- 177comments
- 158comments
- 12comments
- 160comments
- 9comments
- 152comments
- 86comments
- 30comments
- 79comments
- 29comments
- 405comments
- 112comments
- 1comments
- 49comments
- 29comments
- —discuss
- —discuss
- 277comments
- 53comments
- 376comments
- 2comments
- 66comments
- 1comments
- 30comments
- 132comments
- 9comments
- 181comments
- 287comments
- 129comments
- 267comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Only relevant part is this:
It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.
I recommend reading the paper by Parnas about the original SDI system.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf
See also: the mass of starlink satellites over time.
Rods from God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
I thoroughly enjoyed Veritasium's video on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8
The biggest assets space weapon wise has Musk? Anything that can become a particlecloud taking out a orbit counts- so two constellation sattelites, that aim for one another should count?
As long as they're OK with China and other countries having space weapons then all is fine.
Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop.
This is fine.
You actually think they don't already?
No, of course they don't.
What would be the point? MAD relies on everyone knowing you can take them out if they attack you. What does a space weapon offer additionally that makes the huge expense worthwhile?
Are you serious? Just because you have nuclear weapons doesn't mean all other forms of military are useless. I don't even know how to parse that argument to respond in more detail.
I was responding to this comment specifically about nukes:
My bad
I think he was saying China already has weapons in space. Not necessarily nukes.
Killing opponents' satellites comes to mind.
Not every target is on the ground.
Space based weapons have been discussed as one of the ways to break MAD eg space based systems can see and stop a nuclear missile before it could land
MAD is not military doctrine and never has been. It's a philosophical concept that arose in the mid 1960s and gained column-inches in the press because it had a cool and ironic name. Even McNamara rejected it.
USA, China and Russia all plan to fight and win wars, not go out in a blaze with the other guy. And that includes 'nuclear warfighting' which involves the ability to command and control nuclear exchanges and come out the other side victorious.
I would argue that despite not being military doctrine, it has been effective. Nuclear deterence is demonstrably real. It is a form of Nash equilibrium.
I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.
Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).
The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...
Controlling the high ground has been a critical element of warfare ever since the primary weapons were spears. If you want to claim that isn't the case then the burden of proof is on you.
There have been detailed and credible claims of Chinese space weapons for some time now.
https://media.defense.gov/2020/Sep/01/2002488689/-1/-1/1/202...
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
The Nukes of Damocles
Well, that's one way to kick off a new arms race. Guess the orbital junk problem is about to get worse.
Say goodbye to satellites and space tourism for the next 200 years :(
Kessler trashes LEO and yes, "space tourism" because that means bare orbital joyrides and those would become unacceptably hazardous for a tourist attraction. But it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits, or for leaving if we, or more likely a non-human probe wanted to leave Earth's orbit.
So, no Starlink, but you'd still have COSPAS SARSAT in a reduced form, you'd still have geostationary telecoms birds, space telescopes, and various other things.
Indeed. Ace Combat 7 (a great game) already explored this. Both sides destroy each others communication satellites at nearly the same time and it creates utter chaos on the battlefield. Had one side succeeded and the other failed, it would have been game over for that side. That seems the most likely space weapon to me, though IANA military expert by any means.
GEO is one of the few orbits we could actually one-shot trash for generations. (Well, any high-altitude orbit is. But GEO is special. If a random high-altitude orbit gets trashed, you can probably do fine with a slightly-different trajectory.)
No. The reason this can't work is that "trashing" an orbit works by a long chain of random collisions which also put debris into different orbits at roughly the same altitude. The debris from a smashed StarLink for example goes into a thousand different orbits with a variety of different directions but all at a similar altitude to the StarLink and so they'll collide with other StarLinks and similar LEO birds. For LEO that works, so many of these orbits are also occupied, the cascade happens - but for GEO all of the similar orbits are empty except the one everybody uses. Orbiting Earth in exactly 24 hours but say North-South, or at 14° is fun but pointless, all of the GEO birds are in the exact same orbits because they're "hovering" over a specific point on the equator by travelling at the same speed at which that point rotates, that's the whole reason to be at that expensive altitude. So your trash almost invariably goes somewhere empty and makes little difference to anything.
I'm thinking of someone intentionally trashing an orbit. I still think ASAT is more econmical. But if you wanted to dump a bunch of sand around an adversary's GEO arc, I believe that's doable. It's not really feasible in LEO outside cartoonishly-aimless evil.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for jeff bezos' loss?
