Accidental Orion?

MSu1049321 wrote:

In the story it worked a little too well, and the debris cloud spreads and
builds from hitting more and more orbiting stuff until the Earth is swathed in
a layer of uuntrackable, unavoidable space debris that wipes all low-orbiting
objects from the sky and prevents launching new spacecraft for as long as it
take all the garbage to decay and burn up. Considering America presently
controls space and makes the most use of it for commercial and military
purposes, it makes for a fun "what-if" exercise to wonder how things would
change if the sky were suddenly denied... it would bring back high-altitude
aircraft, probably unmanned, for recon, imagine, but getting the aerial photos
or intercepts back would be slower than before. Communications might continue
using lan lines and perhaps fleets of relay aerostats, but these would be
easier for lower-tech nations to interfere with.

Such a cloud could be used for communications the same way as the echo
satilites. still not as good as a proper relay.

it would seriously compromise
command and control capability at least in the short term. I wonder if the
Chinese or worse, the North Koreans are digging any long tunnels without
apparent purpose?

Debree launched from a cannon on the surface won't go into orbit without
a kick at altitude. Rather it'll reenter in less than an orbit. The
launch path, neglecting drag, intersects the launch point. Launched at
an angle it would also intersect the earths surface somewhere else.

The story may have appeared in the old Planet Stories. A high-tech
power generating station explodes. Some years later, a thing falls
out of the sky, which proves to be the power station's turbine. It
seems someone was aboard it somehow, hence, the first man in space.
On second thought, it might have appeared in Astounding. It would
have been pretty near 1947.

This thread is *fascinating.* The bore's lid departed at something
like six times escape velocity. Wow. Now, that idea has a certain
potential for a story....

For instance, if you wanted to work off a large mad, or if you wanted
to *really* say something about Washington DC that would get heard,
how about that? *Really* blow the lid off!

Cheers -- Martha Adams

In article ,
MSu1049321 wrote:
This reminds me of a concept I read of in a SF short story. In it, Canada,
(why? I dunno, maybe because they were sandwiched between a warring US and
Russia and didn't want to get hurt in a nuclear crossfire?) makes a low-tech
but effective anti-ICBM system by drilling a slanting hole deep into a
mountain, putting a nuke at the bottom, and packing the hole with all manner of
metallic junk. When fired, it was to have worked like a gigantic shotgun,
spewing many many chunks into at least low orbit, to kinetcally kill incoming
warheads.

Alas, it doesn't work -- you can't get something into orbit with a gun
launch (which is what this is, on a grand scale) without equipping it with
an apogee kick motor. Any object whose orbit was last *changed* at a
point on Earth's surface will have an orbit that intersects Earth's
surface (unless it leaves at or near escape velocity, anyway).

(On a more local scale, though, it works fine. You can defend ICBM silos
from incoming warheads quite effectively by just burying a small nuclear
bomb a kilometer north of the silo -- assuming you expect the attack to
come from the north -- and detonating it when a small radar at the silo
sees an incoming object. A warhead coming in at Mach Umpteen will be torn
apart by flying through the dust cloud. The location and timing is not
particularly crucial, as the cloud will be large and will persist for a
while. The only problem is the political difficulties.)

a layer of uuntrackable, unavoidable space debris that wipes all low-orbiting
objects from the sky and prevents launching new spacecraft for as long as it
take all the garbage to decay and burn up.

This process can be greatly accelerated, if you want to badly enough. A
salvo of large nuclear explosions at medium-high altitude -- preferably
over some remote area! -- will bulge the Earth's atmosphere upward quite a
bit in that area for an hour or two. Any LEO object passing through the
bulge will be de-orbited.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
Keith F. Lynch wrote:
If that plate *is* in interplanetary space, how hard would it be to
find, someday?

Extremely. It would be a very small object, very hard to spot, in a large
population of natural objects that size. (There are probably several
rocks that size passing by closer than the Moon right now, all of them
undetected.)

Since it would be in an orbit closely resembling Earth's, it would make
occasional close encounters, each of which would perturb its orbit more or
less randomly. This rapidly magnifies any initial uncertainty about its
orbit, because small differences in the encounter path become much larger
differences in the path of the next encounter. Especially given our very
vague knowledge of what orbit it would have started out in, there is
little hope of predicting where it would be.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
Henry Spencer wrote:
(On a more local scale, though, it works fine. You can defend ICBM silos
from incoming warheads quite effectively by just burying a small nuclear
bomb a kilometer north of the silo -- assuming you expect the attack to
come from the north -- and detonating it when a small radar at the silo
sees an incoming object. A warhead coming in at Mach Umpteen will be torn
apart by flying through the dust cloud. The location and timing is not
particularly crucial, as the cloud will be large and will persist for a
while. The only problem is the political difficulties.)

