The thread for space cadets!

[Commodore]

It's never too early to start preparing for the inevitable onslaught of the moon Nazis

I've seen that movie...

 

[Kyriakos]

Russia already has working space weapons.
Sad!

 

[Michkov]

I don't know about the thought experiment you cited, so how about this thought experiment:

You fire a cannon from Earth with enough force for the cannon ball to leave the gravitational influence of the Earth and get into an orbit around the sun. The cannonball travels around the sun and a couple months (or years or decades or whatever) later ends up passing very close to the Earth. It enters Earth's atmosphere and ends up performing a lithobreaking maneuver, which puts it in an orbit around the Earth (with a periapsis admittedly inside the atmosphere, meaning that the orbit wouldn't last very long)

Several weeks/months later ends up at the apoapsis of its orbit around the Earth and gets a gravity assist from the Moon, altering the periapsis of the orbit and creating a stable orbit.

Ah I think I get it, I guess the problem is that eventually the gravity of the moon will alter the orbit again and you can't guarantee a stable orbit. For that you need some sort of way to alter your velocity vector without using external sources (like lithobreaking through the atmosphere or using the moon as a gravity assist/alterator).

Everything past lithobreaking isn't going to work very well in your plan. I think you may confuse it with aerobreaking where you scrub off speed going through the atmosphere hence aero. Lithobreaking on the other hand uses the surface(ie rock and stones hence litho) to break your fall a satellite isn't going to recover from that.

Plus I suppose aiming the cannon properly to make the above scenario happen might not be possible to calculate ahead of time? Plus it seems it would be a crazy powerful cannon

Correct me if any of the above is wrong or if any of my terminology is wrong. I was trying to work through this in my mind but Poland lost in the World Cup so I am not sober

Lithobreaking usually involves the ground as the medium that slows your spacecraft down, what you want is aerobreaking.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Russia already has working space weapons.
Sad!

Define weapon.

They did arm a couple of space stations with cannons and arm their astronauts to deal with bears on landing. Other than that there aren't many uses for conventional weapons in space and WMD's are banned.

 

[Lexicus]

They did arm a couple of space stations with cannons and arm their astronauts to deal with bears on landing. Other than that there aren't many uses for conventional weapons in space and WMD's are banned.

Yeah, but I'd be surprised if the US and USSR/Russia hadn't at least experimented with orbital nukes.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Yeah, but I'd be surprised if the US and USSR/Russia hadn't at least experimented with orbital nukes.

Yes, for sure the US detonated nukes in space and I believe the USSR did as well. The USSR also began development of the fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) which was a fancy way of saying they wanted to put nukes in space on standby. It's not entirely clear how far this development got as it was used as a bargaining chip and helped get the ban on WMDs in space passed. Past that point, if either country experimented with that kind of technology it was either clandestine ground testing or super-secret orbital testing that neither side ever talked about and isn't publicly known. To test in space would have been a breach of the treaty and it's a treaty both sides have been keen to enforce. I'm not sure if it would be legal to do 'dummy' tests with functional space hardware but without the actual nukes.

 

[Lexicus]

I thought that if you detonated a nuke in orbit the EMP would wipe out electronics over a large part of Earth's surface? Have I been misled by video games and science fiction media on this?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I thought that if you detonated a nuke in orbit the EMP would wipe out electronics over a large part of Earth's surface? Have I been misled by video games and science fiction media on this?

Back when they used to test these weapons (early 60's) there weren't enough of the kinds of electronics that are susceptible to EMP bursts to take everything down. The US also tended to detonate them over more remote areas. However, (IIRC) Starfish Prime did take down the electric grid in Hawaii and so polluted space with radiation that it took out a slew of satellites. Thankfully, there wasn't a huge space infrastructure like today or lots of sensitive consumer electronics so it wasn't a huge catastrophe. However, the results on the ground were bad enough that even without the various treaties the US likely would have stopped these experiments on their own and in fact this helped them push for the treaties because they knew the tests were nothing but trouble for everyone.


There is a good documentary on this stuff called Nukes In Space (narrated by Shatner) you should look up. It used to be on Netflix and is probably on Youtube as well.