US does not want an arm race, which China eventually will win. US wants war now.
What filthy b..ds is your pentagon, cia, politicians..
It's been quietly brewing in the background for a couple years with accusations out the US about Russia and China secretly testing systems to intercept and sabotage US satellites either temporarily or destroy them permanently.
Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if its space to ground, like an orbital missile platform or something, you are technically in the clear.
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
Not that the US ever gave a shit about international treaties.
To be fair, this move is coming after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years. Which the US has highlighted many times in the past.
At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.
That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
Got some?
Sure.
https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/current-and-future-trends-ch...
https://www.swfound.org/publications-and-reports/2026-global...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2...
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4431/1
https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Annual_Report/Chapt...
I see a lot of fear-mongering reports from sources claiming authority.
I don't see any evidence.
What kind of evidence are you expecting? Detailed photographs of the satellites on orbit?
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
Russia was at least planning to launch a space-to-space laser back in 1987, but the prototype (essentially just a mass simulator, no lasers inside) failed on launch quite spectacularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
Russia also seems to have tested the release of a sub-satellite from another satellite, perhaps a precursor to a kinetic space-launched weapon.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/secretive-russian...
Neither Russia nor China's known weapons deployment is likely to breach the very narrow restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty, and the latest capability the US has vaguely claimed probably doesn't either.
In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.
The US invasion of Iraq was also based on "strong evidence" of WMDs.
Almaz had a 23mm cannon [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz_program#Defense_measures
Yes, but again that was a conventional weapon, and would have been fine under the treaty. I don't exactly condone it but it was also crap and never flew again. This video https://youtu.be/e-n_V5iEwAs goes into some of the reasons it was a particularly crap idea
Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here.
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated.
A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.
You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.
“Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people.
You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”?
Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
Good example of their point. That’s not “why”.
We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
Is your comment an example of this?
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules.
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
I might have thought about this too much.
Space is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or human habitation, but when you're just passing through, the odds of getting punctured are probably still reasonable, at least for unmanned spacecraft. Keep in mind that the ISS maneuvers out of the way when there are several miles to a potential impactor, just in case. We have all our eggs in one basket right now, so everybody is really careful with that one basket.
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P
Eh, you can do a lot better than that: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conksat_introducing-fragsat-f...
:)
It's not quite as bad as that. Space is big and hitting stuff is really hard. Your hand grenade scenario has effectively been done a few times and it (obviously) didn't make LEO unusable. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2].
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_nuclear_explosio...
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_metropo...
[2] https://berlin.cwiemeevents.com/articles/new-normal-componen...
[3] https://atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasst...
If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react? I doubt they would assume "this is probably just an EMP and not a direct nuclear strike on our territory"
If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.
We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.
While armor is indeed much harder in space, it is not impossible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
Whipple Shields are a very important part of protecting things like the ISS, but are optimized more for chance high velocity impacts with tiny bits of debris than an adversary's targeted projectile or their robotic arm grappler, or indeed non-kinetic weapons like directed energy or EMPs which is probably the capability the US intends to imply here.
You know nothing about space armor until you manage to shoot down Amarr's dreadnought in Eve Online, tyvm.
Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...
If you have a vehicle that can reach orbit, then you have an ICBM. That's why Sputnik struck such fear into Americans.
I was very confused and wondered where this was going!
Do US and Russia even give a shit about treaties.
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
What is the point of any treaty with the current US administration which does not play by international laws? Rules and laws that the USA itself spearheaded after WW2.
The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.
Exactly. Most of these things are just big world politics. Same for AI, btw. "OMG dont do this this is horrible" as the other country does it and hasn't talked about it or haven't been caught doing it.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
The US doesn't care about treaties anymore.
I think they don't fly survival guns on Soyuz anymore. But cosmonauts on ISS do keep a shank or two onboard for sure.
Funny you mention Antarctica. Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized. Some Norwegian sailors has being severely punished for sailing boats there.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
https://san.com/cc/nasa-china-wants-military-moon-base/
Really at this point between conspiracy and official realize is just matter of a year if not just a couple months now.
To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?
Oh I'm sure it will be "neutral," in the sense that all of us normal humans are potential targets in this day and age, under this leadership.
Not really possible. For example, the Soviet Union had naval radar satellites (RORSAT) in space that could directly guide missiles to specific ships.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.