I would have thought that that particular example was (at least
temporarily) self-defeating -- you've stopped the incoming warhead, but
at the expense of blocking the launch of your own missiles through that
very same cloud.

-- don

The bore's lid departed at something
like six times escape velocity. Wow. Now, that idea has a certain
potential for a story.... BRBR


Yeah, like this one... the steel cover blows out into space at extreme speed
and punches a hole in the hull of a peaceful Krygzonian exploration ship
dropping by for a look at Earth. The Krygzonians, while puzzled by the Earth's
idea of advanced weapons technology, nevertheless decide they'd better squash
this over-aggressive civilization before it invents somethign nasty to project
into space, like nuclear warheads....


Matt Bille
)
OPINIONS IN ALL POSTS ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR

(Paul E. Black) wrote:

(BllFs6) writes:

I used to have a link dirrectly to an article written by the scientist in
charge of the project...it was nice little article with facts from the guy that
WAS there....but alas I cant find it

http://gawain.membrane.com/hew/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html

Thats a no longer maintained site. You should link to
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/ instead.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
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Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

In article ,
Don Stokes wrote:
...A warhead coming in at Mach Umpteen will be torn
apart by flying through the dust cloud. The location and timing is not
particularly crucial, as the cloud will be large and will persist for a
while...

I would have thought that that particular example was (at least
temporarily) self-defeating -- you've stopped the incoming warhead, but
at the expense of blocking the launch of your own missiles through that
very same cloud.

Well, if your missiles are reasonably safe from attack, you may not want
to launch immediately. But even if you do, a missile just after launch is
moving much more slowly than an incoming warhead, and generally should
survive ascent through the cloud.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |

In article ,
Henry Spencer wrote:
In article ,
MSu1049321 wrote:
This reminds me of a concept I read of in a SF short story. In it,
Canada, (why? I dunno, maybe because they were sandwiched between a
warring US and Russia and didn't want to get hurt in a nuclear
crossfire?) makes a low-tech but effective anti-ICBM system by
drilling a slanting hole deep into a mountain, putting a nuke at the
bottom, and packing the hole with all manner of metallic junk. When
fired, it was to have worked like a gigantic shotgun, spewing many
many chunks into at least low orbit, to kinetcally kill incoming
warheads.

Alas, it doesn't work -- you can't get something into orbit with a
gun launch (which is what this is, on a grand scale) without
equipping it with an apogee kick motor. Any object whose orbit was
last *changed* at a point on Earth's surface will have an orbit that
intersects Earth's surface (unless it leaves at or near escape
velocity, anyway).

Due to air drag, if a projectile is fired upwards from the surface of
the Earth, the orbit was not last changed at the surface, but rather
in the upper atmosphere. Is that an insignificant factor -- does that
just mean that such an object in a closed orbit will intersect the
upper atmosphere again (and thereby just reenter a little more
slowly)?

--
Tim McDaniel, ; is my work address

(Don Stokes) writes:

In article ,
Henry Spencer wrote:
(On a more local scale, though, it works fine. You can defend ICBM silos
from incoming warheads quite effectively by just burying a small nuclear
bomb a kilometer north of the silo -- assuming you expect the attack to
come from the north -- and detonating it when a small radar at the silo
sees an incoming object. A warhead coming in at Mach Umpteen will be torn
apart by flying through the dust cloud. The location and timing is not
particularly crucial, as the cloud will be large and will persist for a
while. The only problem is the political difficulties.)

I would have thought that that particular example was (at least
temporarily) self-defeating -- you've stopped the incoming warhead, but
at the expense of blocking the launch of your own missiles through that
very same cloud.


To some extent, yes, but your own missiles need not be travelling at
Mach Umpteen while traversing the cloud. And being under power at
the time, it's easier to plan an up-and-over trajectory where the
inbound warhead is constrained to a straght ballistic approach.

Both of which suggest countermeasures a new generation of enemy missiles
could incorporate to deal with the nuclear fougasse defense, though of
course "slow down to merely supersonic velocity" leaves the RV vulnerable
to good old-fasioned SAMs.


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