SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Space Force unveils logo, 'Semper Supra' motto - SpaceNews:
The U.S. Space Force revealed its new logo and motto as the service seeks to build branding and cultural identity.
The black-and-silver service logo unveiled July 22 has the delta wing as its central element that is also found in the Space Force seal and flag. There is a "Space Force" horizontally shaped logo and a USSF vertical logo.
The Space Force motto "Semper Supra" means "always above." It represents the service's role in establishing, maintaining and preserving U.S. freedom of operations in the ultimate high ground, a Space Force spokesman said.
The logo was designed by the Department of the Air Force's advertising agency GSD&M.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Space Force Unveils Logo, ‘Semper Supra’ Motto
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 77 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @07:50PM (10 children)
The U.S. has defacto held the high ground in space since 1969 - to have to strut around a special branch of the military to reiterate that smacks of a creeping insecurity that it may no longer be true.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @08:47PM (1 child)
"The U.S. has defacto held the high ground in flight since 1903 - to have to strut around a special branch of the military to reiterate that smacks of a creeping insecurity that it may no longer be true."
-- someone in 1947
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM
In 1947 we were far from "in control of the air..." My grandfather was drafted into the Army Air Corps shortly before the Air Force was branched off.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 24 2020, @08:57PM (5 children)
It isn't clearly true anymore of the US military. SpaceX might reasonably claim to currently be pretty securely in the lead among the non-military, but when it comes to the military, the US has been dragging it's feet. (Not that that's an inherently bad thing. Kessler syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [wikipedia.org] is a real possibility. And many possible space based weapons are indiscriminately destructive. It isn't too good if a strike on your opponent on the other side of the world boils a cubic mile or two of ocean in a couple of minutes. [For that one think asteroid impact.])
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 25 2020, @10:59AM (4 children)
Let's take 1.5 cubic miles at 25C as the starting temperature.
To evaporate that water, you'll need to bring it to boils () then evaporate it - water is a bitch, latent heat of evaporation (2.26 MJ/kg) is so much higher than the specific heat (4.184 KJ/Kg·K - for a ΔT = 75K, you only need 0.3138 MJ/kg) that I'm going to ignore it.
So how may kg in a 1.5Mile3? Well that's about 6.25222611849·109m3 (at 1609.34m/mile) of water, or 6.25·1012 kg of water.
So to evaporate 1.5Mile3, one will need 14.125·1012MJ or 14.125·1018J. To put it in perspective, that's the energy of a matter/antimatter bomb with a total mass of 157kg.
---
Let's suppose you stop an asteroid in the belt from orbiting the Sun (a valiant display of energy control on its own) and let it free-fall onto Earth - what mass that asteroid need to be? Ceres has an orbital radius of 413.7·109m (and Earth's orbit is about 150·109m in radius. At a Sun mass of 2·1030kg and the gravitational constant of 6.673middot;10-11, a kg in freefall between the two orbits will net you a paltry 0.567·109J. So your freefalling asteroid will need a mass of 24.9·109kg.
(I'll let you ponder what energy you'll need to spend to alter the orbit of an asteroid in the asteroid belt on a collision course with Earth's orbit. If you are capable of such a feat, a much better use of that energy would be to dump it directly on your enemy).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:48PM (3 children)
Excellent calculations that miss the point. 1/16 of a cublic mile of water is still so bad that it doesn't stay localized, and targeting it is difficult. I didn't want to pick any place in particular, but most plausible targets are close to an ocean. The Chicxulub impactor was about 10 – 15 km (6 – 10 miles) in diameter, and I was envisioning something considerably smaller. And it's still overkill.
Many space based weapons are overkill with wide dispersion and difficult to target. Precision targeting isn't usually really a plausible assumption. As for "dumping the energy directly on the enemy", that's pretty much was a meteor impact is...if your aim is good. Lasers are a lot less efficient, and building them gives warning.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 26 2020, @12:11AM (2 children)
Speaking about missing the point - as of today, no nation is capable of energies required to deflect a meteor towards Earth, much less doing it with enough precision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 26 2020, @01:43PM (1 child)
I think you overestimate the energy required. I'll admit that application is beyond current state of the art, but small amounts of energy applied at appropriate points of the orbit could do it even with the modest amounts of energy currently available. (Of course, it might take a few decades to do the job.)
Actually, I'd need to study the matter a bit but I think that if the asteroid is rotating (which almost all are) that there are angles at each rotation that could be usefully used to perturb the orbit in many directions. Thinking a bit more, though, it might be more like centuries.
Still, if you're only considering near-term dangers I'll admit that something like "rods from god" is potentially much more near term. And again I figure that it would have a huge circular error, though it's not going to directly cause a global disaster. Indirectly, however, even setting something like that up is likely to cause someone to trigger a Kessler syndrome.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 26 2020, @02:03PM
No, I don't think so. If you pick an asteroid from the belt, you'll need to "convince" it to change its momentum (at least as direction) to intersect Earth's orbit - in other words, to push it towards the Sun. That Δv (as vector) is going to cost somewhere the same order of magnitude with the difference in the potential energy between the two orbits.
When it comes to the time required to deliver the energy, if it takes decades, not only it's useless as strategy, but aiming it with enough precision against your enemy is totally out of the picture.
Even Lazy Dogs [wikipedia.org] launched from stratospheric balloons has better chances to deliver some damage to your enemy that asteroid bombardment. Be it only that you'll need to spend a multimillion rocket to down it and the attacker only needs a few $1000 to launch it from international waters on a wind that will get it over your territory somewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by jelizondo on Friday July 24 2020, @09:46PM (1 child)
Except the almost 10 years U.S. astronauts had to use Russian rockets [wired.com] to get to space!
Quoting Santayna: "Those who can not remember the past are condemn to repeat it."
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24 2020, @10:29PM
Manned space travel always has been political showboating... the real power is in remote controlled systems.
🌻🌻 [google.com]