This just isn’t feasible it’s like wanting the ocean to be free of weapons. Space is most of what there is, nations that want to defend themselves will have to utilize space as a war fighting domain all we can do is put that off
Sounds like it’s finally time to start blasting random satellites out of the sky.
That would likely require basically banning GPS, imaging and communication satellites too, if we get a WW3 I would be shocked if there weren't physical attacks against those assets by anyone with the requisite launch capabilities because they're just that useful to militaries. Maybe it gets relegated mostly to jamming them instead but I'd be surprised if that level of restraint happened.
There are many separate GPS systems and all the big powers know how to jam and work without them. It was one of the first tactics used in Ukraine.
Of course. But those are also limited to the areas around the jammers too. In a broader hot conflict there'd be a good reason to disrupt the opposition's GPS capabilities across the globe not just locally. It'd be pretty bad economically for many countries to lose GPS access in their homeland but difficult to achieve without a way to disrupt the satellites directly.
They're not dumb; everyone knows this. It's like the old "mutually assured destruction" image of two people standing in a pool of gasoline, each with matches at the ready.
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. There will likely be some escalation in debris and damage resulting from that might eventually result in some kind of action. But most of the damage here would be economical and sending more stuff up is now very cheap. Manned flight is relatively infrequent and aside from the space station and very short lived space tourism, most activity in space is unmanned.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.
Those are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost
I learned that within the 2 hour launch window for Artemis 2 there were many blackout periods ranging from seconds to minutes for collision avoidance.
At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.
No, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.
Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?
The blast radius from a maritime collission is (mostly) relegated to the vehicles in question [1]. The same is not true for satellite collisions.
[1] There are counterexamples, like in narrow chokes & whatnot.
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
Space is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
I wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.
That depends what you mean by "open ocean"? Vessels near ports or in defined traffic lanes frequently maneuver to avoid collisions as per the rules of the road. Outside territorial waters it's less common but still happens occasionally. Either way, those avoidance maneuvers are such routine events that no one really gathers data on them.
Debris from a collision on water won't spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds.
I agree with the principle but Russia and China absolutely already have armed satellites in orbit, so that needs to be negotiated before unilaterally stopping.
There's not really enough stuff up there to cause the kessler syndrome yet, maybe at some specific bands you could cause some annoyances... but ~75% of satellites are operating in bands that would decay into the atmosphere, fortunately it's just easier to operate in the decaying band anyway
Only works when the thing you want to make off limits isn't all that desirable in the first place.
You don't need to have weapons in orbit for the Kessler Syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
Really the whole world should be.
That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.
Space is too important and strategic for it to remain free of weapons and military presence.
Too late
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planes/comments/15fh5js/a_us_air_fo...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59299101
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
and this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_...
The outer space is already a dumpster and a disaster.
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
Ion thrusters allow satellites to stay in low orbits with significant drag, providing significant protection from Kessler syndrome.
I feel safer already. What's the worst that could happen? I'm sure no-one will put an AI anywhere near it.
Who do they want to shoot in space?
Not in space, from space.
other satellites
Isn't it easier to shoot them from the ground when they pass over? In space, the orbit must be adjusted to at least come close enough to the target, wait for the rendezvous, fire, then adjust orbit again for the next target...
I believe that attribution is more difficult in strictly on-orbit activities. I would imagine that these weaponized satellites use radar stealth approaches similar to modern fighter aircraft. AFAIK, ground radar is basically what we have for space awareness.
I would imagine that every new intelligence-related satellite will have more sensors to be situationally aware, and make attribution possible.
If you pay attention to space-nerd podcasts like MECO, "Space Domain Awareness" is getting a lot of investment. I believe that's because we are relatively blind at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_domain_awareness
Not if you want to hit your target before the other side can react and respond. Also if you expect your target to potentially shoot back, a rocket attempting to reach orbital velocity is a vulnerable target to any space based weapons or lasers because it has very limited ability to maneuver from its flight path and still reach orbital velocity.
Trump seemingly cannot resist the classic opportunity for a "1up", can he?
What's a space weapon?
I imagine launching anything from space to earth would be highly inefficient and inaccurate. So it must be space to space.
Space to space weapons are what? Small drones with an explosive charge? I guess that could work. These "combats" are going to be weird, because the objects are trapped in their orbits. Things are going to move very slowly with a lot of intertia.
