any satellite launched is a great security risk to national interests and multinational interests. all one would need to fuck everything up is a payload of sand.
what kind of security precautions are in place to prevent any schmuck from gugging everything up?
jb
At present, getting a payload of sand into orbit, much less geostationary orbit, is something that only a few governments can do. There are some calculations on how much sand would be needed to destroy orbiting satellites in this thread. Rumsfeld et. al. are supposedly looking into defenses against this sort of thing, but I’ve yet to hear that they’ve come up with any sort of workable plan.
so i assume that all payloads are looked into voraciously, and anything suspicious would get bunko-ed.
so if i had a billion dollars and wanted to send a secret payload up, the russian’s would have none of it? i doubt that.
especially since a massive space failure would benefit every government except the U.S.'s (since the U.S. has such a stranglehold over space). if one were to dump gravel out, the playing field would be even (at least, space wise- i understnad that the U.S. would still tower over everybody technologically).
but i have no reason to doubt that (see second paragraph).
jb
Mostly the fact that any schmuck doesn’t have the ability to launch satellites. So far, it’s just been governments: The United States, Russia, the European Union, and (I think) China are currently the only powers capable of launching things into (non-crashing) orbits.
right right, but you mean to tell me that all satellites up there are of government origin? of course not.
i guess i’m asking, what kinds of security procedures are in place to stop a gravel-pusher, and how much does the U.S. government impact on those procedures?
jb
I have no idea what you are asking. Governments launch secret payloads all the time, mostly spy satellites. Other governments don’t destroy those secret satellites for the same reason they don’t launch ICBMs at foreign cities or military bases - they cannot do it without revealing who did it, and it will start a war. What other defense procedures do you think we need?
no no no. geez i suck at this…
private companies send satellites up into orbit all the time. for television transmission, cell phone, photography, et cetera.
they do it by buying cargo space from government launches, i assume. and by ‘government’, i do not just mean U.S. Government.
but if someone had the cash and the wherewithal, they could buy cargo space as well, or a launch, or whatever, and send up a satellite of their own.
since we haven’t had a massive satellite failure (yet), there’s gotta be some check that prevents individuals and companies from sending up payloads of any ol’ crazy shit. you know, to stop them from sabotaging satellites and possibly making a near-earth orbit satellite-deadly.
what is (are) that (those) check(s)?
and has the U.S. admitted a heavy influence into such checks in other space powers?
jb,
fingers crossed
So I guess you’re saying that, if Dr. No could summon the bucks to actually build the secret island base he could just as easily skip the administrative hassles and buy some cargo space on an Ariane?
Have you flown since 9/11? I’ll bet that Ariane Travel does more than just ask. I’ll bet they look inside.
If I understood you correctly.
Are you asking if you could build an armed satellite, pay someone to launch it, then use your satellite to attack the International Space Station? I don’t think anyone will do a launch until they are sure the palyload meets their safety requirements. So in that process, any secrets would probably come out. I don’t know if there is a formal government approval process for each payload.
By the way, most commercial launches are done by private companies now. The distinction may not be very clear since most of the launchers were developed through government contracts. But you usually don’t see a NASA logo on a rocket unless it’s a manned flight or a NASA payload (probes, scientific satellites).
no, i’m talking about general sabotage.
nobody (as far as i have heard) has used a general mischief and mayhem device on our satellites up above. and since the simplest type of sabotage is a coffee can full of sand hidden somewhere in a satellite, i am led to believe that there is a system in place prohibiting cans of sand.
is there? was there? is it a loose amalgam of different standards, or is there a worldwide protocol?
jb
There sure is. On the “Official Launch Space Request Form”, there’s an item marked “Do you intend to sabotage dozens - if not hundreds - of satellites already in orbit?” If someone marks “Yes”, then they won’t launch that person’s payload.
What keeps them from lying on the Request Form? Why, the Honor System, of course!
Your logic is faulty. Just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean that there is a worldwide agency secretly monitoring payloads.
Yes, there is a system in place. The system is that it is prohibitively expensive to do so. When Dr. No gets off his butt and starts splashing money around, Western civilisation as we know it will collapse.
