US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons (bbc.com)

482 pointsby harporoeder7 days ago372 comments

jonkoops 6 days ago

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

voidUpdate 6 days ago

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

pwdisswordfishq 6 days ago

Not that the US ever gave a shit about international treaties.

_djo_ 6 days ago

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.

aa-jv 6 days ago

>fairly strong evidence

Got some?

_djo_ 6 days ago

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...

aa-jv 6 days ago

I see a lot of fear-mongering reports from sources claiming authority.

I don't see any evidence.

_djo_ 6 days ago

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.

aa-jv 6 days ago

I'd like to see evidence which supports the claims and not have to rely on a call to authority fallacy[1] in order to agree with this collective-derived reality.

I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.

None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.

Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

voidUpdate 6 days ago

What evidence would satisfy you that there are weapons in space? You either have to check yourself somehow, or trust a third party. Is there a third party you trust to provide evidence?

aa-jv 6 days ago

The article from The Space Review comes pretty close to providing some actual evidence.

There are no trustworthy third parties when it comes to xenophobic agitprop.

voidUpdate 6 days ago

What extra would you want from the space review article that would constitute actual evidence for you?

gowld 6 days ago

Space Review website has malware-download ads all over the page. That spooks me.

scottyah 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82

etiennebausson 6 days ago

I personally don't trust elements provided by U.S. agencies and foundations since the Irak war and the "proof" they delivered to justify it.

Proxy at work is stopping me from reading most of grandparent links, so it'll have to wait for home.

hunterpayne 5 days ago

The Chinese themselves blew up one of their own satellites as a test of their own capabilities. The missile was launched from the ground but targeted from orbit. They themselves say this and have since they did it 8 years ago. Your ignorance isn't an argument.

mc32 6 days ago

It’s like they’ll believe any rumors about the US doing things but then need concrete evidence irrefutable evidence when it comes to its adversaries.

voidUpdate 6 days ago

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)

_djo_ 6 days ago

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...

notahacker 6 days ago

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.

sesteel 6 days ago

Your comment on Russia and China is false.

hunterpayne 5 days ago

The Chinese have been bragging about taking out one of their own satellites in a test of their capabilities for 8 years now. Russia would but they don't have the money to even try.

This place is no better than X...seriously...it is just too small for the propaganda operations to target and yet it is still just as bad. I don't even think it is HN's fault, just the skew of the population HN attracts.

notahacker 5 days ago

yawns

Not even sure who I'm supposed to be propagandising for here, but as the person that actually works on European dual use satellite tech I can assure you it's well established fact that all superpowers have taken out their own satellites with ASAT weaponry (Russia more recently than China fwiw, though China's in-space capabilities are likely a lot better). None of those are a violation of the very narrow anti-WMD proscriptions in the Outer Space Treaty, and whatever counterspace capability the US is vaguely announcing here (or indeed the capability they and their adversaries have had for years) is unlikely to be either.

PorciiVorbesc 6 days ago

>after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years.

The US invasion of Iraq was also based on "strong evidence" of WMDs.

rjsw 6 days ago

Almaz had a 23mm cannon [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz_program#Defense_measures

voidUpdate 6 days ago

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

notahacker 6 days ago

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...

spwa4 6 days ago

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.

zenbane 6 days ago

This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.

Forgeties79 6 days ago

You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.

brookst 6 days ago

“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.

Forgeties79 6 days ago

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?

ang_cire 6 days ago

I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values".

Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.

Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.

Forgeties79 5 days ago

The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok.

Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.”

Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO

willy_k 6 days ago

Good example of their point. That’s not “why”.

smackeyacky 6 days ago

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.

victorbjorklund 6 days ago

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).

somenameforme 6 days ago

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.

feoren 6 days ago

> Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?

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.

> I think it's something similar with China

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.

> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it

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.

> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber

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?

> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging

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.

> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.

Is your comment an example of this?

mapt 6 days ago

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.

lr1970 6 days ago

> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules.

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.

onion2k 6 days ago

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.

Fwirt 6 days ago

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.

onion2k 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there

Math doesn't math.

The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.