Next up; America cries rivers of victimhood when Russia and China put their far more advanced space based weapons systems into orbit and 100x as many in response because the narcissistic maniacs in the “American” educated idiot class ripped the lid off Pandora’s box because Hollywood taught them that the good guy Americans always win.
China and (maybe?) Russia are putting weapons up there no matter what.
People act like had the inventors of the powder explosive gun never used it, we would still be fighting with arrows and spears today. Completely not how it works.
Isn't it ironic? Spending billions on threats from space while ignoring the person on Earth who acts like Putin's favorite unsecured login.
Semi related "Rods from God": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
So, it's a pistol on a robotic arm, or what? Kinetic weapon doesn't say much.
A pillar with a tiny engine that just incrementally increases the speed could be devastating at a distance though, I'm sure I've read this as some solution to a problem (or attempted solution to some problem) in some sci-fi book, can't remember which though.
Yeah im not sure what they are going on about, "Rods from God" and kinetic bombardment applies to things at the bottom of the gravity well getting hit from shit dropped from up above, it has nothing to do with satellite-to-satellite weapons. Like to launch up a few ton bullet of tungsten into orbit, then maneuver it in place when needed to deorbit and strike a major target, hits like a nuke but without the nuclear program.
But to me it really doesn't make more sense than using nukes though unless they are coming from another body in space, dropping shit from normal earth orbital altitudes is like throwing peanuts compared to something coming out of solar orbit, and actually hitting your target is 10,000x harder. And anyone with a space program large enough to put such weapons in place could more easily produce nukes instead.
Technically the US has had 'space weapons' for many decades, due to how an intercontinental ballistic missile works.
Incidentally, the Shuttle raised concerns in the USSR because they saw those large cargo bay doors and rocket thrusters out back, to think that this was a 'delivery system'.
In the modern battlefield, 'hypersonic' missiles are the new shiny. However, any ICBM is 'hypersonic', at least during the space phase. The new meaning of hypersonic means going at 'hypersonic' speeds through the atmosphere and in the final approach. Force equals mass times acceleration, more speed means more deceleration, which means packing a bigger kinetic punch.
Depending on how you want to define “weapon” the actual offensive capability of the shuttle may qualify. It was designed to be able to capture satellites and return them to Earth.
We have no evidence that this capability was ever used offensively though.
Sort of related: The Shuttle was designed for military use, but mainly regarding launching and capturing spy satellites. From a NASA report on the Space Shuttle's history ( https://www.nasa.gov/history/sts1/pages/scota.html ):
The Air Force was working on a Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB in California, but after the Challenger disaster they decided that the Shuttle wasn't reliable enough and opted to instead use traditional disposable rockets to launch spy satellites.
Rather interesting timing after the US accused China of supplying Iran with high-res imagery used to support attacks on US bases, then a Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart
Yaogan-50 for anyone asking.
Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so
As an aside - the word conspiratorial has become polluted.
If you accept the premise that governments and their military and intelligence agencies aren’t 100% transparent, which is true, then the above comment is simply speculative.
A major provocation? "Oh, you deny using your satellites to supply them with imaging? All right, then it wasn't us who blew up your spy satellite that wasn't supplying imaging."
That is, China's in a bit of an awkward position to complain very much.
Problems start when their complaints take the form of using their own deniable capability against U.S. satellites.
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
So, what solution do you have in mind, if China supplies military support to an adversary? Politely ask them to stop? Let them continue? Seems not so trivial to me, especially since everyone has satellites up there for this purpose, and there's a good chance China would do the same.
Politely ask them to stop seems like a great idea to try first before you actively attack a space capable nuclear superpower!
China is not Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela or some other third world country that the US has fought in over the past few decades. You can't just destroy one of their satellites for free. And I can bet the US didn't do it, because that would be a major escalation, especially now that Xi is coming to the US and there are rumors that the US wants a deal.
So it broke apart by itself?
"The European Space Agency estimates that there have been more than 660 explosions, collisions, or anomalous events resulting in fragmentation. As it stands, there are currently more than 1.5 million space debris objects in Earth orbit.
It’s not clear what may have caused the Yaogan-50 (02) satellite to break apart, but it may have been a propulsion or battery failure, or it may have itself collided with another object or space debris."
I thought the Russians were supplying them with HiRes imagery. I've not heard of any Russian optical or radar satellite breaking up.
