War in Space
China prepares. What are we doing?
By blackhedd Posted in War — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
There is a deeply frightening report published last night in Aviation Week. China appears to have destroyed an obsolete weather satellite of theirs with a ground-based weapon.
Update: The story has now been confirmed by Administration officials and is therefore deemed fit to print. The account in the New York Times raises the specter that China will now move to force the US to accept a negotiated ban on weapons in space.
The world is beginning its long-anticipated descent from Pax Americana into balance-of-power geopolitics. Many people will see this as a hopeful move toward peace. Those of us with longer memories will not sleep as well tonight as they did last night.
Read more...
U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile.
(snip)
China's growing military space capability is one major reason the Bush Administration last year formed the nation's first new National Space Policy in ten years, Aviation Week will report.
"The policy is designed to ensure that our space capabilities are protected in a time of increasing challenges and threats," says Robert G. Joseph, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the U. S. State Dept. " This is imperative because space capabilities are vital to our national security and to our economic well being," Joseph said in an address on the new space policy at the National Press Club in Washington D. C.
Read the whole piece for more details on the alleged incident. A blogger's gloss is here.
If this pans out, it's a very serious escalation of China's military capabilities, and a clear signal that they want to be prepared for an eventual war with the US. Now note very carefully that I'm not saying China intends to go to war, or even whether they think this is likely in the future, or whether they expect us to start one someday. However, I think it's entirely fair to say that the Chinese are not comfortable with a world in which the US holds an overwhelming military edge, and they will act to contravene it.
Another question: why is the MSM ignoring this story? My guess: because it undercuts the Established Narrative™ that the world is dangerous only because we insist on being strong. If they do pick up the story, expect it to play as a call for the US to unilaterally disarm. Or else to engage the Chinese in diplomatic talks to "address the issue of a potentially destabilizing arms race in space." Aaaaaaargh!
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War in Space 12 Comments (0 topical, 12 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2007/012007/01172007/251373
They've developed an 8-megajoule railgun prototype. The planned 64-megajoule version has the potential to launch a projectile ~200 nautical miles, with a peak trajectory of 95 miles. (for comparison's sake, current navy guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy, and have an effective range of ~15 nautical miles). It would cover 200 nautical miles in 6 minutes, compared to the tomohawk's 8 minutes, at a considerably lower price tag: a tomohawk is about $1m/shot. Railgun loads have the potential to cost somewhere around $1k.
This will probably be deployed as a shipboard weapon only; it will take a lot of electrical capacity (think: nuke plant driving a steam turbine) to charge them.
Of course, without satellite data to guide it, its utility might be limited- but still, from a propeller-head perspective, it's very very cool.
"The test, if it occurred as envisioned by intelligence source, could also have left considerable space debris in an orbit used by many different satellites."
a) this would have been seen by now and
b) it is highly unlikely any nation would want to
put thousands of pieces of shrapnel in orbit that
is use by other sats or where such pieces would
decay into other active orbits.
sorry it doesnt pass the smell test, at least not
yet.
Rant Street! www.rant.st
There may be something well short of complete demolition that can disable the average communication satellite. If they can just target the satellite's center of electro-magnetic activity, that would probably do the job with out much debris. The Chinese are also very serious about building a moon base within about ten years. I've no doubt that's primarily a military project too.
There's already many thousands of pieces of shrapnel in orbit at any time. We track it and try to avoid it. The earth is pretty big, so the odds of anything getting struck in the 3 dimensional space around it are pretty tiny, even with a lot of debris in orbit. All that debris will eventually come down anyway, so it is not like it just continues to build up.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
This story makes this sort of report, a prelude to Levin's inevitable assault on the BMD program, all the more frightening.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_01-02/MissileDefense.asp
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld
that last September it was reported that China Tried To Blind U.S. Sats With Laser
"The greater danger is not that our hopes are to high and we fail to reach them; it is that they are to low and we do." Michaelangelo
It doesn't sound very impressive, technologically. The position of an orbiting satellite is known with great precision. If they can put a satellite into orbit, they can put a bomb on one, put into the same orbit, and bang.
Putting bombs into orbit isn't really necessary if you have ICBMs (which also send bombs through space). If you have a anti-satellite capability, you can do aggressive things like target the communications networks on which our economic lives completely depend. You can also take "defensive" actions that are extremely destabilizing, like disable another guy's military reconnaissance during a political crisis that may lead to war.
http://www.vought.com/heritage/products/html/asat.html
our launch platform: the F15.
Of course the super computers necessary for the complex orbital mechanics calculations were sold to China by the Clinton regime - another part of his legacy - a dark cloud that will haunt us for generations.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
poor stupid Reagan. Don't the Chinese know that this is a fantasy, don't they read and abide by the NY Times, the Concerned American Scientists, and various other wise heads.
A nod of appreciation to Bill "BJ" Clinton, a memento of his legacy come to fruition, and how are Loral's profit margins?
"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville