The “article” read like a bunch of conspiracy-theory quackery to me, but since you insisted on pressing the point, I’m curious how you determined the author, Paul Szymanski, is “a well known analyst on space situational awareness, space control, and related issues” and “a knowledgeable and reputable expert”?
The fact that the “article” was published on his personal LinkedIn profile and not a media outlet, news organization, or scholarly journal is a big red flag to me. His other 4 “articles”, all “published” within a few months of each other in 2014, have the following headlines:
[ol]
[li]“Space Warfare Discussion Topics”[/li][li]“Time to Attack Russian Satellites?”[/li][li]“How Vulnerable Are We to Space Attack?”[/li][li]“FLASH! – United States Loses First Global Space War to Russians”[/li][/ol]
That fourth one is a goody. It starts out like this:
I bet that news was a hell of a surprise to people when he “published” it in June 2014.
Paul has apparently been either working as a “freelance consultant” or “seeking new work” for the last 3.5 years, which sounds to me like positive spin on him being unemployed, but I may be misreading the situation.
Before that, he worked as a “Principal Scientist” for a company called “Metatech Corporation” for 6 years. Their website looks like some abomination out of the '90’s, but they may be a legitimate company that really does hire “highly-qualified scientists and engineers with broad experience”.
At this point, I think I’ll quit digging into Paul’s background and give you a chance to rehabilitate your “expert”.
I’m perfectly fine with the concept of star wars, never understood why democrats were so opposed to anti missile tech being researched and deployed. Even if there are countermeasures that could confuse such systems, not all players have the ability to bring such countermeasures to bare.
Good example is the iron dome system in Israel.
Also, we should build and test the “rod from god” in space.
I think this idea of ground-based lasers as ASAT (and as a bonus, anti-aircraft and anti-missile) weapons is an interesting one, but I don’t know how much “power” a laser would need or how much it would lose on, for example, cloudy days vs clear ones. As you noted, the advantage is that you’ve got essential unlimited capacity for size and weight, as we’re not trying to loft it into the air or space, or even float it on water. It could be as big as the Pentagon building (as long as it works and we can afford it) and it doesn’t really matter.
On the other hand, sitting on the surface of the earth is basically the worst case for atmospheric interference. Obviously it’ll have maximum power if it can fire straight up through the atmosphere at a target directly overhead, and it’ll suffer more atmospheric interference as the target is farther off that angle, all the way down to the horizon, where I imagine the thing would be basically useless. Could we today, build a laser powerful-enough to effect at least a “mission kill” on the array of Russian / Chinese satellites zipping over the CONUS in LEO? or the GPS satellites in MEO? or even the communication satellites all the way out in GEO? I don’t know. The other laser weapon projects we’ve done so far, like aboard the USS Ponce, have had limited range (1 mile in that case). The atmosphere is pretty thick for the first 10 miles and thins out beyond that. Can we shoot a laser through a few hundred miles of ever-thinning atmosphere? I don’t think it’s a technology that’s demonstrated or proven, but it’s probably theoretically possible. I’m off to do some research.
Then put the cloud of shrapnel in the path of the satellite. Orbital velocity does the rest.
Anti satellite warfare is like cutting submarine cables – sure you could do it, but no one does. This is because anyone with access to low earth orbit and a bucket of gravel would be able to retaliate. And just like submarine cables, it may prove more valuable to hack the satellite (to intercept comms or inject false data) than destroy it outright.
Not really. Note that an object has to be moving at a minimum of 25,000 MPH (first cosmic velocity) to even get into orbit. Once an object is in orbit the maneuvers available are pretty limited in scope and expensive in terms of propellant. A 5 gallon bucket of gravel and a ICBM booster from the 60s would be the Starwars equivalent of mining a harbor – cheap, easy to deploy, incredibly difficult to counter (it’s impractical to armor a satellite enough to survive impacts at Mach 33).
How would they track them, you may ask? Simple. Because there’s no such thing as a minor fender bender at orbital velocities the DOD tracks the location of the 150k orbiting objects in the sky that are softball size or larger. Obviously, the classified satellites aren’t included in the publicly available data, but it’s not hard to track them for any nation state with low earth orbit capabilities.
