Now that we have one, it raises the possibility that other powers will establish space forces to keep up – and, eventually, equip them with ships and weapons suitable for space combat. How would that go, if it came to combat? What weapons would be used? What defenses would be possible?
The whole idea is too ridiculous to even speculate on.
There will only be one “space war”. There will not be a second. We won’t be able to get into orbit after that.
Low Earth Orbit requires an orbital speed of between 7 to 8 km/sec (depending on altitude) to maintain a steady orbit. A 20mm cannon shell carries 65 kJ of energy. At orbital speeds, a 1.3 gram fleck of paint carries the same energy. Shoot up or explode any object in orbit, and debris flies off. Even the tiniest bit of debris carries utterly devastating levels of kinetic energy, which means if it hits another orbital object, more debris is formed. Hit a certain critical mass of debris flying around, and it would just pinball into an orbital death cloud, where trying to get into orbit will result in getting destroyed orbital debris.
That’s the Kessler Syndrome in action, the MAD of outer space. It should be unthinkable, but the Chinese gave a satellite kinetic kill a try in 2007 (2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test - Wikipedia), and the US before AND after them.
So if you don’t care about anybody else using orbits, I’d just orbit up as many little killbox satellites, each armed with (seriously, yes) the equivalent of a shotgun and some birdshot rounds, or some kind of explosive warhead that could make the biggest cloud of fragments possible. Satellites move pretty predictably, so the goal would be to make a cloud of fragments or pellets in an opposing orbit and let kinetic energy do the rest.
Let’s hope that cooler head prevail, and nobody does this. Then your goal of space warfare is really to knock out the other side’s GPS (or GLONASS or BeiDou) satellites as non-destructively as possible. This becomes varying levels of speculation on my part.
- Try de-orbited satellites with parasitical orbital engines on your own little satellites. (The Russians do have an “inspection satellite” that’s been “inspecting” US spy satellites for awhile)
- Sensors might be burned out with powerful laser pulses, or otherwise fried with directed energy of some sort.
- Or just plain ol’ hack them into uselessness, though this one is kind of a WAG as to how vulnerable military computer systems ultimately are.
I mean, this is all pretty handwaving speculation at this point.
AIUI, the idea of space force, at least in theory, is that it’s mostly about consolidating various functions that right now are handled in a piecemeal fashion by the air Force and various government agencies.
New offensive weapons aren’t, or at least shouldn’t be, on the agenda right now.
I guess this doesn’t stop us playing along with the op, but it’s worth pointing this out. The existence of space force does not entail space combat forces.
So what’s the point of the SF? We already had a unified Space Command.
The point?
Trump is a child.
As best I can tell, the difference is SC is part of the air force and so pulling it out as a separate force, with its own budget, basically guarantees that some thought and action will be put in for the various “what ifs”, some of which might have been sidelined up to now.
The whole thing could have been done as a boring bureaucratic reorganizing, but calling it a flashy new military force would appeal to a septuagenarian with the maturity of a 5 year old.
ETA: ninja’d 
As I understand it, from other postings on this board, we still could orbit, a annoying very low earth orbit could still be used, at the expense of propellant to boost often. Yes this would shorten the life of anything we place there do to the need to reboost due to propellent loss, but that’s the reason it would clear fairly quickly and be reusable after such a event. Also very high orbits could still be quite usable as it’s just so much empty space up there. But yes the easy and useful orbits will be in not the greatest of shape.
That’s not really orbit anymore, though. That’s powered flight, for flexible values of “powered”. Mass is expense, and the thinner the atmosphere (and hence, the cheaper the drag penalty) the longer it would take to clear up. It doesn’t stop the lower, actually useful orbits from being completely clogged, though.
Higher orbits, as you say, are safer, the safety (other things being equal) being proportional to the square of the altitude. Getting there, however, would require running the Low Earth Orbit Debris Gauntlet, an all-too-rousing version of Red Rover where getting caught means the problem gets worse for everyone who follows. To be fair, the odds of getting through that debris belt would likely be pretty good. The odds of staying there safely, however, are not. That was a lot of words on my part basically agreeing with you.
At this point, I can’t really say there’s much of a debate though, as interesting as this topic is to me. I’m not really sure what a counter-argument to any of this would look like.
Edit: The tags have to be on their own lines, evidently.
Is anybody working along the lines of deflector-shield technology?
No, seriously, is anyone working along the lines of deflector-shield technology? Seems like that could be the only thing presenting any possibilities.
There’s no such thing as a “deflector-shield”.**
** In practice there’s the usual press-release noise and a bit of patent trollery, but no substance.
Also, would there be a role for Space Marines? Originally, marines were used for ship-to-ship boarding. Would that be possible in space combat?
No, seriously, what are you talking about?
I’ve read that the X-37 military space shuttle used by the USAF could fly up to enemy satellites and push them downwards so that they reenter and burn up in the atmosphere; sound plausible?
Sure, if the satellite you’re “pushing downwards” is so strategically valuable that it’s worth sacrificing an entire X-37 to destroy it. I’m not sure why you’d sacrifice an expensive manned vehicle for a job that could be done by a cheap missile, though.
Look. Space combat, right now, is going to be satellites blown up with missiles. There are no “force fields”, no “photonic torpedos” or “sonic screwdrivers” or whatever else out of science fiction. No “space marines”. The only thing a person could do in a space battle is teabag a satellite before being reduced to a pink mist by a cloud of 8 km/sec metal shards.
The main point of “space combat” is intelligence superiority. At the moment, all there is up there of millitary value is spy satellites and GPS (or equivalent–GLONASS or BeiDou). The goal of a “space battle”, right now, would be to degrade the enemy’s ability to organize their troops and spy on the opposition. That’s it.
There is nothing to board up there. There is nothing a person could do up there that a remote-controlled robot couldn’t do better and more cheaply.
Also you wouldn’t push a satellite “down”, that would actually speed them up and, perhaps counter-intuitively, give them a higher orbit. What you do is slow them down, instead. Make the orbit more elliptical so it can graze the edges of the atmosphere, lose more velocity, and eventually get dragged out of orbit by atmospheric friction, where it’ll burn up and shower somebody’s backyard with hydrazine dregs and/or radioactives.
You don’t need a whole X37 for it. You just need a smaller, cheaper orbital object of your own with a grapple of some sort and an excess of fuel for its own retrothrusters.
Presuming, like I pointed out before, you don’t just send up a small missile with a fragmentary warhead and send an orbital cloud of debris with enough kinetic energy to kick off the beginnings of Kessler Syndrome. Which, frankly, is exactly the heedless-of-the-future activity I expect out of all the current countries capable of launching their own orbital vehicles.
The only thing that would help would be armor. And armor is heavy.
If you could put a few inches of steel armor around your vessel, it would probably be protected from the worst of it.
Until we are producing products from space materials, that is pretty much a no go from a practical standpoint, though.
Whipple shield.
If maximum Murica is the goal, we might as well send Sandra Bullock back up there with a GoPro and have her fire-extinguisher all the orbiting Soviets down. Take that!
Compared to, say, warp-capable cloaking passenger cruise ships, kinetic shielding seems a somewhat more solvable problem given and near-future current technology and resources. Even tanks don’t just use steel anymore but ceramics and foams and such, not to mention active systems that attempt to intercept and/or explosively deflect incoming projectiles. I don’t think they’re fast enough for tank shells but can take out incoming missiles. But orbiting satellites are going maybe twice as fast?