I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

Then why are they making so much fuss about (tracked) small things drifting by, violating the "safety box" around a satellite or station?

mapt 5 days ago

LEO is relatively simple to destroy simply because it's already so populated with mass, and that population is growing rapidly, and because they all come pretty close to crossing each other's orbits. Collisions with even very small pieces of debris typically generate secondary debris, growing the population.

A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.

lenkite 4 days ago

Low earth orbit isn't that much space though right ? It is effectively a stack of practical orbital shells. A rogue nation state can make satellite launches financially unfeasible.

x______________ 6 days ago

> you need to launch a rocket full of sand

You want an accretion disc around the planet like Saturn?

toast0 6 days ago

> But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.

It's usually much easier to steer an outgoing projectile. :P

waste_monk 6 days ago

>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

Eh, you can do a lot better than that: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/conksat_introducing-fragsat-f...

wat10000 6 days ago

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.

mschuster91 6 days ago

> 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.

wongarsu 6 days ago

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...

mschuster91 6 days ago

> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states

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...

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?

Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?

mschuster91 5 days ago

Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs.

Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.

Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

You know that most of the chickens we have won't make it for long, outside?¹ Because they are all highly 'optimized' breeds? Even coming with a handbook for that breed, several hundred pages long. Defining exactly what to feed when in which amounts and intervals, but also temperature and lighting. Where again does one get that stuff, when everything is chaos? Could more normal, robust ones be bred and distributed fast enough to compensate? In the required amounts?

¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.

wat10000 5 days ago

I doubt farmers have enough spare pre-electronics equipment sitting around to run the entire farm at the same scale. I'm sure they could improvise a way to continue farming, but output would be substantially impacted.

Humanity managed to do fine for millennia by existing in a state of frequent malnutrition and a not insignificant number of deaths from starvation. And it was never in a world with the population density we have today.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

Depends? Think southern part of the United Kingdom with London and some harbours, Belgium, Netherlands, German Rhine-Ruhr Area. All with one 'stone'. Use some more stones for other large agglomerations, like Frankfurt am Main, Paris. While were at it: Hamburg+Denmark+southern Sweden. Moscow, St.Petersburg. Greater Los Angeles would be as bad. Silicon Valley/Bay Area. As would be anything around NYC/Washington DC/Philly/Baltimore. Seattle+Vancouver? Great Lakes? Any Chinese megacity? India? All of this wouldn't need that much nukes.

All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, but many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.

I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.

ctkhn 6 days ago

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"

wat10000 6 days ago

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.

freebsd_lovefes 6 days ago

Plot twist - someone has already thought about this and took measures of unimaginable scale...so that, no one, ever, wipes out, humanity, with nukes.

Dylan16807 6 days ago

Can you do better than "measures"

ben_w 5 days ago

Yes. I assume this is why there's a treaty against stationing the weapons in orbit or on the moon etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react?

We'd bitch and moan and then carry on as usual. Nobody is starting thermonuclear war over fried birds. Maybe someone gets tariffed.

jdougan 6 days ago

The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.

mapt a day ago

Nagasaki and Hiroshima are thriving cities.

<1000km LEO would take a hundred generations to resume operations.

The collision you note, along with another couple that have occurred, dramatically increased overall trackable debris counts, by thousands, when we only had a few thousand satellites and under a hundred thousand debris items. Secondary collisions were much less of an issue than they are now, and they are now much less of an issue than they will be in five years per current plans.

Also, ball bearings or the military equivalent tungsten BB's, are prefigured for maximum lifespan and maximum distribution, as well as being untrackable from day 1.

gorgoiler 6 days ago

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.

notahacker 6 days ago

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.

freebsd_lovefes 6 days ago

You know nothing about space armor until you manage to shoot down Amarr's dreadnought in Eve Online, tyvm.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

New development in sight: https://phys.org/news/2026-09-eggshells-aluminum-material-si...

mapt 5 days ago

They're great for a 20mm x 5mm x 0.3mm fleck of paint or vacuum insulation weighing 30mg, not so much for a 10mm hex nut weighing 11g.

Armor can protect you against the smallest debris which post the least risk and decay the fastest. Everything else, not so much.

