:rolleyes: Well, DUH! No spaceship to date has been designed with any defense in mind! Violence against spaceships has never been an issue, up to now . . . and, come to think if it, it’s still not an issue! We shouldn’t expect that to change until space travel becomes a lot more militarily/economically/socially important than it is now. If you were an Al-Qaeda leader or a Chinese leader, would you even think of spaceships (most of them purely robotic, at present) as a strategically important target? Or would you concentrate on targets of more immediate relevance?
The term strategic importance requires explanation, anytime it is invoked. Why is this target important? What is the strategy behind hitting it? Those are questions to be asked an answered. Strategic importance is not an inherent value in a target.
So, the thought on the thread that started this discussion was that the shuttle could be a target for a number of reasons, including it’s symbolic stature within America (and throughout the world), the massive amount of money tied up in the program would be temporarily lost (if we lose another shuttle, we halt manned flights), it would be a very visible tragedy, etc.
As for the beanstalk, I love the idea… but how exactly would you prevent an airplane from flying into a noodle strand that anchored a space station to the planet below? Or any long range missile from striking such a massive stationary object?
Well, if it’s made of carbon-60, it might just slice the plane/missile in half like a giant cheese knife.
I’d guess that compared to spending $800 billion on the elevator, the cost of surrounding it with 24-hour F22 patrols would be a rounding error.
Well, you’d not only have to protect it against earthly threats but also micrometeorites and orbital debris; if you can manage to do that, protecting it from ground attack is, if not trivial, certainly an expansion of the same methodology.
Such a technology is highly speculative; by the time we can build such a thing, we’ll probably have threats other than a Stinger missile or a fighter jet. But it is a reasonable and serious concern for which there is no simple solution.
Stranger
Given that airplanes have been attacked by shoulder-fired missiles and some even brought down by them over the past 20 years or so, there actually are people who have designed defenses for airliners.
But it’s not armor - it’s a means to confuse missles so they miss their target. Much lighter, although not cheap at all.
For reasons already discussed here, it would be problematic to put effective armor plating on any ship capable of being launched into orbit, or of flying on wings. If we ever do build armored spacecraft, they’ll probably be assembled in orbit and designed for space-only operations, not for flying in any planet’s atmosphere or far down its gravity well; and their armor would be designed to defend against threats launched from other spacecraft, not from a ground-based terrorist with shoulder-launched missile rig. And if it ever reaches that point, we’ll be living (already) in a world where several states (states, not private terrorist organizations) have their own military space forces, with all that implies. Whether that can ever happen is an interesting question, worthy of its own thread.
Adding onto this, I can easily imagine armor being layered onto a ship already in space as it prepares for a high-speed interplanetary or interstellar voyage, to protect the hull from micrometeorite damage.