Wouldn't it be possible to confirm who may be supplying imagery by taking some IRGC supplied imagery such as [1] and figure out which satellite(s) were overhead at the time and capable of taking the image? It may not be particularly straightforward to do so--but seems theoretically possible with:
- Consideration of time-of-day/azimuth of overhead satellite based on shadows and perspective.
- Comparison to other imagery of the same location checking for portable objects (such as vehicles) and keeping track of when they appear and disappear, and whether they're present in the imagery being analysed.
- Consideration of cloud coverage and weather conditions to rule out unwanted satellite passes.
Then write up a report and publish it, making it a believable and concrete finding instead of a finding that otherwise may just be perceived to be speculation/vibes.
[1] https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-jordan-strike-at-u-s-aircraf...
That's exactly how it was revealed that a high quality image intentionally leaked by Trump came from a satellite and not an overhead plane.
Press article: https://www.livescience.com/secret-classified-satellite-trum...
Blog write up: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/09/image-from-trump-tw...
It's really not interesting at all. The US Destroyed that satellite to stop that information flow.
Because, of course, P47 has to be the first, do the thing that’s obscene. Grrr.
the idea that the orange infant can order the use of weapons in space should be terrifying to everyone regardless of politics
no-one is stupid enough anymore to say "oh he would never"
or "only against people we don't like"
No, of course he would use it against Canada or Greenland if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed or didn't sleep at all
He clearly has rage fits which is one of the early signs of dementia
He would most definitely order the use of space weapons
I am really surprised he has not nuked some part of Iran yet, innocent civilians be damned but there are still 800 days left so here's hoping we don't wake up to that headline
How is this smart? US was already able to strike any place on the globe, what happens if this motivates the US enemies also have weapons in space and then US mainland becomes strike-able.
What was the thing that the US military previously couldn't blow up? The enemy now can have giant piece of hard metal in orbit and blow up previously %100 out of range data centers for example.
Very unwise action on US part.
You thought we had a whole Space Force without any Forces?
Well, let's hope that these forces are going to get better outcomes than the forces that fought in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran.
It's so ridiculous to elevate the war zone when you were far away and out of reach currently. US is so target rich that I will be very surprised if US enemies leave those alone once US paved the way to the new frontiers.
I always find it funny here, how out of all the targets "the enemy" could hit, HN-er is afraid they'll hit the datacenters :)
You don't need space weapons to hit datacenters, you need one van full of explosives and someone willing to die to deliver it to a datacenter.
To temporarily disable them, you just need a cheap drone with some explosives.
Finding someone who is both willing and able to deliver explosives to a datacenter wouldn't be easy, the last stime something like that happen is 9/11. Throwing large masses on the other hand is not so hard as countries like Iran already have missile building capacity and are partners with actual space capable Russia.
Also, the super expensive data centers are great targets, probably much better targets than US can hit in Iran for example. What happens if those Nvidia chips that are churning the economy start to getting blown up by carefully de-orbited stones?
There were suspicious rednecks shooting out power stations a couple years ago.
The FBI routinely finds mentally ill people to convince/encourage/fund a terrorist attack and arrest them after they purchase materials with FBI money and call it a sting.
I don't think it's nearly as hard to find someone as you think.
Hit enough transformers and it will be a very long temporary.
"Space weapons" here most likely means some combination of anti-satellite weapons and electronic warfare such as GPS jammers. AFAIK it's been widely believed that the USSR/Russia has had these capabilities in orbit since the 80s. I'd be willing to bet that the US has had them for decades as well, it just hasn't been publicly acknowledged.
For some reason they did not provide any details beyond that they have kinetic and non-kinetic means. Kinetik indeed can mean just ability to blow up satellites but IMHO it is good enough to trigger an arms race.
The arms race was always happening. Russia put a weapon on a space asset decades ago, basically for shits and giggles, but was recently practicing a space asset maneuvering and deploying a smaller asset, and there's very little justification for such a system other than "Attack another satellite", especially since no public cover has been offered.
Both Russia and China have demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Ages ago.
Space being not militarized was always a fiction. Space was militarized first and foremost, and everything NASA ever did was to encourage and help that goal. This has only gotten dramatically less symbolic and more actually meaningful since recent massive advances in space sensor platforms and scale.
This is only a change in public messaging unfortunately.
