https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53518238
The US State Department described the recent use of "what would appear to be actual in-orbit anti-satellite weaponry" as concerning.
Russia's defence ministry earlier said it was using new technology to perform checks on Russian space equipment.
The US has previously raised concerns about new Russian satellite activity.
But it is the first time the UK has made accusations about Russian test-firing in space.
[...] The head of the UK's space directorate, Air Vice Marshal Harvey Smyth, said he was also concerned about the latest Russian satellite test, which he said had the "characteristics of a weapon".
"Actions like this threaten the peaceful use of space and risk causing debris that could pose a threat to satellites and the space systems on which the world depends," he said. He urged Russia to be "responsible" and to "avoid any further such testing".
[...] The US said the Russian satellite system was the same one it raised concerns about in 2018 and earlier this year when the US accused it of manoeuvring close to an American satellite.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @10:40PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:26AM
The US has to care about the public image and deal with public backlash while the Russians have to deal with less productivity, more corruption and more red tape.
Don' try to balance a game by making the factions equal, that takes the fun out of it, asymmetric games are way more fun to play because you can pick whatever faction is more your style.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2020, @10:48PM (13 children)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah5gAkna3jI [youtube.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @11:02PM (11 children)
Damn! I never took you to be such a bourgeois teeny-bopper!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 24 2020, @11:16PM (10 children)
Dude, please. I grew up in the '60's and early '70's. We didn't have all the gay shit you kids grew up with. Chicks today have smartphones and sexting. Girls then had hula hoops and bobby socks. We didn't have all the video you have - we were lucky if someone allowed us to listen to their car stereo. You spoiled litte bourgeois asses shouldn't make fun of your elder bourgeois.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @11:28PM (8 children)
Looking back, I thought 70s was THE loony decade, with all them disco dancing and kungfu fighting, but then look at these millenials.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:29AM (6 children)
Don't forget the hair. "Big hair" started out as a black thing - then all the white kids had to have big hair. That was when I first noticed that a lot of white people seemed to wish they were black.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:47AM
That "big hair" shit kept up thru the 80s - remember the "hair metals?" Even the limeys are infected - see Thomson Twins.
Now, the jerry-curl, that is a genuine greasy disgrace - an embarrassing chapter in the African American history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @03:20AM (2 children)
What does that mean, "wish they were black?" Is blackness also a part of this decadence narrative you're spinning?
The youth today, they are too black. The boys are too girly and the girls are too boyish, they have no respect for the social constructs of the white man. White men must assert the hierarchy that conveniently places white man at the top. If they do not, blacks might start acting white! Then the white snowflake race with its half baked racialism and social construct theory of gender will really be in trouble!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:29AM (1 child)
Bored kids in the 50s came up with crazy new novelty dances, bored kids in the 2020s come up with crazy new novelty genders.
What changes is the fads, not that fads exist.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @12:07AM
Fuckin' Proud Boys and their Apache Attack Helicopter fetishes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:38PM (1 child)
I do remember that I wanted to be black like my older cousin when I was a kid. Sadly not possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @02:01PM
Follow your dreams [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:31AM
The loony decade was the 90s. Need proof [youtube.com]?
Drugs are bad, mmmkay? They make you like THIS!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @04:25AM
Few things were more gay than the 90s. Bunch of posers
I can't believe you did that. If you found those guys in a Beavis & Butthead show, I wouldn't think you're so weird, especially for someone your age
By the way, Class of '73
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday July 25 2020, @05:00AM
I love music from the early 90s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @10:52PM (1 child)
Star Wars, baby, let's go. Now all kinds of shits will fall out of sky.