As no government will want to experience the global economic problems caused by such “mishief and mayhem”, let alone the possibility of war, they are not your candidates. As has been said, I suspect that they do review payloads to check for the odd, misplaced, coffee can full of sand.
On top of smuggling the sand into space, there is also this tricky question of how exactly will hit the space ship in front of you. Assuming GeoSync orbits are the ones you want to destroy. First of all, there ARE limits as to how close geoSynch sats are allowed to be from each other. Simple you say? Just shoot the sand out of your sattelite into theirs. Well, there is this unfortunate problem that if you make something go faster, you also make it go into a higher orbit.
Plus, there is already a significant amount of “space debris” floating around which I am sure sattelite manufacutrers have to take into account of when the design the sattelites so its not as if they haven’t thought about possible collisions.
i never said there was a system. i don’t know if there’s a system, and it seems like setting up a world-wide system would be extremely difficult. that’s why i’m asking if there is one.
why do posters keep assuming that i am talking about Dr. No, a superevil multibillionaire supervillain? (not to encourage the destruction of satellites but) it would be really easy to make space effectively dead to us, satellitically.
who would want to do this? well, we have had organized cells of muslim extremist anti-westerners fly airliners into skyscrapers, and we’ve had a very motivated neo-luddite bomb citizens as a means to advance his personal politics.
either one of those might wanna take out geosynchronous and near-earth satellites.
not to mention that a foreign country may want to take out as many satellites as possible, if they are planning on fighting or being attacked by the U.S. what with our army being so reliant on GPS and satellite survellience.
china certainly springs to mind.
as to the difficulty of individuals or small groups launching into orbit a hazardous payload, i haven’t the slightest. again, that’s why i asked the question. but it doesn’t seem too hard.
i believe that most of the cost for building and launching a satellite is the design and manufacture of the complicated machinery of the satellite itself. so don’t spend that money. design it just enough that it looks like a functional satellite. upon visual inspection, x-ray, et cetera. especially if you are masquerading the satellite as a science experiment, this seems very easy to do.
or if you are a disgruntled citizen within the satellite and/or aerospace and/or telecommunications industries (or a group with a member who is), design into some satellite a sabotage device.
it doesn’t have to be a can of sand, either. a tube of liquid (ostensibly with another function) which liquid, when introduced to the cold vacuum of space, will crytallize into hard little nuggets of satellite-bashin-action. or a complicated gear mechanism (who knows what the ostensible reason for that one is), which, upon a certain signal, opens up to spill a multitude of iron gears cogs and camshafts.
all in all, doesn’t seem too hard to fuck things up royally up in space. nobody has done so. is this because the controls on what is put into orbit are more stringent than i have outlined above? or because it hasn’t happened yet? or what?
jb
i never said there was a system. i don’t know if there’s a system, and it seems like setting up a world-wide system would be extremely difficult. that’s why i’m asking if there is one.
why do posters keep assuming that i am talking about Dr. No, a superevil multibillionaire supervillain? (not to encourage the destruction of satellites but) it would be really easy to make space effectively dead to us, satellitically.
who would want to do this? well, we have had organized cells of muslim extremist anti-westerners fly airliners into skyscrapers, and we’ve had a very motivated neo-luddite bomb citizens as a means to advance his personal politics.
either one of those might wanna take out geosynchronous and near-earth satellites.
not to mention that a foreign country may want to take out as many satellites as possible, if they are planning on fighting or being attacked by the U.S. what with our army being so reliant on GPS and satellite survellience.
china certainly springs to mind.
as to the difficulty of individuals or small groups launching into orbit a hazardous payload, i haven’t the slightest. again, that’s why i asked the question. but it doesn’t seem too hard.
i believe that most of the cost for building and launching a satellite is the design and manufacture of the complicated machinery of the satellite itself. so don’t spend that money. design it just enough that it looks like a functional satellite. upon visual inspection, x-ray, et cetera. especially if you are masquerading the satellite as a science experiment, this seems very easy to do.
