Banning Weaponized Orbits?

All this ASAT chatter on the X37-B thread made me think of another scenario.

State-sponsored terrorist threat to commercial satellite infrastructure.
aka how to deploy ASAT weapons against GEO satellites?

For kinetic kill weapons, you'd want to launch in a elliptical orbit that
crosses through GEO. You'd open the kill devices to form a tubular shaped
cloud that crosses GEO, intersecting at four regions in space. You'd want the
angle of intersection to be as parallel as possible to maximize relative
velocity and the angle of attack.

One could also launch weapons in multiples of these orbits to increase the
number of 'kill cylinders'.

The only usefulness of such orbits would be for a weapons system. Should we
get busy on a treaty now?

Dave

On 12/29/2010 10:23 AM, David Spain wrote:
All this ASAT chatter on the X37-B thread made me think of another
scenario.

State-sponsored terrorist threat to commercial satellite infrastructure.
aka how to deploy ASAT weapons against GEO satellites?

For kinetic kill weapons, you'd want to launch in a elliptical orbit
that crosses through GEO. You'd open the kill devices to form a tubular
shaped cloud that crosses GEO, intersecting at four regions in space.
You'd want the angle of intersection to be as parallel as possible to
maximize relative velocity and the angle of attack.

One could also launch weapons in multiples of these orbits to increase
the number of 'kill cylinders'.

The only usefulness of such orbits would be for a weapons system. Should
we get busy on a treaty now?

If you want to kill satellites without generating debris clouds that can
damage other space assets, why not detonate a EMP device in close
proximity to them and let it destroy their electronics? Apparently those
have gotten so small that they now have prototype EMP hand grenades:
http://defensetech.org/2009/02/11/ar...fare-soldiers/

Pat



Dave

Problem: how would you enforce a treaty against weapons without
international inspection of every space-bound payload, which most
spacefaring nations would not allow?

Matt Bille
www.mattwriter.com

On Dec 29, 5:33*pm, Matt wrote:
Problem: how would you enforce a treaty against weapons without
international inspection of every space-bound payload, which most
spacefaring nations would not allow?

Matt Billewww.mattwriter.com

Inspection of all LEO items prior to launch seems easy enough.

How many per day are getting launched?

~ BG

On 30/12/2010 8:29 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 12/29/2010 10:23 AM, David Spain wrote:
All this ASAT chatter on the X37-B thread made me think of another
scenario.

State-sponsored terrorist threat to commercial satellite infrastructure.
aka how to deploy ASAT weapons against GEO satellites?

For kinetic kill weapons, you'd want to launch in a elliptical orbit
that crosses through GEO. You'd open the kill devices to form a tubular
shaped cloud that crosses GEO, intersecting at four regions in space.
You'd want the angle of intersection to be as parallel as possible to
maximize relative velocity and the angle of attack.

One could also launch weapons in multiples of these orbits to increase
the number of 'kill cylinders'.

The only usefulness of such orbits would be for a weapons system. Should
we get busy on a treaty now?

If you want to kill satellites without generating debris clouds that can
damage other space assets, why not detonate a EMP device in close
proximity to them and let it destroy their electronics? Apparently those
have gotten so small that they now have prototype EMP hand grenades:
http://defensetech.org/2009/02/11/ar...fare-soldiers/


The most damaging element of a nuclear EMP involves an interaction with
the atmosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse

Sylvia.

On Dec 30, 1:56*am, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 30/12/2010 8:29 AM, Pat Flannery wrote:

If you want to kill satellites without generating debris clouds that can
damage other space assets, why not detonate a EMP device in close
proximity to them and let it destroy their electronics? Apparently those
have gotten so small that they now have prototype EMP hand grenades:
http://defensetech.org/2009/02/11/ar...nic-warfare-so...

The most damaging element of a nuclear EMP involves an interaction with
the atmosphere.

Yeah, I was going to make that quibble myself. But then I decided
that, despite Pat's use of the term "detonate", an "EMP device" in
this context doesn't mean a nuclear explosion. Those EMP hand grenades
don't have atomic bombs in them, certainly. A strictly electric EMP
generator is not unreasonable to consider for the task of disabling a
satellite.

On 12/29/2010 5:33 PM, Matt wrote:
Problem: how would you enforce a treaty against weapons without
international inspection of every space-bound payload, which most
spacefaring nations would not allow?

By telling them that anything that goes into orbit without inspection
gets nailed by a UN ASAT?

Pat

Logistically, it's pretty easy to have inspection teams in the
spacefaring nations to take a look at satellite cargoes before they
are encapsulated and mated. In practice, however, you are never going
to get the US, China, and Russia to agree to allow inspectors to poke
around in their military/intelligence satellite cargos before launch.

Matt

On 12/30/2010 9:06 AM, Alan Anderson wrote:
Yeah, I was going to make that quibble myself. But then I decided
that, despite Pat's use of the term "detonate", an "EMP device" in
this context doesn't mean a nuclear explosion. Those EMP hand grenades
don't have atomic bombs in them, certainly. A strictly electric EMP
generator is not unreasonable to consider for the task of disabling a
satellite.

The grenades are supposed to consist of an inwards compressing shaped
charge (like a miniature version of the plutonium implosion compressor
on a nuclear weapon) surrounding a small extremely powerful permanent
magnet.
Radius of effect isn't very much of course, but these are certainly
nothing you would want to fall into the hands of terrorists.
The original non-nuclear ones used a coil of extremely fine wire
surrounded by high explosives and hooked up to a very high-powered
capacitor.
On detonation, the capacitor dumped all its electrical energy into the
coil, creating a very powerful magnetic field in it in the split second
before it overheated and vaporized from the current flow. Before it
could vaporize the explosives went off and squished the coil out of
existence in a way that projected its magnetic field towards the target.
The Soviets were way ahead of us in this at the end of the cold war;
apparently our EMP device was around the size of a 55 gallon drum and
could knock out electronics for around a 2-3 city block radius of the
detonation point.
We thought the Russians would be really impressed by that till they
showed us the thing they had that could knock out things for around a 10
block radius that was around the size of a landmine.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:
On 12/29/2010 5:33 PM, Matt wrote:
Problem: how would you enforce a treaty against weapons without
international inspection of every space-bound payload, which most
spacefaring nations would not allow?

By telling them that anything that goes into orbit without inspection
gets nailed by a UN ASAT?

The only meaningful way to enforce a treaty such as this is to impose economic
sanctions against the offender. It is not necessary to inspect the spacecraft,
since it's the orbit that's the violation. It would not matter if the orbit
was 'weaponized' by a fully deployed ASAT technology, although that would
certainly be worse than a sat placed there on 'standby' as it were, which is
far worse than nothing there.

One can argue the significance of economic sanctions as a deterrent, on the
other hand you can also argue as compared to what short of war? Nothing?

Think of it this way, eventually both the US and USSR agreed to stop doing
atmospheric nuclear tests and other countries eventually followed suit. We
should treat certain orbits the same way.

Dave