A question for you though - does that insulation vaporizing itself inside a whipple shield generate secondary debris comprised of the whipple shield and condensed aluminum droplets??

trhway 6 days ago

You fire a radar guided powerful laser pulse at the incoming object causing small surface ablation , intentionally a bit to the side, which will serve as a small reaction mass eject altering the trajectory of that incoming object.

mapt a day ago

This is not what people think it is. It isn't a delta V or a distance solution - we simply aren't that precise unfortunately. The relative velocities are enormous, the inverse square law distances (lasers are not perfectly collimated, just highly collimated) and opportunity for reflections unacceptable. You do this after you've pulled alongside the object via SEP and ion thrusters, and you sit there ablating the surface with your lightweight pulsed laser from a few hundred meters away in formation, for weeks/months. That saves you chemical propellant proportional to the task, and it saves you enormous mass and complexity in grappling, derotating, and otherwise securing an uncooperative rotating body.

kragen 6 days ago

This is not correct, and the experiment has been done a number of times with no real effect, most memorably in 01961, when Project West Ford put 480 million copper needles in 3500-km-high medium Earth orbit (MEO); but it's a little bit challenging to understand why.

The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.

That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.

It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.

The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.

The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.

None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.

The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.

antonvs 6 days ago

The wires in Project West Ford weighed something like 40 micrograms, with a diameter in the low tens of micrometers. They don’t really fit the criteria of what’s being discussed here - they would not do significant damage to other satellites, and while they could reenter the atmosphere and hit a person, you probably wouldn’t even feel it.

antonvs 6 days ago

…and for those unfamiliar with this fun project, the idea was to provide a radio relay system that wasn’t easily disabled by an enemy. This was before communications satellites were common.

pennomi 6 days ago

Wouldn’t any needles launched prograde be put into a higher stable (though obviously elliptical) orbit?

kragen 5 days ago

To set the scenario, we're talking about the orbits which ball bearings would end up in if you had a cardboard box full of ball bearings in a stable, circular low Earth orbit, and you set off an explosive in the middle of the box to scatter the bearings. You're wondering if the ball bearings that the explosive happened to launch prograde would end up in a stable elliptical orbit with a higher apogee rather than re-entering the atmosphere.

I'm not that strong on orbital dynamics, but I think the answer is that you're right. The ball bearings launched directly prograde would be in a new stable elliptical orbit with the perigee at the explosion point. That means I was wrong about the debris only affecting the orbital altitude where the explosion happened. But most of the ball bearings would still re-enter the sensible atmosphere within a single orbit.

The Δv required to deorbit from LEO is surprisingly small. In https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-... we find that deorbiting the International Space Station to a controllable place in "a remote area in the ocean" from its current 415 km altitude requires only 57m/s of Δv. The more precisely controlled Space Shuttle re-entry used 90m/s of Δv: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/calculating-.... It seems crazy that a change in orbital speed of only 1% would be enough, but there it is. There's a lot of explanation in that SE question.

The ISS document also explains that even the enormous ISS will deorbit by itself in "roughly one-to-two years without reboosts", which is why most LEO satellites are in somewhat higher orbits.

elnerd 6 days ago

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...

Tangurena2 6 days ago

If you have a vehicle that can reach orbit, then you have an ICBM. That's why Sputnik struck such fear into Americans.

KellyCriterion 5 days ago

Not completely:

- "if you have a vehicle that can reach orbit and it has re-entry capacities to stear it to the point you want it", then you have an ICBM

:-)

tete 4 days ago

> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon

Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people.

Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.

exe34 6 days ago

> used for defending yourself against wild animals

> in the event that you land in a forest or similar.

I was very confused and wondered where this was going!

nojvek 6 days ago

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.

ak39 6 days ago

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.

nickff 6 days ago

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.

zobzu 6 days ago

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.

SG- 6 days ago

The US doesn't care about treaties anymore.

varjag 6 days ago

I think they don't fly survival guns on Soyuz anymore. But cosmonauts on ISS do keep a shank or two onboard for sure.

tastyfreeze 6 days ago

I have little doubt that the OST was circumvented by definitional tricks. That is how the game of treaties and power is played. Something like rods from God or a conventional bomb orbiting platform wouldn't be considered a WMD but most certainly are the types of weapons common folk would think the OST forbids.

I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.

pseudohadamard 5 days ago

>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

Not to mention the 23mm cannon on Salyut 3, in case you needed to take out the wild animals from orbit.

reptileIllumina 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized

To what end? Seriously. Maybe submarine listening devices on the seabed?