But yes, science fiction tends to overstate the impact of EMP-type detonations. They are bad but detonating one in space won't take down every consumer electronic world wide. It very well could wreck most of our satellites in orbit, however. That would be a catastrophe in and of itself. But your iPhone would keep functioning if the blast wasn't within line of sight.

Edit: Pretty sure this is the documentary. It's awesome

 

[warpus]

Lithobreaking usually involves the ground as the medium that slows your spacecraft down, what you want is aerobreaking.

Right!.. ..

I mean I guess this technically could work but no one can plot this kind of trajectory over the timescales required. There are far too many big, moving pieces in the solar system for this to work.

Yeah.. but even if you could aim it precisely and plot that kind of trajectory, it seems it would be impossible to create a stable orbit, unless you used a gravity assist from a passing by comet or some other object, and those seem too small for something like that maybe

 

[Kyriakos]

 

[Commodore]

Other than that there aren't many uses for conventional weapons in space and WMD's are banned.

From what I've seen, theories regarding "practical" militarization of space would involve space stations with soldiers stationed on them that could be rapidly deployed anywhere on the planet within a few hours at most.

Of course that idea has a whole laundry list of problems that would come with it, not least of which would be dealing with the weakening of bones and muscles that occurs in those that spend long periods of time in space. Soldiers being deployed from orbit aren't going to be much use when they can barely stand once they get on the ground. You also can't rotate out the soldiers too often, otherwise the whole thing just becomes prohibitively expensive.

 

[warpus]

How many soldiers could you keep on a space station anyway? 10? 20? What could you do with a military unit like that, plant a couple trees?

Why not just keep them on the ground? Seems a lot cheaper and practical. It's not like it'd be easy to drop from orbit to some random place without anyone noticing.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Direct surface to surface launches of soldiers is a far more practical way to do this. Cheaper by orders of magnitude as well.

 

[Colon]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...-may-have-gifted-early-earth-water-180969411/

Research suggests watery planets worlds would be normal in systems where both rock planets and gas giants are present. That obviously has cool implications.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The Air Force certified the Falcon Heavy to launch their payloads and awarded them a contract for a launch in a competition between SpaceX and ULA. One by one SpaceX is cracking open the major launch markets.

 

[Imaus]

The Space Force isn't going to be, like, Space Marines or having crews of people in space for a long, long time. It mostly will take over satellite operations, spatial operations, and maybe payloads from the USAF to themselves. More like glorified radar tracker men and some engineers than anything else, along with the USAF's R&D for space stuff.

Also, the Soviets launched a Megawatt Laser in the late 80s (Polyus) along with the US launching a Neutron Particle Cannon (BEAR), both products of Star Wars.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The Space Force isn't going to be, like, Space Marines or having crews of people in space for a long, long time. It mostly will take over satellite operations, spatial operations, and maybe payloads from the USAF to themselves. More like glorified radar tracker men and some engineers than anything else, along with the USAF's R&D for space stuff.

Also, the Soviets launched a Megawatt Laser in the late 80s (Polyus) along with the US launching a Neutron Particle Cannon (BEAR), both products of Star Wars.

Yes, that's what I said the space forces would be a few replies back.

Polyus never made it to orbit. When it detached from the Energia rocket (the carrier for Buran), it did a 360 backflip and fired its engines which caused it to de-orbit itself. It was only supposed to flip 180 degrees but an inertial sensor malfunctioned.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

A while ago I complained about how Aerojet Rocketdyne (a major, old-school defense contractor) had an R&D agreement with the USAF where the company would pay for 1/3 of the cost of developing a new first-stage engine but all of sudden decided to renegotiate the contract so they would only have to pay 1/6 of the cost and this was typical contractor BS and an attempt to bilk the taxpayer.

Well they just got that new deal, plus funding for yet another engine.

Like, I fully understand that the aerospace sector is super-dependent on these kinds of contracts and overall the government should help this industry out. But this is just naked greed in my opinion and I don't know what the possible justification for this is.
http://spacenews.com/rl10-engine-added-to-air-force-agreement-with-aerojet-rocketdyne/

 

[Thorgalaeg]

They meet the higher bribery standards in the market. It is a capacity you can only achieve after many years of experience and practice.

 

[Kyriakos]

We need to contact the Chaos deities, cause their familiars on earth are already against us.