or if you are a disgruntled citizen within the satellite and/or aerospace and/or telecommunications industries (or a group with a member who is), design into some satellite a sabotage device.
it doesn’t have to be a can of sand, either. a tube of liquid (ostensibly with another function) which liquid, when introduced to the cold vacuum of space, will crytallize into hard little nuggets of satellite-bashin-action. or a complicated gear mechanism (who knows what the ostensible reason for that one is), which, upon a certain signal, opens up to spill a multitude of iron gears cogs and camshafts.
all in all, doesn’t seem too hard to fuck things up royally up in space. nobody has done so. is this because the controls on what is put into orbit are more stringent than i have outlined above? or because it hasn’t happened yet? or what?
jb
As for the bucket of sand, if the satellite is in LEO, the shooter needn’t have to be able to orbit their own satellites. Just being able to build a half-way decent IRBM is enough. You put the sand into a suborbital hop intersecting the orbit of your target, and Blammo! No more satellite.
This is much easier than trying for a precise ABM-style intercerpt, easier, for that matter, than placing a satellite in stable orbit.
If your accuracy is suffering, send a six or a dozen buckets of sand. It’s still relatively cheap by comparison to orbiting the satellite in the first place.
exactly
First of all, satellites are scrutinized by literally hundreds of technicians during pre-launch tests and preparations. Someone would surely notice a coffee can full of bolts stuffed in there.
But mostly, space is an incredibly huge place, and it would be extremely unlikely to get close enough to another satellite to do any harm. In the 1970’s, the Soviets developed an antisatellite satellite called the IS-A, which had a “cloud of debris”-style shrapnel warhead with an effective radius of 1 km. Even with a 2 km wide cloud deliberately scattered in such a way as to cause maximum damage, the system still needed some fairly precise guidance to hit it’s target.
Most likely, a random scattering of debris would only damage the satellite it was stuffed in, if that. There are thousands of pounds of inadvertently launched crap (paint chips, bits of insulation, etc…) zipping around up there already and collisions are a very rare occurrence. Your sabotage effort would simply blend in with the rest of the junk. Buckets of sand in an IRBM would more likely just result in a meteor shower a few hundred miles down range than a destroyed satellite.
We’re saying your assumption is faulty. It is not easy to make space “effectively dead.” How large is low earth orbit? As large as the surface of the earth, times a few hundred miles thick (high), depending on definition. We’re talking far more volume than all the oceans of the earth. And it takes far more than a grain of sand to destroy a satellite. What’s a bucket of sand going to do, unless you aim it directly at a particular satellite?
Also remember that the smaller an object, the larger the surface-to-volume ratio. Which means smaller things are more affected by atmospheric drag. Therefore tiny particles of sand don’t stay up very long in low earth orbit.
That’ll be because you keep talking about individuals/small groups with billions of dollars 
.
And that’s the point, isn’t it. Both very low-tech, if effective, solutions. Assuming that they don’t stick to these relatively easy, tried-and-tested methods, I don’t think I’d be giving anything away if I said you’d be better off worrying about dirty radiation bombs, or even those nice suitcase nukes that the Russians have misplaced.
I addressed countries doing this without wanting war in the first post (i.e. they wouldn’t). If someone were planning a fight with the US, then it is a good idea. However, people like Saddam don’t have the resouces, so you’re back to the big guys, perhaps with China being the most likely future enemy. Then your talking about a full-blown war, possibly nuclear, where the state of your satellites is the least of your worries. If that’s the case, you could probably use EMP more easily and more effectively.
Not to me it doesn’t, but that’s my opinion. Again, why spend all this money on what is probably an unguided, random system when you can more easily cause more havoc down on Earth.
Again, as has been said, the cost of launches means that they are thoroughly checked. It would take the entire design team to subvert it, as they would normally be trying to cut the payload weight, not bolt random bits on. And, of course, some sort of Dr. No jammer to take control of the satellite (otherwise it’s not guided).
That’s a fair point. Still, you’d need a guidance system/jammer, otherwise you can’t target your expensive, fairly inefficent weapon.