This is one big reason I find the idea of a “killer satellite” with a robotic arm pretty laughable. It’d be sort of like putting some guys in a rubber dingy, giving them a jackhammer, and calling them a navy. Odds are good that they’d never sink a single enemy warship.
There is no need for an attacking weapon to “outrun” its target, and in fact ASAT and ABM weapons generally operate by intercepting the target trajectory from the oncoming aspect so that the target adds its own momentum to the destructive energy released in impact.
A nuclear weapon is a poor choice for anti-satellite use. Aside from the potential secondary effects of EMP upon the region below the explosion (from X-rays interacting with the ionosphere and creating a coherent radio wavelength pulse that interferes with equipment on the ground or within the atmosphere) nuclear explosions don’t really produce that destructive of an effect in space; without an atmosphere to absorb the radiation, blast effects are limited by what is produced by the inert components, and the ionizing radiation at any substantial distance is not that much more than a satellite built with space-rated components is designed to withstand for long periods of time. Nuclear weapons designed specifically for ABM use typically had very high yields (the W-71 used on the LIM-49 ‘Spartan’ was a 5 MT nominal yield, or else relied on close proximity and high neutron flux. Given the substantial improvements in guidance and tracking systems, these weapons really aren’t much more effective than kinetic interception (hit-to-kill) interceptors, and have attendant cost, security, and political ramifications that make them manifestly undesirable for that use.
I’m sure it could; it can carry a variety of payloads and obviously maneuvers in orbital space. The question is whether it would be smart to use it for that purpose. The X-37 is expensive to launch and maintain, whereas a system dedicated for purely ASAT purposes using the ICBM/SLBM boosters and infrastructure could pretty much hit anything in LEO with relative ease.
A truly effective “missile shield”, if it could be developed, would be inherently destabilizing in a deterrence scenario, as it offers substantial advantage to the party that owns it. The costs for developing an effective ABM system quickly spiraled from the few tens of billions of dollars to thousands of trillions for a comprehensive system, and even the more modest Grond Based Midcourse Defense system that is currently (pseudo)operationally deployed (for over a decade now) ostensibly against a singular attack by a “rogue nation” has a running cost of US$41B and has run into problem after problem, notwithstanding that the crucial Sea-Based X-band radar platform has been loitering at Pearl in test status for years.
Effective countermeasures are so trivial to deploy that test agencies have had to carefully characterize target emissions and debris to avoid the interceptor getting confused. Even an excessive amount of metallic residue in the exhaust plume of the booster can be enough to distort the radar cross section and thermal signature, causing the ground radar tracking system and terminal seeker head to fail to identify the threat. Intentionally producing effective countermeasures that could confused any extant system is ridiculously easy, and coming up with workarounds is a Sisyphusian task.
Kinetic bombardment (so called “Rods from God” or USAF Project Thor) is intended for surface bombardment from orbit. You seem to be confusing it with the Brilliant Pebbles concept which had telephone-booth sized satellites in a wide array of orbits that could deploy football sized kinetic interceptors (in some concepts the interceptors would be clusters of individual flechettes that would break apart and tumble to create a larger interception field). Brilliant Pebbles was considered to be conceptually feasible but there were questions about the efficacy in a wide scale attack, and post-Cold War the program was cancelled because there was no longer a perceived need for a system for which the lifecycle cost would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
You don’t even need gravel size debris; even a small fleck of paint or bit of metal shaving can do substantial damage at orbital speeds, and you don’t have to “catch up” to a target; just get in its way. It would be easy for any actor with sufficient launch capability to disable a complete orbital azimuth at a range of altitudes by just spreading enough debris in a persistent pattern, and the subsequent debris that is produced could easily spread to other altitudes and azimuth, resulting in the dreaded Kessler syndrome in which whole altitudes of orbits are inaccessible for decades to millennia without deliberate intervention.
And it is for this reason that we should engage in a strong effort to prevent the weaponization of space; it is just too easy for any lesser power to gain the upper hand via denial of orbital space, incidentally impacting the incipient industry of commercial LEO space, and potentially higher altitude telecommunications, Earth surveillance, and satellite navigation systems. The loss of this access would be a cost to every spacefaring nation, and in fact the entire world that relies upon satellite communications and weather surveillance for agriculture, business communications, and disaster avoidance and relief.