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 6 days ago

No one expects the Antarctic Inquisition

damnesian 6 days ago

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.

preisschild 6 days ago

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.

verelo 6 days ago

> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica.

Cute, Antarctica is just future beachfront...give it time.

edgyquant 6 days ago

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

iAMkenough 6 days ago

Sounds like it’s finally time to start blasting random satellites out of the sky.

rtkwe 6 days ago

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.

scottyah 6 days ago

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.

rtkwe 6 days ago

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.

imglorp 6 days ago

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.

jillesvangurp 6 days ago

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.

hajile 6 days ago

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.

jillesvangurp 6 days ago

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

hydrogen7800 6 days ago

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.

throwitaway222 6 days ago

At some point they need to remove all the objects that can't do 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers per day.

nomel 6 days ago

No, they do not actually, because they fall out of orbit in ~5 years, since they're in the lower part of the thermosphere.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day

Genuine question: how many avoidance maneouvres does maritime traffic execute in the open ocean?

beambot 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> same is not true for satellite collisions

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.

eks391 6 days ago

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.

throwitaway222 6 days ago

I wonder how many collision avoidance maneuvers are performed every day by human drivers. It must be in the trillions.

hajile 6 days ago

Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars.

Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).

nradov 6 days ago

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.

moffkalast 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 5 days ago

> 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

This isn't how debris clouds work. The most-complex ones occur when entirely separate orbits collide were you get an X-shaped (versus cylndricla or conic) debris cloud. But the energies of the collision inputs sharply curtail the orbits and places in said orbits the debris fragments can generally reach.

moffkalast 5 days ago

Idk, Iridium-Cosmos debris are still absolutely everywhere [0] after almost 20 years. The only place a ship collision's gonna leave debris is directly under it.

[0] https://ajmas.github.io/StuffInSpace

4gotunameagain 5 days ago

> The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US.

Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.

Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.

bpodgursky 6 days ago

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.

micromacrofoot 6 days ago

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

mikeweiss 6 days ago

Only works when the thing you want to make off limits isn't all that desirable in the first place.

gadders 6 days ago

You don't need to have weapons in orbit for the Kessler Syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

bilsbie 6 days ago

Really the whole world should be.

GiorgioG 6 days ago

> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica.

That's cute that you think that. The reality is you can't do less than your adversaries may/will/are doing.

mytailorisrich 6 days ago

Space is too important and strategic for it to remain free of weapons and military presence.

surfingdino 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica

"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].

> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect

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...

KludgeShySir 5 days ago

"generationally fuck" - Oxford English Dictionary's phrase of the decade

Retric 6 days ago

Ion thrusters allow satellites to stay in low orbits with significant drag, providing significant protection from Kessler syndrome.

BurningFrog 6 days ago

Unless you can enforce a weapons ban, "should be a neutral ground" means absolutely nothing.

Everyone would launch weapons while they deny it, because that is the rational and responsible thing to do.

sesteel 6 days ago

We do things in response to the actions of others; I'll leave it there.

snvzz 6 days ago

Regulations are only as strong as the power to enforce them.

andai 6 days ago

>"We urge the US side to stop expanding its military capabilities and preparing for war in outer space," AFP quoted a foreign ministry spokesman as saying.

I'm no geopolitics whiz but "we urge the USA to be unprepared for war" is a pretty comical statement to me.

nradov 6 days ago

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

bigyabai 6 days ago

Once a country develops midcourse ballistic missile intercept technology, it's practically impossible to not own an ASAT weapon. It's just a matter of targeting and programming.

This can lead to "defensive" efforts that ultimately create disruptive, offensive weapons. It's not necessarily contradictory or hilarious, IMO.

whatshisface 6 days ago

In human terms, there is a spectrum between knowing where to buy a firearm, owning a firearm, and pointing a gun at your head.

tintor 6 days ago

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.

eps 6 days ago

First country to admit putting weapons in space.

andai 6 days ago

I was wondering, didn't they have something like this fifty years ago? Wasn't that the whole point of the space program?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

topspin 6 days ago

> Being the first country to put 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.

not_a_bot_4sho 6 days ago

> Being the first country to put weapons in space, is far from comical.

First to publicly announce it. However, Russia beat us to the punch.