This was always the inevitable outcome, because there's no "Bigger fish" to make independent nations follow any rule other than the rule of the jungle, and space is the highest ground.
More unwise is doing nothing and letting adversaries have it.
The same logic that has spent decades providing us with poorly planned preemptive attacks and an ever-growing military budget. Meanwhile, the quality-of-life for the citizens who pay for it continues to decline.
Cmon folks. What is happening over there? Can anyone tell me? Is it the plastic in water or something?
It would not surprise me at all if the Trump administration is the one to bring Kessler's nightmare to fruition.
Might be a good thing for humanity if we all get stuck here, and have to figure out how to get along or die trying...
Bunch of idiots with space weapons. Great!
In the great power struggle there can be no safe havens. All the world's a stage. And the sky too.
Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.
If we get to try and explain these times in like 30 years to our (grand-)children, I'm sure it will be with a great sense of embarrasment.
I hope one of these days we can get our priorities straight.
Do you feel any embarassment coming from the previous generation, which set the stage for what we have now? I think it will be much of the same.
All the time. Politically speaking the past is quite embarrassing.
in the west older generations hold much more power over who gets elected, demographically speaking, and look at what's going on. They feel no shame whatsoever and are doubling down.
I feel resentment and contempt to every previous generation of humans and embarassment for my generation for sure
Every human on earth should be embarrassed at the state of the anthropocentric world
Prehistoric humans get a pass in my book. They seemed to have a cozy life.
I'm proud of our long and amazing climb upwards, from brutality to technological civilization.
Thanks to all our forefathers that have passed their gifts onwards.
analog brutality, that thing of the past. much better now with technological brutality
No their heads are in the sand as they exit the stage. Pathetic.
Sometimes. Depends who you ask. Some boomers are in glorious denial. Many are still in bloody office. The ones I’ve heard opine about embarrassment and failure are mostly those that’ve been trended towards fight-the-power for their adult lives.
Hopefully our grand children are alive to hear that explanation.
I think most of the powerful countries in the world already have space weapons. Space exploration is just a facade for this.
Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.
From a certain point of view ICBMs are a method of communicating.
Trajectorial calligraphy is a subject in some schools where individuals who like to communicate unconventionally study.
I'd wager starlink is mostly military with the cover of civilian use case.
search "Declassify Elon Musk's space-based weapons program before Biden leaves the White House"
There's the program called Starshield, that's part of the miltech side of the program. One of the military uses is using the starlink constellation signals as a passive SAR for the whole planet with millimeter scale accuracy.
I suspect this isn't true in any meaningful way, and relates to Trump's people deceiving him. Seems 100X more likely that Trump said "what kind of weapons does space force have?" and they had to come up with something, rather than a clandestine space weapons program being successfully developed and deployed.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706451
Behold, the real bull case for SpaceX: not space-based datacenters, colonizing Mars, or asteroid mining, but the thorough militarization of Earth's orbit by the US.
Nice we can finally get rid of those pesky starlink satellites that have ruined astronomy!
Nothing to worry about, General Turgidson said it was just made in order to prevent a space gap.
Guess someone finally pushed that 'deploy to production' button on orbital defense. Always assumed this was already live for years.
Why spend money on healthcare when you can spend it on being able to annihilate any country on earth?
America spends more % of its GDP than France on healthcare.
For the most expensive population to insure (old people) in a much more inefficient manor (private coverage via medicare advantage).
At this point I would take filled potholes.
Even worse, Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are.
Cool, we have a weapon in space that cost $1B and 6 months to re-arm. That's not super helpful when who we are fighting is flying $20k lawnmower powered drones to take out all our bases in the region.
We are basically the modern version of the Spanish Armada.
Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.
Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters.
To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.
There is no "genocide," it's just war. And believe it or not, Israel is showing restraint. If it's enemies had anywhere close to its military capabilities, Israel would be a nuclear wasteland by now.
We’re in September 2026 now. The number of average daily deaths in Gaza this year so far has been about 3. Mostly highly targeted drone strikes of Hamas and Jihad combatants on their bikes and cars.
Even according to the UN there’s currently no famine anywhere in Gaza, as enough food is going in.
The situation may be dire, as Hamas is still refusing to lay down arms, so that Gazans can start rebuilding, but for you to claim there’s a genocide currently actively ongoing shows a level of disingenuity and total detachment of reality, which sheds light on the illegitimacy of all your other claims.
I guess propaganda slogans have no expiration date.
