhster | 19 hours ago
hn_submit | 19 hours ago
aeve890 | 18 hours ago
Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.
monneyboi | 19 hours ago
I hope one of these days we can get our priorities straight.
dudefeliciano | 19 hours ago
tomasphan | 18 hours ago
dudefeliciano | 16 hours ago
AndrewKemendo | 18 hours ago
Every human on earth should be embarrassed at the state of the anthropocentric world
galleywest200 | 17 hours ago
AndrewKemendo | 4 hours ago
kbelder | 16 hours ago
Thanks to all our forefathers that have passed their gifts onwards.
dudefeliciano | 13 hours ago
bix6 | 18 hours ago
Arubis | 17 hours ago
testing22321 | 15 hours ago
alexashka | 8 hours ago
misetech | 19 hours ago
bdamm | 16 hours ago
hiddencost | 16 hours ago
freebsd_lovefes | 13 hours ago
BiteCode_dev | 16 hours ago
mars-or_wars | 16 hours ago
Permik | 15 hours ago
passive | 18 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 18 hours ago
kibwen | 18 hours ago
bix6 | 18 hours ago
doe88 | 18 hours ago
hoistway | 18 hours ago
ciconia | 18 hours ago
sejje | 17 hours ago
cogman10 | 17 hours ago
ARandomerDude | 17 hours ago
cogman10 | 17 hours ago
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.
drnick1 | 17 hours ago
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.
cogman10 | 17 hours ago
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.
toast0 | 13 hours ago
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
cogman10 | 12 hours ago
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
vablings | 16 hours ago
mrguyorama | 15 hours ago
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...
shadowtree | 12 hours ago
A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
AngryData | 10 hours ago
AngryData | 13 hours ago
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
dragochat | 13 hours ago
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
LightBug1 | 17 hours ago
- Open the floodgates to the open militarisation of space by all possible nation states.
- In response, justify huge increases in space defense spending budget
- Rinse / repeat to kingdom come. Same as it's always been.
Someone's getting a nice fat bonus, cigar and a blowjob tonight.
WillAdams | 17 hours ago
>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.
GMoromisato | 14 hours ago
I feel that applies more to Russia's space program--some cosmonauts (not all, of course) support Putin's war.
causal | 17 hours ago
eagerpace | 17 hours ago
daveguy | 16 hours ago
carterschonwald | 17 hours ago
Arubis | 17 hours ago
krunck | 17 hours ago
Arubis | 16 hours ago
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.
razerbeans | 17 hours ago
spaceuhhbased | 17 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
Hard to be certain due to Cold War secrecy, but the consensus seems to be that they conducted several test-firings before the station was finally deorbited.
FuckButtons | 14 hours ago
krunck | 17 hours ago
I expect "rods from god" to be used any time now.
mmaunder | 16 hours ago
samizdis | 15 hours ago
hiddendoom45 | 13 hours ago
recentlypostedj | 16 hours ago
mars-or_wars | 16 hours ago
thenthenthen | 8 hours ago
epolanski | 16 hours ago
ctoth | 15 hours ago
https://panda.substack.com/p/salvage-fuzing-and-co-orbital-n...
t1234s | 15 hours ago
exabrial | 14 hours ago
sgustard | 14 hours ago
nomel | 13 hours ago
Can you expand on your solution to world peace?
whh | 13 hours ago
legulere | 11 hours ago
It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
nomel | 11 hours ago
wraptile | 10 hours ago
frumplestlatz | 9 hours ago
frumplestlatz | 10 hours ago
Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.
"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".
asdff | 13 hours ago
cedws | 13 hours ago
bearjaws | 12 hours ago
All you need to know about making deals with Russia.
RobKohr | 10 hours ago
s1artibartfast | 8 hours ago
We dont know if Ukraine would be a state today if they refused
notthemessiah | 12 hours ago
tonymet | 11 hours ago
Reagan had the right strategy , for his time.
tonic_note | 14 hours ago
People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.
bob1029 | 13 hours ago
Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.
consumer451 | 13 hours ago
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711876
asdff | 13 hours ago
twothreeone | 12 hours ago
sizzle | 13 hours ago
drob518 | 13 hours ago
asdff | 13 hours ago
asdff | 13 hours ago
bdamm | 12 hours ago
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
baxtr | 12 hours ago
CodeWriter23 | 10 hours ago
andai | 13 hours ago
I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
nradov | 13 hours ago
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-anti-satellite-test
Revanche1367 | 12 hours ago
r_lee | 11 hours ago
but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive"
and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
Revanche1367 | 11 hours ago
SubmarineClub | 9 hours ago
And if China hadn’t stuck its dick into the Korean War, the whole peninsula would probably be as prosperous as the south.
etc-hosts | 7 hours ago
I'm going to bookmark your comment and read it instead of drinking coffee every day this month, thanks.
elteto | 8 hours ago
nradov | 7 hours ago
kurthr | 6 hours ago
You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
China supported the Khmer Rouge, maybe Pol Pot is memorable?
nradov | 11 hours ago
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4198/1
Revanche1367 | 11 hours ago
bigyabai | 9 hours ago
This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.
whatshisface | 13 hours ago
tintor | 12 hours ago
Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.
eps | 12 hours ago
andai | 8 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
topspin | 11 hours ago
The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).
Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.
not_a_bot_4sho | 7 hours ago
First to publicly announce it. However, Russia beat us to the punch.
Russian, China, India, and the US are all in this secret little club (but maybe not so secret anymore!)
krapp | 7 hours ago
Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3
[1]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...
restalis | 3 hours ago
m463 | 4 hours ago
m4rtink | 12 hours ago
vondur | 12 hours ago
Lammy | 11 hours ago
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 1999–2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060831035044/http://www.de.afr...
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 2009–2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160428181404/http://www.kirtla...
- LASER Effects Test Facility fact sheet from 2002 showing a 50-kilowatt CO² LASER setting a test target on fire: https://web.archive.org/web/20070315131556/http://www.de.afr...
skyhvr | 9 hours ago
throw158a3 | 8 hours ago
hereme888 | 8 hours ago
gggmaster | 6 hours ago