Russian, China, India, and the US are all in this secret little club (but maybe not so secret anymore!)

krapp 6 days ago

Russia mounted a gun on one of its space stations[0] but it didn't work out, and they were going to launch an orbital nuclear platform[1] but then everything went to shit.

Less flippantly, I seriously doubt the US is the first country to put weapons in space, they're just stupid enough to admit it for some reason. I would bet money I don't have that both Russia and China have something nasty up there at least, and the US has probably launched something for Israel at some point.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3

[1]https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-rise-fall-the-sovie...

wildzzz 4 days ago

There was this article from several years ago but I don't believe anything came out of it:

https://breakingdefense.com/2021/08/pentagon-posed-to-unveil...

restalis 6 days ago

"Putting" weapons in space, like in orbit (otherwise they won't stay in space for long) is not like putting weapons in international waters close in to the target. Any weapon that relies on moving some (projectile) mass from there will have to deal with the costly orbital mechanics, where the projectile will have to be pulled out of orbit with a lot of mass and time to reach anywhere on the planet. It's... not that good of an option for attack, compared even to existing ballistic ground-to-ground trajectories. For non-projectile orbital weapons, i.e. energy weapons, the physics are brutal, because the amount of energy necessary to reach any degree of destructive effect to a target on the ground is way too large. And all that has to also be weighted against the risk of having such weapon staying exposed in the orbit, like a sitting duck, for anyone on the ground to disable it in numerous ways. If there would be any case for having weapons in space, I don't think it will be to attack anything on the ground.

m463 6 days ago

The next logical step is to use AI to influence US voters with "no data centers in space" outrage.

nopassrecover 6 days ago

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

fnands 6 days ago

Yaogan-50 for anyone asking.

Interesting. A bit conspiratorial, but hey. It would be a major provocation if so

willy_k 6 days ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 6 days ago

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.

rl3 6 days ago

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.

nomel 6 days ago

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.

FabCH 6 days ago

Politely ask them to stop seems like a great idea to try first before you actively attack a space capable nuclear superpower!

nomel 6 days ago

If they did supply images, to supporting the attacks, that did or even didn't result in the death of soldiers, then they were first to commit an act of aggression towards a nuclear superpower. This is a measured response to that act of aggression. Asking politely, in that context, doesn't necessarily make sense, especially when you can just burn a few hundred million of their dollars to demonstrate why they shouldn't do that.

I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].

[1] https://spacenews.com/china-says-it-remains-opposed-weapons-...

FabCH 6 days ago

There is a meaningful difference between „providing information to a country currently being attacked“ and „blowing stuff up in orbit“.

One is significantly more risk to the rest of the world than other.

nomel 5 days ago

Don't be naive. If a blind man is asking you where to aim his gun, are you responsible for the death or is the blind man pulling the trigger? In the context of war, BOTH of you are, and both are valid military targets, just as a spotter is, directing a sniper, on the battlefield, because the intention of both of you is to cause death.

rl3 4 days ago

>Don't be naive.

You do realize that since the advent of image reconnaissance satellites, imagery has been used to support the wider geopolitical objectives of whoever owns the satellites doing the reconnaissance, up to and including sharing intelligence with geopolitical allies?

In other words: the point of contention here is a tale old as time, and when caught one power usually just registers diplomatic complaints against the other power. Rather than, you know, kick off WW3 by messing with space assets between two nuclear powers.

I'd also like to note that the Soviets literally provided a massive amount of logistical support to North Vietnam. In the Korean War, their own pilots even squared off against Americans. The United States returned the favor when they invaded Afghanistan, our logistical and intelligence support killing scores of Soviets. At no point did either power decide to start blowing up each other's satellites.

It's 2026, Iran I'm sure has a myriad of ways of acquiring imagery via commercial satellite providers. Let alone other intel modalities.

The notion that a giant KC-135 sitting on a tarmac somewhere being otherwise safe were it not for the Chinese sharing intelligence is laughable.

Reads more like incompetent threat assessment and regional asset positioning.

lossolo 6 days ago

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.

chinathrow 6 days ago

So it broke apart by itself?

lossolo 6 days ago

"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."

willy_k 6 days ago

That doesn’t mean anything. “Sometimes satellites hit things or have problems and blow up. Maybe it hit something and had a problem”.