I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them.
US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations.
But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
I'm sorry but that's absolutely incorrect. The USA has literally zero control when it comes to Iran.
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land.
Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s.
America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will.
Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale.
The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed.
If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs.
Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day.
And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that
TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHave...
Could ask Japan how that math changed - and that was with technology from 1944.
A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world?
Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations?
Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games
fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational
also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm
- Confirm openly that space weapons have been deployed.
- Open the floodgates to the open militarisation of space by all possible nation states.
- In response, justify huge increases in space defense spending budget
- Rinse / repeat to kingdom come. Same as it's always been.
Someone's getting a nice fat bonus, cigar and a blowjob tonight.
C.J. Cherryh has a memorable quote on this in her _Downbelow Station_.
One of my favorite SF books.
I feel that applies more to Russia's space program--some cosmonauts (not all, of course) support Putin's war.
Man I imagine within the first few minutes of a hot war LEO and geostationary would just light up with assets pointed at one another. I know we will have bigger problems at that point in time but I hope we are at least trying to developed weaponry that doesn't Kessler-ify all of space for the next thousand years.
How long until the CEO of Lockheed Martin comes out asking for a ban on space weapons?
Maybe they'll ask for a "slower pace of development" so it doesn't look as much like they're just asking for new regulatory barriers on their competition.
… i thought international treaties explicitly say no space weapons. ughhhh fucking wh
Laws are for the little people, obviously.
And you think America cares about treaties?
Historically it did, so long as the politically privileged class of USians were among the folks that would be advantaged by those treaties.
Anti-nuke proliferation and CFC restriction treaties worked.
Treaties with native populations were ignored and violated whenever convenient; now they get occasional acknowledgement in speeches but no actual change or action.
I would’ve put space weaponry in the first category.
FTA it says the treaty covers "weapons of mass destruction". But historically (at least prior to the 2000's), there was an unspoken rule of not weaponizing space. I think that's changed in the last ~20 years and recall covered of China sending kinetic weapons into space.
The Soviet Union placed a 23mm autocannon in orbit as part of Salyut 3, a manned space station launched in June 1974:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
Hard to be certain due to Cold War secrecy, but the consensus seems to be that they conducted several test-firings before the station was finally deorbited.
using a 23mm auto cannon on orbit is more or less useless. There’s no way to reasonably shoot something when your relative velocities could easily be strictly greater than the bullets. Even if something is coming straight towards you it’s very difficult to aim when you have to take into account orbital mechanics. You would need a huge amount of RCS fuel in order to counteract the impulse from the gun. And even if you did shoot the gun if you miss, you now have a bunch of bullets that share your orbit and will at some point intercept your flight path again, if you don’t miss, you still have shrapnel sharing your orbital path.
The boom in private space companies all vying for USG cash was the initial indicator this was happening. The amount of mass sent to orbit so far for USRO and USSF has been huge. And it's not going to let up.
I expect "rods from god" to be used any time now.
It’s paywalled. Is anyone reading it before replying here?
It's not paywalled - it's the BBC. But maybe try CNN's version: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/15/us/us-space-force-weapons-cap...
I have been getting occasional paywalls from the BBC asking to pay to read articles. Clearing cookies does remove the paywall for a while so I think it's some sort of A/B test they're running.
Wasn't it always known? I thought Trump had said it in his 1st term. Cant find the article thought
It's Golden Dome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Feels like I struggle to wake up to a good news since a decade.
Wonder about this aspect:
https://panda.substack.com/p/salvage-fuzing-and-co-orbital-n...
With how much money we spend on the DOD and MIC it would be disappointing if we didn't have multiple arrays of space weapons and weather modification.
I have a feeling every major nuclear power probably does at this point. Russia definitely has global GPS jamming capabilities in orbit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz23G_UXCGA
Reagan and Gorbachev came within inches of abolishing nuclear weapons, but the sticking point was the US would not back away from building space weapons. As long as warmongers are in control we will continue to live in danger and fear.
Can you expand on your solution to world peace?
I think it's generally acceptable to make a statement without proposing a solution.
You need to get a critical mass of people to despise war so much that they are ready to have disadvantages themselves to make a war free world a reality. E.g. complete stop of trade with countries starting a war or supporting such a country.
It happened before relatively successful with slavery and is partially happening with the death penalty. For me it seems like a very long way to go though.
