Steps to an earthbound humanity

Factual Questions
21

Most certainly, any nation that went this route, would be asking for a world of trouble. Nothing terribly new for some nations, though. Still, a debate on the political ramifications of this action is the least of my concerns. My question is more technical in nature.

And remember that this is not something that you need to keep doing. This is set and forget. Once the debris is up there, it stays there until gravity and atmosphere do their thing. That takes a while. Not only that, it compounds itself. Every something that gets hit, makes even more debris.

But to the point. MRBM’s were mentioned. Who has those? Iran, North Korea, Hezbollah? What minimum range do you need to repurpose a rocket to touch LEO?

If they are truck launchable, I presume they are also boat launchable, that would make it somewhat easier to throw the stone and hide the hand, so to speak.

The number itself I presume is not terribly relevant. Whoever has them, will launch as many as they have/can in a volley (probably over a 24-hour window would be more effective and still safe to complete before any kind of reaction) and brace themselves for a one-way trip to the neolithic. I am sure that even just a dozen would bring an ocean of headaches to NASA & co. Still, if someone has any numbers to throw around as to what number of particles is necessary to get a chain reaction going, I would be very interested in hearing that.

As for undoing the damage, well, I am willing to hear the options. I hope someone is thinking them out.

Exapno, no sweat on the crossed takes on this topic. This is one of those things that have captured my imagination for a very long time. My OP might have omitted details for those who haven’t spent years pondering this dark corner of the space program.

22

[QUOTE=Squink]
But you don’t have to interdict that whole area. Satellites go around the earth. So if you create a ring of debris which also goes around the earth, a satellite will intersect it twice on each orbit. That fact reduces considerably the amount of material you need to make LEO untenable.
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But aren’t most communications sattelites in geosynchronous orbit?

23

[QUOTE=Chronos]
I think you misunderstand the problem. You don’t need to cover the entire surface of the planet; you just need to intersect every low-Earth orbit, which is much, much easier.
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Sure, but the OP was asking specifically about “locking the Earth in a cloak of space debris.” Your solution is better, but the OP wasn’t asking for a better way to do it.

And if someone’s going to cloak the earth, I’d be mre worried about Christo than the Taliban. :wink:

24

[QUOTE=anson2995]
But aren’t most communications sattelites in geosynchronous orbit?
[/QUOTE]
Sure, but the OP said that LEO would do. We’d lose spy satellites, weather satellites, some phone networks and the like; enough to piss us off deeply.

25

[QUOTE=Brain Wreck]
Well, some US scientists have proposed blotting out the sun to stop global warming. cite.

Seems reasonable to enough me, not like all that gay-ass shit about cutting emissions, reducing consumption of fossil fuels, and developing alternative fuel sources.
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Even with a solar reflector method, they are only talking about stopping less than 1% of the light hitting the Earth, and cost estimates on that are in the many hundreds of billions of dollars (which is still a bargain compared to emissions cutting - it would probably cost a similar amount to replace coal fired plants with nuclear ones, just within the United States.) - so putting up enough stuff in orbit to make space travel impossible will be fiscally impossible for any plausible rogue nation.

26

[QUOTE=anson2995]
Sure, but the OP was asking specifically about “locking the Earth in a cloak of space debris.” Your solution is better, but the OP wasn’t asking for a better way to do it.

And if someone’s going to cloak the earth, I’d be mre worried about Christo than the Taliban. :wink:
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Just for clarification, I said locking humanity on Earth, not enclosing Earth. And for further clarification, what I mean is what Chronos says, just putting enough debris on LEO that putting anything there is simply too risky to be worth the try, and that it creates a chain reaction where anything there is turned into even more dangerous debris. Getting it bad enough that just traversing it becomes a high risk, that gets you bonus points.

I would think Christo is more likely to be helpful with a solution to the problem than a cause. I can imagine big floating drapes collecting all the debris and funnelling it to the atmosphere, creating an incredible light show. Right up his alley. Is he a Doper? :slight_smile:

Hitting geosynchronous orbit would be, of course, much more devastating. It would also be a lot harder, and certainly out of reach for a baddie on a budget.

27

This has been done in fiction. In Sean McMullen’s 2004 story, The Cascade, extremists blow up an orbiting “something which has a lot of sand in it”. (This seemed believeable at the time but I can’t remember what the item was now.) This action creates a cascade effect, as other orbiting items are destroyed, until space travel to-or-from earth becomes impossible. The purpose, in the story, was to strand a well-equipped Martian exploration team on Mars and compell them to remain and become colonists, since they now cannot return to Earth.