Edit: Its a perfectly valid response to the question that was asked.

boc 6 days ago

So China's brand new recon satellite that was placed specifically in orbit over Iran just happened to self-destruct weeks after China was accused of giving Iran high-res satellite imagery that was used to kill American soldiers?

And the US just publicly told everyone they have weapons in space?

Hell of a coincidence.

hn_submit 6 days ago

I thought the Russians were supplying them with HiRes imagery. I've not heard of any Russian optical or radar satellite breaking up.

dhx 6 days ago

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...

3eb7988a1663 6 days ago

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...

CodeWriter23 6 days ago

It's really not interesting at all. The US Destroyed that satellite to stop that information flow.

missedthecue 6 days ago

China has more intelligence/imaging satellites in space than the US does. I don't think it will stop the information flow.

CodeWriter23 5 days ago

And all they have to do is move them into position to gather intel on the Iran region to have them destroyed as well.

missedthecue 5 days ago

You think the US will destroy 230 Chinese intelligence satellites? LOL

CodeWriter23 5 days ago

The DEW announcement is the message "we destroyed your satellite, Xi"

Lammy 6 days ago

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...

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

Lame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casaba-Howitzer would 'Rock the Casbah' even more.

WillAdams 6 days ago

C.J. Cherryh has a memorable quote on this in her _Downbelow Station_.

>They were armed, the swift exploration ships, as they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.

GMoromisato 6 days ago

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.

LargoLasskhyfv 5 days ago

But then came evil communistic Cyteen, spoiling the plan, with cloned AZIs, evil space Nazis. Supporting the Alliance of Merchants at Downbelow. Damn & Woe!

How exactly that came to be (from Earth-Company side) was expanded a little bit, as sort of a prequel in Heavy Time(1991) and Hellburner(1992), and later again in Alliance Rising(2019) and Alliance Unbound(2024) from the POV of the affected stations in the so called Hinder Stars(the first to be explored by slower than light ships from the Earth), made obsolete by FTL later on, because of more direct routes to Downbelow and further into Cyteen territory.

WillAdams 3 days ago

Do they support or tolerate? The ambiguity of "right side" is striking.

LargoLasskhyfv 2 days ago

Supporting. To put a stopgap between the interests of the Earth-Company, with its sublight ships, and the the first, now almost all abandoned/mothballed space stations around stars which opened the route to Downbelow, which was the first system with a biosphere and indigenous life. A real outpost being able to sustain itself, instead of having to rely on re-supply from Earth. Breaking the chain of trade and economics, which enabled them in the first place. A sort of 'area-denial', giving them no base of operations out there, and no way into the meanwhile established new 'outer worlds' towards another such world, called 'Cyteen'. Which then invented faster than light flight, and gave it to willing merchant ships for free. But not the Earth-Company, because they considered that mutiny and defection. They were cut off from all that new trade. By themselves. Because of politics, tariffs, customs, embargo, slowness, stupidity.

A strand of the plot is sort of an arms race between the Earth-Company trying to build a ship with an FTL-capable engine on one of the last stations remaining in operation, under military junta, and an independent merchant trying to apply new measurements to jump in direct line from Downbelow/Pell or adjacent space to Earth, which would make all the former investments of Earth-Company obsolete for real.

Because Cherryh's FTL isn't like Star-Trek/Star Wars. It requires precise gravitational mappings of so called 'jump-points', which can be stars, brown-dwarfs, and such. Meaning there isn't necessarily a direct route between your desired start and end, but instead large detours necessary across a chain of such jump-points, which are near enough to each other. Because the 'jump-drives' have limited range of a handfull to a dozen of light-years only. Depending on mass of the ship. And if that gap on your route is more than that, detours are necessary. And there are many gaps.

You actually can look at that in your browser on the many sites offering a 3D-view of that, for our nearer stars, say within a sphere of up to 100 light years, or so :-)

Another thread of action would be the efforts of the Earth-Company to go into a wholly another direction in space, because of all of that, and meeting sentient and spacefaring other aliens from outer space, but not in a good way.

That is her Chanur epos, written from the POV of such aliens, fighting over one of the earthlings, captured by them on one of Earth-Companies exploratory missions, making the aliens go: WTF?!

