China Shoots Down Satellite

P&R could probably use more Brians and fewer pontificating jackasses with their lame one-liners and petty flames.*

*Yes, I am including myself in that assessment. Thanks for asking.

Are you trying to say I’m not a pontificating jackass? I consider myself a double-threat!

Thanks Brian :)

I always look forward to checking out your threads. I also appreciate the continous updating. It’s a repository of sorts.

Anti-satellite technology and planning has to be front and center of all strategic and tactical ops planning at the Pentagon. How do we function without satellite assistance? How does the other side function and what can we do to hurt them.

Years ago there was a similar amount of buzz when the Soviets did the same thing. This was during the Cold War and relations between the Superpowers were icy. There was a line of thinking that the Soviets were gearing up to pick off satellites at will.

You’re never going to have a power big enough to challenge America that is nice or trustworthy. But you need such a power to keep America honest (I use that word figuratively). Otherwise you’d have the Bushies putting THOR satellites up and nuking anyone they don’t like from orbit.

Odd, that hasn’t seemed to have been a problem since 1991… I guess the mind control satellites have gotten to me. I don’t even see the orbital battlestations, no matter how hard I look.

I know it makes me a bad person, but all I can think about is how awesome and sci-fi it would be to have a space war.

Good for China. The US won the space race, so we get to own space for a while. Maybe now that other powers are catching up this means there’ll be enough funding to try to win the Moon Base Race or the Mars Terraforming Race. How much extra would it take to add some point defense cannons to a spy satellite? Only n00bz are trumped by missile technology.

Actually, won’t this make liftoffs a bit harder? There’s probably 40,000 extra bits of crap now floating in orbit that need to be avoided.

And just to add to this, he generally goes to the effort of finding and updating existing older threads if they are on similar topics, instead of spamming the forum with tons of brand new ones.

There’s at least one sci-fi novel I’ve read where Earth is isolated by the huge bands of garbage in orbit from dead satellites, etc…

Wasn’t there a TV show about a space garbage collection ship? Perhaps the show was ahead of it’s time?

QUARK

You still end up with a high velocity cloud of shrapnel heading towards the satellite, and projectile weapons need ammo and a powersource, energy weapons are too big to mount on a satellite. Also, the science of hitting something at the velocities involved in space combat is probably out of reach of current tech? (not sure on that one)

Stealth and efficient manoeuvrability are probably the current options.

Obviously we should invest our tech points in shields.

Actually, yeah. Our greatest concern is obviously satellite defense. I’m assuming that’s where a lot of our “weaponizing space” research actually focuses on. At this point I would guess it’s really difficult to even know if something has been attacked or went dark for another reason.

But this was an inevitable development. Space superiority is simply an extension of air superiority and any fantasy that orbit would remain off limits was quite delusional.

There was also Salvage 1, with the junk yard rocketship.

Yes, but do they know about the TERRIBLE SECRET OF SPACE??!?!?

This is all true, but the key distinction is that with airspace every nation governs their own little slice, which doesn’t extend to space. There’s a profound lawlessness. The problem with that is that space is also a shared resource. It’s, dare I say it, the tragedy of the commons. If conflict should erupt in space it would most likely foul up orbits and disrupt, if not destroy, the operations of peaceful satellites from third parties for decades.

That nations develop the capability to destroy satellites is perhaps inevitable given their military and economic value but the agressive posturing of the US and China is not. There’s a difference between maintaining the capability and pushing for the right to use it whenever they see fit.

Well, debates over the “right” to use any military force are quite pointless. Nations only honor their treaties as long as they see a benefit. Once there is a compelling enough reason to engage in orbital hostilities, it will happen. Consequences could certainly be dire, that will have to be weighed against the benefit of any action. I actually suspect that temporary battlefield com networks and surveylence drones will be important to lessen dependence on orbital assets. This would be along the lines of predator drones already ion use, even cameras launched from 40mm grenade launchers which already exist as prototypes in combination with the kind of information superiority described in Vinge’s Rainbows End.

Having grown up on a diet of 1950’s-1970’s SF I actually like the idea of a space arms race. Any driving force of space based technology that doesn’t actively include me being reduced to my component atoms is fine by me.

It is also good for the world to have another global power keeping the US in check.