This is a spin-off of another thread that I thoroughly hijacked (sorry). The topic for this thread is any and all things related to space warfare (not just ballistic missile shields like the title might suggest).
More to come.
A few topics I think worth exploring are:
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What is the current state of anti-satellite weaponry?
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What about space-based weaponry?
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What does the future hold?
For #1, I believe that Russia, China, and the US have demonstrated the capability to destroy orbiting satellites with solid-fuel missile launches from within Earth’s atmosphere. Israel and India have announced programs to develop similar ASAT (anti-satellite) weaponry.
Let’s talk about targets for a minute: In the last few decades, satellites have become an important resource for any sophisticated first-rate military. There are basically three purposes (that I can think of right now at least):
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“spy” satellites, or in military parlance, ISR platforms. Basically, they take pictures or other forms of “sensing”, such as infrared, radar, radio-wave intercepts, etc. These oftentimes reside at relatively low orbital altitudes (maybe 150 - 1000 miles up). Their low altitude proves opportunities for them to gather intelligence on large swaths of the earth’s surface, but makes them relatively easy targets for ASAT missiles. This animated GIF sort of illustrates the idea.
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Global Positioning System satellites. We use these to help with navigation and targeting. Everything from troops on the ground to US Navy destroyers at sea, and missiles homing in on their target, make use of GPS technology to find their way. These are typically found at medium earth orbits (~12,000 miles up). These would obviously be prime military targets, but they’re quite a ways “out there”, so shooting them down is a relative challenge, and the network of satellites does have a fair bit of redundancy built into it, so you’ve got to shoot down quite a few of them to have good effect.
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geosynchronous communication satellites. These are by far the most challenging targets, orbiting at around 26,000 miles above the earth. These are used to pass all sorts of communications, including data transmissions. They’re obviously useful to the military at a strategic level, although when units are closer together, at the tactical level, they will often communicate with line-of-sight radios that do not rely on communication satellites.
You know darned well that any information available on the internet is unclassified. It’s outdated technology and something way more sophisticated than what is described on the internet is most likely in use today.
But, let’s look at some possibilities.
Nuclear weapons. I doubt there are nuclear weapons in space as the cost of putting them there is excessive compared to moving them around in a submarine. I would rule that option out.
Space based lasers? The US Navy has deployed ship mounted lasers as weapons. Putting one in space isn’t a super large jump. They could easily hit other satellites or possibly targets on Earth.
Killer satellites? Absolutely. Technology already exists for that from earth based missiles. Killer satellites using velocity and momentum instead of explosives are possible, even rumored to exist and easily disguised as something with an innocent purpose. Not to mention jamming and/or hacking possibilities to neighbor satellites from another innocent appearing satellite. China has 180 satellites in orbit, how many are capable of jamming/hacking US satellites? No way to know what technology they have up there.
The fact is, if it’s possible, someone is probably researching/building/deploy it at some level.
Lasers are an interesting technology. We’re right on the cusp of being able to use them as effective weapons. You are correct that the US Navy put a (rather experimental) version on the USS Ponce a couple of years ago. It’s not really powerful enough to blast holes in opposing warships’ thick armored hulls, but they did use it to engage some (target practice) small boats and drones. It’s probably not really powerful enough to take down a full-sized attack jet either (but could probably blind-the-hell out of the pilot). Lasers have a few downsides though:
Today, they’re still quite large and heavy (although we’re working on miniaturization). For example, here is a picture of the rear of the USS Ponce with its laser weapon system installed. The area pictured used to be a flat flight deck where they’d land helicopters. That size and weight makes them difficult to get and stay airborne, or get up into orbit. For example, there was a (now abandoned) project to use a laser mounted on the nose of a 747 to knock out ballistic missiles. They didn’t choose one of the largest and most powerful aircrafts in the world because they wanted to. They chose it because they had to.
Lasers also take a lot of power. In a naval vessel that’s already generating a significant amount of electricity, this isn’t such a big deal. In the case of an aircraft, or a satellite, which is operating with significantly-less electrical power output, that’s more of a challenge (which plays into the same size and weight difficulty above).
On other hand, the laser weapon system aboard the Ponce has a relatively short range, and is susceptible to atmospheric conditions like fog and clouds. Think about how poorly the headlights perform on your car in a heavy fog, for example, and you can imagine how similar conditions might affect the laser weapon system on the Ponce. This is an area were space-based lasers have a clear advantage. There are no clouds or fog in space, no atmosphere to interfere (as long as you’re targeting other satellites in LoS). So, maybe you could get away with a relatively small, light, low-powered laser to slowly burn holes through enemy satellites.