So, you're saying that this requires all people of the world get along and agree with anything that might cause war? That sounds like a reasonable plan! Thanks for the response.
Or a post resource scarcity society where everyone's rich enough to be able to make ethical decisions with very little actual cost.
I mean in hindsight there's no way israel or china would have disarmed.
Gorbachev's dead now and look who sits in his place. I'm not so sure such a treaty would still be respected anyway. As as for who sits in Reagan's place...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
All you need to know about making deals with Russia.
Yeah, Ukraine should have held onto its nukes. But it got a lovely piece of paper to protect itself with.
The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.
The capabilities of the "space weapons" didn't exist. Reagan used the threat of those weapons to perpetuate USSR's unsustainable military & defense investment, knowing the US could sustain it. Within 5 years, USSR was defunct.
Reagan had the right strategy , for his time.
It's most likely space-based missile defense, perhaps DOD secretly revived the Brilliant Pebbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) program?
People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.
Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.
The more practical approach appears to be fully on-orbit activities, as those are currently far harder to attribute. The field of "Space Domain Awareness" is still nascent and rapidly evolving.
See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711876
It probably felt really hard decades ago. But we are already well into the era where you can target a particular seat of a car driving on a highway with a nonexplosive kinetic weapon.
That doesn't mean you can hit it too. The only case which I remember was well documented was for a turret gun "controlled by satellite" hit the passenger of a standing vehicle from the back of a truck in front of it (nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in Tehran in 2020 while his wife, sitting immediately beside him, was unharmed). Also those reports were pretty questionable at the time, there were multiple competing narratives, and I'm not sure the satellite gun story was ever independently verified.
Sounds like the plot taken from For All Mankind
When are we getting sharks with laser beams?
We opted for training sea lions instead to defend our submarine bases
Wasn't the shuttle originally planned to be a weapon as well, capable of intercepting and sabotaging satellites using its loading bay workshop? There are also the various "mini shuttles" the three letter agencies fly around the earth for several hundred day stints of doing who knows what exactly with who knows what capabilities (other than having a similar sabotage potential as the original shuttle perhaps).
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
As far as I know, a major issue with NASA space programs such as the shuttle was that each group held its own requirements. So, most likely the DoD had some additional demands.
The SIR-C/X-SAR was launched in the Shuttle Bay and used to map the entire surface of The Earth. Some would call that a munition. This article, following that event IS the confirmation.
I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.
Ya, that's a hilarious comment from the Chinese after they have literally tested their own anti-satellite weapons. But then their diplomats have never been short of chutzpah.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/chinas-anti-satellite-test
You think the US doesn’t have similar things?
the commenter never implied that they don't
but anyone familiar with how China positions itself knows that they always say things like: "our space stuff is 100% peaceful we dont have any military stuff there, the imperialist West is lying! we are never aggressive, we are only peaceful and defensive"
and when someone else does something they always urge them to act according to international law and to not escalate
How many wars has China started in the last century?
What a weird comment. I never claimed the USA doesn't have similar things. It's an arms race.
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4198/1
And the US complained about it then, so what’s your point in calling China’s complaint here chutzpah while leaving the US out?
In human terms, there is a spectrum between knowing where to buy a firearm, owning a firearm, and pointing a gun at your head.
Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.
Weapons in space is like putting nukes and missiles in international waters 12 miles from coast of all other countries, to reduce strike time.
First country to admit putting weapons in space.
The distinction of first (known) deployments of orbital kinetic weapons belongs to the Soviet Union. In 1968, they tested an anti-satellite system by intercepting a target satellite with a interceptor satellite and detonating it (Kosmos-249/Kosmos-252).
Later, in the 1970's, the Soviets deployed and test fired Rikhter R-23 23mm revolver cannons from Salyut military space stations.
So what is it, just kill sats, or something more interesting like rods-from-god, briliant pebbles, orbit to ground laser cannon or somethong else entirely ? Inquiring minds want to know! :-)
I've assumed that they put weapons on satellites as soon as it was possible.
Relevant:
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 1999–2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060831035044/http://www.de.afr...
- USAF Directed Energy Directorate home page during the years 2009–2016: https://web.archive.org/web/20160428181404/http://www.kirtla...
- LASER Effects Test Facility fact sheet from 2002 showing a 50-kilowatt CO² LASER setting a test target on fire: https://web.archive.org/web/20070315131556/http://www.de.afr...