28

Can’t lasers be used to move objects slightly in space? I thought I read soemthing about some lasers used to move small objects in a zero-G environment. Am I imagining this? If so, wouldn’t it be possible to “assist” space debris in falling out of orbit by use of high powered laser arrays on high altitude planes?

29

[QUOTE=Chronos]
I think you misunderstand the problem. You don’t need to cover the entire surface of the planet; you just need to intersect every low-Earth orbit, which is much, much easier. Just put a relatively small cloud of stuff up, in a retrograde orbit: Eventually, everything else in low-Earth orbit will hit that debris cloud, at very high relative speed. Punching “one small hole” through won’t solve anything, since everything up there is always moving, and therefore won’t stay in the safe hole.
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Actually, a good image for this is a ball of yarn, with your debris field moving in orbits which vary in altitude, eccentricty, and ecliptic angle. With even a modest amount of debris in a variety of orbits you could make intersection with and damage to an unarmored satellite or vehicle in or crossing Low Earth Orbit a statistical likelyhood for any significant orbital duration. Furthermore, an initial field of debris will generate even more junk as impacts occur and formerly functional satellites are turned into orbiting fields of debris. This cascading debris effect is named the Kessler Syndrome is named after Donald Kessler of NASA/JSC, who wrote the seminal paper on this.

[QUOTE=Jurph]
It’s pretty common for countries to make MRBMs of that size road-mobile, so the “launch pad” is a truck that is 40 miles away by the time you can get anything on the original launch location. China, Russia, and (maybe not today, but definitely in the next decade) Iran have the capability to do satellite-denial with road-mobile MRBMs. I don’t think the U.S. maintains any road-mobile missiles, but we could start. :dubious:
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There are a couple of in-development ABM systems that might be able to fulfill this role, but denial of orbital space is not a race we really want to run, since we’d stand to lose the most from it. It would be most costly to the US and Europe, who hold the bulk of commercial and military satellites in orbit, but detrimental to everyone else as well. I don’t think you really need mobile capability, though; from just two or perhaps three different launch sites at various latitudes you could cover all plausible orbits in LEO.

[QUOTE=Sapo]
If they are truck launchable, I presume they are also boat launchable, that would make it somewhat easier to throw the stone and hide the hand, so to speak.
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This isn’t necessarily true; especially for a booster large enough to reach orbital space, launching from a maritime platform is significantly more difficult than launching from a road-navigatable TEL. There are a variety of problems, from stability, fueling (for a liquid booster), launch operations and environments, and establishing your exact location for navigation purposes, which are significantly different on or in the water. And it would be very difficult even for an insular nation like North Korea to field a platform capable of launching orbital boosters without being able to trace the launches back to source. (It would be essentially impossible to launch a booster without detection, and it is the mission of U.S. Strategic Command to discriminate and track launches around the globe.)

[QUOTE=Epimetheus]
Can’t lasers be used to move objects slightly in space? I thought I read soemthing about some lasers used to move small objects in a zero-G environment. Am I imagining this? If so, wouldn’t it be possible to “assist” space debris in falling out of orbit by use of high powered laser arrays on high altitude planes?
[/QUOTE]
You could possibly do this by using a high powered laser to ablate material on the “forward” end of the debris, slowing it down and causing it to fall to Earth, but this would take an enormous amount of energy (from a ground-based laser) and would possibly have detrimental effects on the upper atmosphere is used continuously. Orbital pollution is a real and intractable problem, which is why so many people are up in arms over China’s ASAT test (which, as Jurph briefly mentions, may have had an alterior motive).

The Wikipedia article on space debris has some useful information on the topic.

Stranger

30

The Taliban wouldn’t have to do anything at all ,mankind would die out in probably quite a short time .

Even if we were incredibly lucky and the statisticly soon predicted asteroid strike didn’t happen,well ! population is growing arithmetically while resources are being depleted daily , a cosmetic anti global warming /pollution campaign is going to do jack shit ! if we dont outreach in the solar system then the human race will die out ,probably pretty soon.

31

[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
Even if we were incredibly lucky and the statisticly soon predicted asteroid strike didn’t happen,well ! population is growing arithmetically while resources are being depleted daily , a cosmetic anti global warming /pollution campaign is going to do jack shit ! if we dont outreach in the solar system then the human race will die out ,probably pretty soon.
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Thomas Malthus said the same thing in 1798. He wasn’t right either. :wink:

32

Volcanic debris from Mars have been found on Earth.

