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Recently Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow-Raising Claims About Advanced Space Technology
Recently retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast gave a lecture last month that seems to further signal that the next major battlefield will be outer space. While military leadership rattling the space sabers is nothing new, Kwast's lecture included comments that heavily hint at the possibility that the United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever. Is this mere posturing or could we actually be on the verge of making science fiction a reality?
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Recently Retired USAF General Makes Eyebrow-Raising Claims About Advanced Space Technology
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Default, n.:
The hardware's, of course.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday December 16 2019, @01:48PM (13 children)
I'm reasonably sure that the US military (and other military organizations) have some space weapons.
- Surveillance satellites. This is obvious: photosurveillance, but also electronic interception of any sort of radio communications, especially involving other satellites.
- Pournelle's "Rods from God" are pretty trivial, for example: Dumb projectiles that can be de-orbited and told to impact a particular point. As long as they are solid enough not to break up on re-entry, they can pile a lot of energy into a small area.
- Hunter-killer satellites that can maneuver to a different orbit and destroy another satellite. Easy to do, as long as we aren't talking huge orbital shifts, and I'm sure some of those are up there as well.
None of this ought to be surprising. But add in the average General Officer who totally believes the fancy marketing pitch from his favorite contractor, and it probably does sound like science fiction.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday December 16 2019, @02:14PM (4 children)
Bunker-buster, yes. Otherwise 7.2t of dynamite is more practical to deliver by conventional means [wikipedia.org].
FTFY. And a bad science-fiction when it comes to that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday December 16 2019, @08:55PM (3 children)
That guy has lived his whole life in the US military, so he's a hammer. It is no surprise he sees everything as a nail.
The US military industrial complex is running out of enemies again, and they really need enemies to keep that sweet cash rolling in. As General Hammer is retiring from the Air Force he is busy looking around for a nice consulting job in the private sector, because that is what retired generals do in the US.
Creating some nonsense threat out of whole cloth and a whole new battlefield is a wet dream to these people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @09:18PM (2 children)
Thanks for elaborating on the meaning of financially motivated, historians will find it informative.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:11AM (1 child)
It seems like the A/C's on this site are getting angrier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17 2019, @06:42AM
Judging by the writing style, I'd say there are a couple of new bad apples. Enough time and they'll either end up banned or bored, and, either way, move on. Part of the problem, IMHO, is that everyone, not just ACs are getting shorter tempers and frayed nerves. Also, many colleges and schools are on break or near finals, so more time and stress for students as well.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday December 16 2019, @02:36PM (7 children)
>I'm reasonably sure that the US military (and other military organizations) have some space weapons.
I seriously doubt it.
>- Surveillance satellites
Of course they have these; they've had them for decades (since the 70s at least; you can see the really old ones in museums now). These aren't weapons.
>- Pournelle's "Rods from God" are pretty trivial,
Only in concept. Making them actually impact where you want them to isn't that easy: you'd need some kind of active guidance.
> Hunter-killer satellites that can maneuver to a different orbit and destroy another satellite. Easy to do,
Only in concept.
>I'm sure some of those are up there as well.
What evidence do you have for this claim?
Any of these weapons systems would have to be *tested* before it can be fielded. Good luck testing a "rod from god" without the entire world knowing about it: I find it highly unlikely the adversaries wouldn't notice this, and it be in the press. The hunter-killer satellite *might* be able to be tested without the adversaries noticing, but I really doubt it. It wasn't that long ago that the Chinese (IIRC) tested out one of their anti-satellite missiles and pissed everyone off because of the resulting debris field: we already have way too much space junk up there, and that made it so much worse. You don't think they'd scream hypocrisy if we tested a hunter-killer weapon?
The reality is that even simple-sounding stuff like this really isn't trivial to implement and develop to a level where it can be fielded as a reliable weapon. Life isn't like Hollywood where you can just slap something together in 5 minutes and it works perfectly; engineering takes a lot of time and effort and especially testing. You can't test this kind of stuff without others noticing.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 16 2019, @02:59PM (3 children)
The rods need not be so very large, I think. The article talks about rather large rods, or poles, that will have a pretty big impact. I believe that you could work with a lot of smaller weapons, maybe even small enough to be equivalent to a stick of dynamite. There would be some lower limit to size, and I don't know where that is, but smaller weapons can be expected to work much like a larger one.
Save the guidance for the larger weapons. Just practice with the little ones, learning how to aim them ballisticaly. Not really accurate? Mehhh - I think that maybe you can get accuracy "good enough" with ballistics, then later on, decide whether you need to saturate an area, or use a larger weapon.
Testing in the open ocean, or in remote desert locations seems reasonable enough for the smaller weapons. All the developers need are some sensors deployed, to determine how close they are hitting. A ballsy forward observer might be good, to evaluate the effects in real time.
But, I will admit that those huge-ass bunker busters are a lot sexier than any of their smaller kin. ;^)
One other thing is, this is where asteroid mining comes in. It's a helluva lot cheaper to move some mass from one orbit to another, than to drag it out of our gravity well! That may mean that the rods are made of something less durable than tungsten, but when the rods are dirt cheap, the military will probably accept tens of thousands instead of mere thousands.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 16 2019, @10:26PM
Drop the non-very-large rods from a weather balloon, it's cheaper than to launch them in space and they'll very likely reach terminal velocity anyway. The real thing's speed drops from about 8000m/s (orbital speed) to 3300m/s (terminal velocity) anyway - that's a whooping loss of 73% of their kinetic energy due to the drag in atmosphere.
The algo of computing the re-entry trajectory is already known for a very long time - all the landing of re-entry capsules with the returning cosmonauts use it for more than half of a century. One needs to adjust the for the rod form factor, which can be determined in wind tunnels cheaper than launching the thing into space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 17 2019, @01:48AM (1 child)
Ballistic guidance isn't trivial. You still need actuators and a control system and some way of navigating for this to work. And a smaller weapon will be blown around in the atmosphere a lot more than a larger one, so it needs GNC even more.
As for asteroids, you're again trivializing the problem. You can't just drop asteroids onto a target unless you're trying to wipe out a whole city. If you want accuracy, you need GNC, which means a precision-manufactured projectile with some kind of GNC system.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 17 2019, @02:20AM
No, you don't just drag asteroids around to bombard earth. You mine them, for the materials needed. https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9378480/giant-golden-asteroid-psyche-61-billionaire-nasa-2022/ [thesun.co.uk]
Of course, mining the materials in space means setting up some fabrication facilities. The metals won't just take shape before our eyes, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @03:53PM (2 children)
X-37B?
After all, it spends most of its time just hanging around in orbit, maneuvering, doing whatever it does. Don't be fooled by the wings, they're only for re-entry and gliding back to the home base to allow for re-arming/provisioning for the next mission..see it for what it is, a reusable multipurpose MILSAT masquerading as a dinky wee space plane, with a payload bay capable of carrying mission pods for surveillance, H-K duties, name your own poison...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 16 2019, @04:38PM (1 child)
should have added, H-K duties, 'killing' a satellite doesn't necessarily mean having to blow the bugger to smithereens..
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday December 17 2019, @05:33AM
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