What is that? Where did it come from? Leading to turmoil, endangering instable balances and treaties between them.

Implying they could be suddenly confronted with all of humanity, coming from all of the large Cyteen spaces/territories, via Downbelow/Pell, 'Hinder Star Stations', via Earth, to them.

asdff 6 days ago

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).

bdamm 6 days ago

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.

baxtr 6 days ago

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.

CodeWriter23 6 days ago

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.

sgustard 6 days ago

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.

nomel 6 days ago

> 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?

whh 6 days ago

I think it's generally acceptable to make a statement without proposing a solution.

legulere 6 days ago

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.

nomel 6 days ago

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.

wraptile 6 days ago

Or a post resource scarcity society where everyone's rich enough to be able to make ethical decisions with very little actual cost.

frumplestlatz 6 days ago

Power over others can never be post-scarcity, and it's an incredible motivator.

legulere 5 days ago

That is not what I'm saying. There can be a lot of disagreement about a lot of things but there needs to be widespread agreement to not start wars and to use strong non-war mechanisms to stop war mongers. I know that it is far off from where we are today, but it is not impossible like needing everyone to agree with everything.

frumplestlatz 5 days ago

We tried that. League of Nations. The UN. How has that worked out?

Human order is fundamentally kept by there being a true threat of violence enforcing it.

If you forget that reality and abandon your ability to project violence, someone else will remind you.

frumplestlatz 6 days ago

In which case, any country willing to fund a military and start a war would dominate the world.

Slavery and the death penalty are poor analogies, and not just because slavery was stopped through quite a bit of violence, and the death penalty/imprisonment exists as an alternative to vigilante justice only by virtue of the state's monopoly on violence.

"If everyone just ..." is always silly, but it's especially silly when it comes to the belief that order can be enforced through anything other than -- ultimately -- the threat of violence. Everyone will not "just".

ChrisRR 5 days ago

You don't have to have a solution to recognise that there's a problem

tonymet 5 days ago

Yeah you do. If you’re not offering a better way, you’re only moaning.

grafmax 5 days ago

Cooperative deescalation is the right direction.

asdff 6 days ago

I mean in hindsight there's no way israel or china would have disarmed.

cedws 6 days ago

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...

bearjaws 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

All you need to know about making deals with Russia.

RobKohr 6 days ago

Yeah, Ukraine should have held onto its nukes. But it got a lovely piece of paper to protect itself with.

s1artibartfast 6 days ago

easy to say at a distance. It didnt have full control and had the nuclear powers pushing them to.

We dont know if Ukraine would be a state today if they refused

notthemessiah 6 days ago

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.

tonymet 6 days ago

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.

tristanj 6 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

thrance 6 days ago

Only relevant part is this:

> Cost estimates for the Golden Dome program range from $175 billion (White House), to $1.2 trillion (Congressional Budget Office), to $3.6 trillion (American Enterprise Institute) depending on the architectural details. The wide range largely hinges on the number of space-based missiles and the cost of replacing satellites whose low orbits decay quickly due to atmospheric drag. Some $24.4 billion in federal funding was directed to the Golden Dome in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025, with another $13 billion allocated for the fiscal year 2026, totaling 2.2% of the federal discretionary budget during that year.

It's just a ploy to transfer more public money to government contractors and friends, like Musk.

huurtehoog 6 days ago

I recommend reading the paper by Parnas about the original SDI system.

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs99r/readings/parnas1.pdf

bob1029 6 days ago

See also: the mass of starlink satellites over time.

thehumanmeat 6 days ago

Rods from God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

whh 6 days ago

I thoroughly enjoyed Veritasium's video on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_n1FZaKzF8

spaceuhhbased 6 days ago

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.

FuckButtons 6 days ago

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.

misetech 6 days ago

I think most of the powerful countries in the world already have space weapons. Space exploration is just a facade for this.

bdamm 6 days ago

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.

hiddencost 6 days ago

From a certain point of view ICBMs are a method of communicating.

freebsd_lovefes 6 days ago

Trajectorial calligraphy is a subject in some schools where individuals who like to communicate unconventionally study.