Could a Terrestrial volcano toss up enough debris to trash the majority of satellites?

33

[QUOTE=Sapo]
How hard would it be to lock humanity in Earth forever under a cloak of space debris that prevents all space flight?

LEO would do, even if it lasts only a few years, it would be devastating enough for our telecomm-depending way of life, I think.

Is this a goal that the Taliban could reach? Bill Gates? China?
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One speculation I have heard about is the use of a nuclear weapon. Detonate it in orbit and the resulting radiation field fries most satellites. The field lasts for years. We know-we did it once. Back in the early 60s the US (I think) set off a bomb test in LEO altitude. The folks in charge were surprised to find that most of (fortunately very few) satellites in orbit at the time promptly failed. Newer satellites are hardened, but many would be destroyed today. Of course it would have to be done by a country with the weapon and the rocket, but there are a few such countries out there. Doesn’t take any aim. I doubt anyone would retaliate by using weapons against people, and it would be cheap (relatively). Essentially this creates a Van Allen belt at a lower altitude.

34

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Volcanic debris from Mars have been found on Earth.

Could a Terrestrial volcano toss up enough debris to trash the majority of satellites?
[/QUOTE]
The Martian meteorites are likely a result of asteroid collisions, rather than volcanic activity on Mars.
Escape velocity from Mars is 5 km/sec, vs 11.2 km/sec from Earth.
Both these numbers are in the range of detonation rates of high explosives, not steam explosions. On the other hand, your typical asteroid hits at 20 km/sec, which easily allows for blowing chunks of planetary surface to orbit and beyond.

35

[QUOTE=rbroome]
One speculation I have heard about is the use of a nuclear weapon. Detonate it in orbit and the resulting radiation field fries most satellites. The field lasts for years. We know-we did it once. Back in the early 60s the US (I think) set off a bomb test in LEO altitude. The folks in charge were surprised to find that most of (fortunately very few) satellites in orbit at the time promptly failed.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, this happened after an American test called Starfish Prime in 1963. The explosion created an artificial radiation belt that destroyed four sattelites and damaged three others.

More troubling was the effect on the ground from the electro magentic pulse. Telephone service was knocked out on the Hawaiian islands 1500 kilometers away from the test site, and there were reports of damage to radios, televisions, and street lights. The Russians had a high altitude test in October 1962 that caused even more trouble, with the pulse frying the electrical system over a large area and setting a power plant on fire.

The idea of nuclear tests igniting the atmosphere served as the premise for at least two classic sci-fi films released in 1961, before either of these events took place: “The Day the Earth Caught Fire” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.”

The unpredicatable results of these tests (17 were conducted succesfully between 1958 and 1963) and the public fears over what might happen led to the adoption of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.

36

Depending on how high up you are, only a small fraction of satellites are going to be in line of sight. And no matter how high up, it’ll only be about half of them at most.

37

[QUOTE=Chronos]
Depending on how high up you are, only a small fraction of satellites are going to be in line of sight. And no matter how high up, it’ll only be about half of them at most.
[/QUOTE]
Mmm…not necessarily. A satellite in geostationary orbit has an orbital radius of about 4210[usp]3[/sup] km, whereas the Earth’s circumference is 12.710[sup]3[/sup] km, so from geostationary orbit one satellite will could see another except in a 17.4 degree arc hidden by the Earth. This makes it visibile in approximately 95% of its potential positions with respect to our satellite. Satellites in Low Earth orbit, on the other hand (on close order of 1000km altitude), will be occluded for almost half of their orbit.

However, the nuclear test being referred to is the Starfish Prime test in 1962. The test created a man-made Van Allen belt which damaged or disabled a significant number of satellites in Low Earth orbit, and residual radiation remained for several years. While modern satellites are somewhat hardened against the effects of radiation in near-planetary space, it still does damange (hence, why satellite orbits are plotted to minimize exposure to the natural Van Allen belts), and performing multiple detonations with the focused intent of pumping the Earth’s magnetosphere with charged particles could pose a significant hazard to both satellites and manned missions.

This effect, it should be noted, is quite distinct from electromagnetic pulse in which electrons in the atmosphere are “knocked free” from atmospheric gases by the gamma ray burst, and then get trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field at an altitude of 20-50km where they spiral around ejecting large pulses of radio-frequency EM fields, which then induce currents in circuits on the surface. The idea weapon to create an artificial Van Allen belt would be one that itself generates a huge amount of charged plasma in the 1-10MeV range at an altitude and orientation that causes it to be trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field.

Stranger