Mature launch vehicle systems can put payloads into the prescripted orbit, typically within a 1 km[SUP]2[/SUP] or less target box with >95% realized reliability. (Of US launch vehicles Delta II is the king with 151 successes in 153 attempts, giving a realized rate of 98.7% and predicted rate of 98.1%, and Atlas V has 66 attempts in 67 attempts for 98.5% and 97.1%.) On-orbit maneuvering within that area requires only a very modest maneuvering capability, and if the goal is just to put a spread of debris in the path of an incoming satellite even that accuracy is probably excessive. Once a nation has effective launch capability it is pretty much trivial to deploy destructive weapons in the orbital environment or even just accidentially create destructive debris through an unintended collision or debris emission, a fact that USAF Space Command has been very aware of (and concerned about) for several decades, and is part of the reason they are willing to share JSpOC tracking information to commercial and international satellite operators.
Yes you can. The Russian “space tug” for example is “rumored” to have an engine that can fire up to 75 times to position it for using the missiles it carries.
Is it real? I’ve never seen one. But I posted a link to it from Russian sources.
You fucked up your own satellite network ? As has been said before, China has some 180 sats up there. Another word for satellite is a small, solid object going round and round really fast around the globe. When you destroy them, they don’t vaporize, they become a cloud of debris…going round and round really fast, over a larger area than when they were a solid object.
According to this article, “X-37B’s propulsion system is capable of providing a total delta-V of nearly 3.1km/s over the course of a mission.” That’s impressive to me.
For the same reason the Russians shat their pants at the possibility, way back when. Nuclear deterrence only works when it’s a two-way street : you can’t fuck me up because I’d fuck you up. If one side cannot be upbefucked, it has a strong incentive to let loose, and let loose ASAP while it holds the ephemeral tech edge. Star Wars isn’t for protection, the *current *nuclear climate is for protection. Star Wars OTOH enables naked aggression.
And speaking as a resident of planet Earth watching the US rapidly tumble down from its position of global power, now with an insane man in charge to boot, the idea of y’alls being able to nuke somebody, anybody, *everybody *without fear of retaliation makes me wanna fetch my brown pants.
As for the rods from god, that would run against international treaties. We’ve all agreed not to weaponize space. And, sure, we’re probably all doing it on a covert just-in-case basis. But going from that to full scale deployment ? See above re:tech edges and aggression.
Piling on from what Stranger On A Train and Kobal2 posted, here is the “Report to The American Physical Society of the study group on science and technology of directed energy weapons”. Click on the “PDF” button to get the whole thing in a PDF. It’s a non-classified document, written by some of the top scientists on the planet - the first author is a Nobel laureate. Most of the authors had also worked on weapons systems, and brought that experience. If you don’t want to trudge though the technical details, read the executive summary.
From the executive summary:
“We estimate that all existing candidates for directed energy weapons (DEWs) require one or more orders of magnitude (powers of 10) improvements in power output and beam quality before they may be seriously considered for application in ballistic missile defense systems. In addition, many supporting technologies such as space power, beam control and delivery, sensing, tracking, and discrimination need similar improvements over current performance levels before DEWs could be considered for use against ballistic missiles.”
Sure, the report is 19 years old, but i have seen zero evidence of enough progress to overturn that statement. Why do people oppose SDI? Because the technology is not anywhere close to ready, and it’s destabilizing as hell. We’ve poured billions down the drain for SDI. We could have done something useful with all that money.
This UN Russian annalist reports that it did affect the moves of the USSR leaders, but overall: no. The USSR actually did realize early how ineffective SDI was really so there was not much change in the military costs to the Russians.
I’m having a *very *hard time believing that a national blackout by EMP would kill 90% of Americans. Yes, I know - dependence on electricity, society unaccustomed to foraging/farming, etc. But 90%? I would like to see a very detailed analysis of how that figure was arrived at; I’d have a hard time believing even 50%.
