The Air Force, saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack, is seeking President Bush’s approval of a national-security directive that could move the United States closer to fielding offensive and defensive space weapons, according to White House and Air Force officials.
The proposed change would be a substantial shift in American policy. It would almost certainly be opposed by many American allies and potential enemies, who have said it may create an arms race in space.
A senior administration official said that a new presidential directive would replace a 1996 Clinton administration policy that emphasized a more pacific use of space, including spy satellites’ support for military operations, arms control and nonproliferation pacts.
Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.
They don’t come out and say this, but the “protection from attack” angle is normally something like “prevent China from attacking us while we mess around in their backyard.” Standard great power politics stuff.
They’ll need to cook up some threat after they’ve won the “war on terrorism”. The neo-cons don’t want another episode of post-cold-warism where there was no enemy to stir the masses.
This stuff has very long timelines, decades long timelines, The US has to deal with it now to be ready for the
American military dominance relies in large part on her space assets. If you are doing long-term strategic planning on countering American military power, you need to deal with these.
At present, nobody can. However, at present, the US can’t deny anyone elses assets either. Nor can the US protect its own, or necessarily replace existing satellites quickly.
This isn’t a matter of how things look in 2005, it’s about how they will look in 2020.
Hey, I got a better idea. How about subsidizing firms that are trying to get commercial space travel off the ground? Maybe then we could go to other planets and stuff… yeah… I don’t want to be around when some countries decide to have a war in space.
One of our best advantages is undisputed space and air superiority. Now that private firms have demonstrated the ability to get near space it’s time to start thinking about defending those assets. Hardly surprising.
Did any of you guys hear about that Dread weapons system currently under development? It fires projectiles at an incredible rate using centrifugal force and is perfect for deployment in a zero G vacuum.
Yes. The PR stuff about it being recoilless is bullshit; instead what you have is what feels like a near-constant pressure, instead of the kick you get from a single-shot gun.
If you want to dispense with rockets, you could basically fire your ammo in equal and opposite directions simultaneously. But that might cause problems with things you don’t want shot down being behind the DREAD satellite.
Also: really really long links really really suck. They format everything that follows to make it necessary to scroll to the left to see the ends of the lines, then scroll back. That’s a pain.
One of our best advantages is undisputed space and air superiority. Now that private firms have demonstrated the ability to get near space it’s time to start thinking about defending those assets. Hardly surprising.
Did any of you guys hear about that Dread weapons system currently under development? It fires projectiles at an incredible rate using centrifugal force and is perfect for deployment in a zero G vacuum.[/quote]
I read this article and am 98% certain that it’s a fake. It just makes no sense from a physics point of view, for so many reasons. Here, have 2:
Precession: If you have that much mass constantly spinning around and you attempt to aim the weapon on or down it will torque itself over on its side.
Jamming. There has to be a weapon feed system, and we are expected to believe that rounds can be fed into the centrifuge, accelereated to speed and fired at a rate of hundreds per second and that this technology is simple.
There are lots more reasons. This thing smells like a total hoax to me. Also, none of the people or companies mentioned seems to exist. I didn’t bother to do a patent search, but I bet there’s no patent, either.
Normally I would assume that everyone realizes it’s fake, but I’m beginning to get the impression that people actually believe this. My apologies if I’m ruining the joke.
Wouldn’t solve the fact that you couldn’t tilt the device up and down. The gyroscopic force of the spinning disc would make it incredibly difficult to tilt the assemblage. Furthermore, the whole idea of a weapon that consists of a wide, lightly armored spinning disc at incredible speeds, is ridiculously impractical. One bullet, one heavy blow, the slightest misalignment or bend in the wheel would, at the speeds involved, lead to the device violently tearing itself to pieces. Not exactly something you’d want to be standing behind in the field. And further, someone at POE news did a quick and dirty ballistics analysis and found that with the force involved on spherical projectiles of the sort they’re discussing, the dropoff rate would be incredible, leading to a range of something like 30 meters. If it’s not a hoax, it’s one hell of a snowjob.
Jason had it. At this point China would be the government threat that comes to mind, but with private enterprises outside of the US able now to cheaply launch satellites and whatnot into space, I don’t suspect it will be long before “bad guys” start doing something similar.
Isn’t there a treaty that prevents all miltarization of space? I’m positive of the “no WMDs” one and the “no weapons on the moon” one, at least between the US and a now-defunct USSR, but aren’t there others? Dozens of natoins now put satellites into space so wouldn’t it make sense that such a treaty has been at least proposed?
Treaty? Prevents? Pschaw sir, pschaw! The past several years have shown that treaties are not worth the paper they’re written on as they can be and will be unilaterally ignored when inconvenient.
The space property and militerization treaties may look nice on paper, but up until now, they’ve been essentially moot. I have a hard time believing they’ll hold up once, ya know, space property and militerization becomes an actual possibility.