BiteCode_dev 6 days ago

I'd wager starlink is mostly military with the cover of civilian use case.

mars-or_wars 6 days ago

search "Declassify Elon Musk's space-based weapons program before Biden leaves the White House"

Permik 6 days ago

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.

chukar 6 days ago

Well, that's one way to kick off a new arms race. Guess the orbital junk problem is about to get worse.

alfiedotwtf 6 days ago

Say goodbye to satellites and space tourism for the next 200 years :(

tialaramex 6 days ago

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.

freedomben 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

> it makes no real difference for GEO or outer orbits

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.)

tialaramex 6 days ago

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.

JumpCrisscross 6 days ago

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.

snickerbockers 6 days ago

Am I supposed to feel sorry for jeff bezos' loss?

rtkwe 6 days ago

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.

Theodores 6 days ago

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.

adamsb6 6 days ago

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.

ndiddy 6 days ago

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 ):

> One Air Force requirement that had a critical effect on the Shuttle design was cross range capability. The military wanted to be able to send a Shuttle on an orbit around the Earth's poles because a significant portion of the Soviet Union was at high latitudes near the Arctic Circle. The idea was to be able to deploy a reconnaissance satellite, retrieve an errant spacecraft, or even capture an enemy satellite, and then have the Shuttle return to its launch site after only one orbit to escape Soviet detection. Because the Earth rotates on its axis, by the time the Shuttle would return to its base, the base would have "moved" approximately 1,100 miles to the east. Thus the Shuttle needed to be able to maneuver that distance "sideways" upon reentering the atmosphere.

> In addition to the Air Force's cross range demand, the military also wanted a larger Shuttle payload bay than NASA originally advocated. NASA wanted the Shuttle payload bay to accommodate modules for a future space station, which necessitated a payload capacity of approximately 50,000 pounds. The Air Force wanted a bay 15 x 60 feet that could hold 50,000 to 65,000 pounds and that had doors that could open out into space to deploy satellites easily. This payload requirement meant that the fuselage of the Shuttle needed to be essentially a large rectangular box with rounded surfaces. In general, NASA went with the Air Force's requirements because it needed the Air Force's support to help insulate it from the political charge that the Shuttle was really just a step towards human exploration of Mars or a permanent space station, which is precisely what some people at NASA wanted it to be.

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.

doe88 6 days ago

Nothing to worry about, General Turgidson said it was just made in order to prevent a space gap.

causal 6 days ago

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.

hereme888 6 days ago

The part where China "begs" the US not to weaponize space, and then talks of how China wants to militarily dominate space... Such typical tactics to delay US progress.

gggmaster 6 days ago

Typical tactics to shift the blame to China.

hereme888 2 days ago

Lol, I quoted China. How is that shifting anything? They did that themselves.

Steve16384 6 days ago

I feel safer already. What's the worst that could happen? I'm sure no-one will put an AI anywhere near it.

exabrial 6 days ago

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

tonic_note 6 days ago

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.

bob1029 6 days ago

> but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard

Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.

consumer451 6 days ago

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

asdff 6 days ago

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.

twothreeone 6 days ago

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.

physhster 6 days ago

Bunch of idiots with space weapons. Great!

vondur 6 days ago

I've assumed that they put weapons on satellites as soon as it was possible.

m4rtink 6 days ago

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! :-)

monneyboi 6 days ago

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.

dudefeliciano 6 days ago

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.

tomasphan 6 days ago

All the time. Politically speaking the past is quite embarrassing.

dudefeliciano 6 days ago

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.

AndrewKemendo 6 days ago

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

galleywest200 6 days ago

Prehistoric humans get a pass in my book. They seemed to have a cozy life.

AndrewKemendo 6 days ago

Their greed turned a lush world into what you see today

kbelder 6 days ago

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.

dudefeliciano 6 days ago

analog brutality, that thing of the past. much better now with technological brutality

AndrewKemendo 5 days ago

You have a propagandized version of human history

Life in a hunter gatherer tribe doesn’t look anything like your ignorance portrays

bix6 6 days ago

No their heads are in the sand as they exit the stage. Pathetic.

Arubis 6 days ago

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.

testing22321 6 days ago

Hopefully our grand children are alive to hear that explanation.

alexashka 6 days ago

There is no 'we'.

d--b 6 days ago

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.

LightBug1 6 days ago

- 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.

krunck 6 days ago

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.