One of the challenges of satellite warfare is that the distances are vast and the speeds are insanely fast. Those things are going to count against a laser weapon system, which, at least in the versions we know about, rely on tracking the target very precisely and keeping the focal point of the laser aimed at the same point on the target, to essentially burn through it, like a blowtorch. It’s not instantaneous death and destruction (yet).
As far as we know, there are no offensive anti-satellite laser weapons in orbit today, but as you noted, not all the information is publicly available. I think they’re possible today, but perhaps improbable, and we’re heading into the future where they’ll become more probable, to the point of being an almost certainty.
Here I think we ought to make a distinction between a class of weapons we can call “killer satellites”, which I propose we define as “things that are in orbit waiting to be used” (which I’ll deal with in a later post because it’s getting late) and direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles like the Chinese, Russians, and USA have all tested, which never achieve orbital velocities and are kept on Earth waiting to be used.
As for the latter class, the direct-ascent ASAT missiles: they aren’t limited to using explosives to kill target satellites, but most of them probably do, because launching stuff way up into space is already quite expensive, so you might as well make the “payload” out of X lbs of high explosives rather than just X lbs of steel or concrete (a kinetic energy option). Some examples of this in our arsenal are the US Air Force’s F-15-launched ASM-135 ASAT, the US Navy’s SM-3 (with some modifications), and perhaps the US Army’s THAAD. All of these are really only effective against LEO targets (and probably only the lowest of LEO). Stepping up our game a bit, we could lob ICBM’s a good ways out into space, maybe even to Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), and with a nuclear warhead, you don’t have to be all that accurate to really ruin a satellite’s day.
In theory any country with the capability to launch a satellite into orbit also has the capability to launch an anti-satellite weapon, whether it’s just a big chunk of concrete or some sophisticated satellite-destroying robot (although we probably wouldn’t call these “direct-ascent” anymore). I don’t want to overstate this capability either. There are only maybe a dozen or fewer countries with the proven ability to launch a satellite into orbit. The challenge with these types of launches is that they use huge liquid-fueled rockets that are very big and expensive, take a long time to manufacture, and quite a while to prep for launch. And countries only have, at most, a handful of specially-prepared sites from which to perform these launches. And the whole operation is really just kind of fragile. A bit of weather, the launch is scrubbed. A bit of a glitch in one of the many inter-connected systems, the launch is scrubbed. If an enemy is raining cruise missiles down on Kennedy Space Center, for example, it’s difficult to imagine them being able to successfully prep and launch a Falcon 9 or Delta IV rocket, let alone doing it over and over again to degrade China or Russia’s satellite networks. Same goes for China or Russia. They probably can’t get more than one launch off before we wreck their launch site(s). On the plus side, this might be the only way most countries have to physically “reach out and touch” the highest satellites, in geosynchronous orbit.
Speaking of ASAT warheads, how about using a Davy Crockett mini-nuke? A satellite might survive a spray of shrapnel from a proximity explosion simply because it’s travelling faster than the shrapnel, but it couldn’t outrun the radiation from a nuke.
A really great resource for information on what is possible (and what isn’t) is Atomic Rockets at www.projectrho.com. (For some reason, the site seems down for me right now, but “is it down for everyone or just for me” style sites are telling me it is still up.)
Items covered include 1.) the fact that space-based lasers need to be cooled, and vacuum is a very good insulator, so you need huge radiators to dump that heat (or lots of mass to absorb it for releasing much more slowly) limiting the laser strength and fire rate. 2.) for nukes, most of the damage done on Earth is overpressure and heated air. In a vacuum, you have neither of those and all the damage is done from the radiation itself–which disperses with the inverse square of distance and is much less effective in space than you might think. To do much damage, it has to be close.
(ETA while the site wasn’t available to me through Google, it works for me for some reason by clicking my own link above. The exact site is Atomic Rockets - Atomic Rockets. I’ll post specific links later, but it’ll be outside my edit window.)
And here is the page that covers lasers and nukes, among other things.
Space warfare seems short-sighted at best.
Let’s say we go to war with China. We wouldn’t want to blow up just one of their satellites, but all of them, right? I don’t doubt we have the capability. But what happens after that?
Even assuming a war with China doesn’t go nuclear, we’ve just filled Earth’s orbit with massive amounts of space debris. Won’t that debris eventually interfere with everyone’s satellites? Do we have any way of effectively cleaning up space pollution?
