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Stuff will be flown into space for the purpose of burning it so people can look at it:
Meteor showers are an awe-inspiring sight, and skywatchers often plan well in advance for their shot at spotting shooting stars as they rain down from the heavens. The rare events have, up until now, been a totally natural phenomenon, but one company is planning on turning on-demand meteor showers into big business, and it's scheduled its first man-made shooting star showcase for early 2019.
The company, called ALE, has created a spectacle it calls Sky Canvas, and it's as close to controlled meteor showers as we may ever get. What makes it so interesting is that this isn't some kind of slight of hand or illusion, but actual material dropped from special satellites burning up in the atmosphere to produce a brilliant light show overhead. It's wild, wild stuff.
The cube-shaped satellites that control ALE's Sky Canvas are tiny — less than two feet on each side — but they carry the proprietary pellets that create the "shooting stars" and can be controlled remotely from the ground. On command, the satellites release their payload, which then falls to Earth and, after coming into contact with the intense friction of the atmosphere, ignite.
Manmade explosions over Hiroshima?
(Score: 2) by captain_nifty on Wednesday November 22 2017, @06:04PM (1 child)
This is surprisingly similar to proposed orbital kinetic energy weapons.
Something in orbit has a hell of a lot of kinetic energy, all that is needed is a good sized piece of metal that won't burn up completely pushed in the right direction to cause some pretty serious level of damage to a target on the surface.
These satellites would have all of the technology to accurate orient and fire their projectiles with relation to the ground, and if supplied with different pellets (different material or larger), would make an excellent weapon system.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday November 23 2017, @11:07AM
Something in orbit has a hell of a lot of kinetic energy
About 8000m/s. KE = 1/2 mv^2, so each 1kg has a 32MJ of energy (and a little gravitational energy), so a 1 tonne object has 32GJ. That's ignoring any energy lost in the atmosphere.
However a 15kT nuke that's previously been seen in has 63GJ of energy. Typical nuclear missiles are in the 1,000KT range (10x100kt warheads), about 4,200 GJ, or about 100 tons in orbit.
A Falcon Heavy is aiming for $2m/ton to LEO, so that's $200m for the same destructive force of a nuclear missile. Building a new nuke is in the $20m range [ucsusa.org], 1/10th the price of the theoretical Falcon Heavy launch cost (or 1/100th of the general price)
But yes, as price to orbit keeps falling, it lowers the price to massive destruction, and that's a problem.