Once we start blowing up things in orbit, it would make space less accessible to everyone, possibly not accessible at all.
Thanks for breaking this off into a new thread. I repeat again, your original claim that no space-based anti-satellite weapons exist probably cannot be proven true or false at this point, but if I had to guess, I’d say you’re wrong. (I note that you amended your claim later to say “that we know of,” which I think is both an important clarification that I agree with, and a big change to the original claim.)
See for example, this analysis by a guy who has an extensive history of consulting for the Air Force on just these matters:
As far as directed energy goes, I doubt that anyone needs to put a laser on a ship or a satellite to have an effective weapon. Even scientific observatories are using lasers in combination with adaptive optics to address scintillation – how much further would they have to go to have higher-power lasers that could be militarily relevant for LEO satellites? Such sites don’t have to deal with the size-weight-power-cooling issues that exist on ship and satellites.
Plus, directed energy doesn’t necessarily mean “fire a laser and expect something to blow up like the Death Star destroying a planet.” Using a laser to damage optical systems or solar panels is way more feasible, and after all, satellites aren’t built to take damage. ETA: plus as people point out, using lasers to effect a “mission kill” rather than a “hard kill” avoids the whole debris issue.
This is pretty much it. I see the space based weapons as designed to interfere with/destroy communication, navigation and spy assets of an adversary, not to rain destruction on mankind below. It will follow the typical technological pattern, one side develops a space-based asset, the other develops counter-measures.
We know we only have access to unclassified information. No one, outside a few governments, really knows what’s up there and what’s possible. Don’t trust the government to give you the right story, example, the Glomar Explorer. If the internet existed at that time, any Google search would have returned a purpose for the ship far different than it’s intended purpose. I suspect the same thing applies today. The weather satellite peacefully taking pictures of the landscape below may not be what it seems.
I don’t see how it could outrun a proximity explosion especially since there is no air friction in space. If the missile is coming toward it then it obviously can’t outrun it. Ditto for coming in sideways as long as it lead enough. If the missile comes fast enough from behind to catch up, then some of the shrapnel will have enough additional forward momentum to hit.
If the missile explodes behind, above, or below, then the paths of the shrapnel may not intersect with the path of the satellite.
I wonder if the X-37 can be equipped to kill satellites.
I’m confused. My original claim, AFAIK, was in post #48 of the other thread. It was just:
Is your theory that China has secretly smuggled anti-satellite weapons on board some of their existing satellites, even though we have no evidence for this, and because you believe this theory without any evidence to support it, you’d guess that I’m wrong?
Or, conversely, is your theory that Chinese Beidou navigation satellites themselves constitute “space-based anti-satellite weapons” because they have some maneuvering capabilities and could, theoretically and with a great deal of luck, be used to crash into another satellite in a kamikaze-style attack?
Or is it something else entirely that I’m misunderstanding?
*In March 2009, then deputy minister of defense Vladimir Popovkin told journalists that Russia had “retained basic assets” in Naryad-VN and Naryad-VR (or Sentry) systems.
The Naryad-V, which apparently also has the military designation 14F11, consists of an orbital space tug, whose civilian version is known today as Briz-K (Breeze). Its engine can fire up to 75 times during one mission. This highly maneuverable rocket stage serves as a launch platform for multiple missiles developed at a highly classified KB Tochmash design bureau.
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Space based it is.
Is it really there? I don’t know, and If I did, I probably would be put in jail for discussing it.
After half a century of roller-coaster rides for one of the most controversial developments in space, the world still faces a considerable probability of satellites blowing each other up in space.
The author of the piece I linked to is a well known analyst on space situational awareness, space control, and related issues. He is saying that something fishy is going on, in that China may have latent space-based ASAT capabilities that are not fully understood. His article is a refutation of your original claim that “China doesn’t have any offensive space-based capabilities.” His article is a pretty thorough analysis that your assertion cannot be proven. His article calls your assertion into doubt, while not necessarily refuting it conclusively.
And while you mock the idea that China may have deployed covert capabilities into space, I have provided a cite from a knowledgeable and reputable expert who says exactly this, so when you charge that I have no evidence of this, you’re glossing over the fact that I gave you a link to an article that concludes that China may have deployed covert capabilities into space. I’m not sure how much clearer I can be.
Are you surprised that countries may deploy covert capabilities into space? Do you have some inside knowledge on what the X-37 is up to, for example? Because its capabilities seem pretty well covert, too.