Those descendants of the penal colony down under are probably best equipped to cope, with drop bears and flying spiders and what not.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday July 24 2020, @11:27PM
already had a chance to practice [history.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday July 24 2020, @11:22PM (2 children)
So a kinetic space weapon? Is it for space combat or do they have fantasies of orbital bombardment (aka rods of god)? A prequel?
https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/these-air-force-rods-from-god-could-hit-with-the-force-of-a-nuclear-weapon [wearethemighty.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 24 2020, @11:57PM
Is best to get on record that the other side did it first so that escalation is merely defending the righteous. This lesson learned in the early days of WMD.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:38AM
At present, the weapons are just satellite killers - can you imagine the chaos if US GPS were taken offline while Russian controlled GPS remained functional (and encrypted...)
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by PaperNoodle on Friday July 24 2020, @11:56PM
This reminds me of a way to clean up space junk [dailymail.co.uk]. IIRC, one of the issues was the ban on weapons in space. If you can clean up space junk you can shoot down satellites and any laser would be classified as a weapon subject to the ban.
Maybe Russia should learn from the Chinese [popularmechanics.com] about PR and marketing.
In other news, the new motto for the Space Fore is sounding better.
B3
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:03AM (1 child)
So we'll have to ask the Senegalese as a tie-breaker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:10AM
Keep making cookies and shut the fuck up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:10AM (12 children)
I don't know. It seems convenient just as the "Space force" has been set up, out comes a threat from some "evil enemy", that happens to perfectly justify the existence (and presumably request for massive funding) of this new division.
Russia (and China), already have ground based anti satellite weapons, but I guess a space based system might provide strategic advantage. Then again, for all we know the X-37b is a weapons platform as well as a surveillance one, and the Russians are now playing catch up.
As for weapons in space, from what I remember the outer space treaties only banned nuclear weapons in space, not non nuclear weapons. In fact from what I remember the "Salyut 3" space station had a heave machine gun installed, and that was years ago.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 25 2020, @12:41AM (11 children)
A Tesla Roadster in orbit is a potential weapons platform, all you have to do is hang a crossbow out the window.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by khallow on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:14AM (10 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:27AM (9 children)
-Anything- in orbit is a potential weapon, all you have to do is set up the trajectory correctly.
"In orbit" = "Moving at ~10 kilometers per second. A goddamn soft-boiled egg is a weapon, with that kind of velocity.
Niggling little details like surviving re-entry and surviving to reach the target are left as an exercise for the reader.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:37AM (8 children)
Aka "kinetic weapon".
Same as a bullet. A big one. Guided.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:49AM (7 children)
See "Rods from God".
Launched from orbit.
Depleted uranium / tungsten alloy javelin the size of telephone poles. Arrive almost white hot from re entry heat.
Heavy and hard.
Guided. Useful for precise entry into underground bunkers.
Quite useful for arranging leaders of threatening factions meet their maker.
On our schedule.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 25 2020, @03:17AM (5 children)
A telephone pole of DU/W is pretty heavy, can't have too many of them on orbit without somebody noticing the launches - de-orbiting them to a precise place, at a precise time will require quite a bit of advanced notice.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @05:05PM (4 children)
Original design was several stashes in fairly low orbits. Given an orbit of an hour or two you could drop one within minutes to hours. Precise place isn't too difficult, time and place would be harder. The telephone pole size of DU is overkill. The original was more the size of a crowbar and was supposed to take out tanks and ships.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday July 25 2020, @07:17PM (1 child)
> ... take out tanks and ships.
Think one of them hitting say an aircraft carrier. Fairly big target, not moving to fast or at all. Lots of hardware to the bottom of sea if/when you hit it. Probably good value for the buck it cost to drag it up into orbit in the first place. Not to mention it's not that many of them so just knocking a couple, or one, of them out is the basis for a lot of problems (not to mention WAR ... but if you are already there it's a nice, non nuclear, first strike).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:23AM
I doubt a single crowbar sized one would sink an aircraft carrier. But you could have different sizes too, or just hit it multiple times.
There's a rule of thump for hyperfast impact penetration (KE sufficient to vaporize more than twice the impactor mass). Take the density of the impactor / Density of target * length of impactor = Depth of penetration (P).
If you then assume all the kinetic energy was liberated as explosive energy in a column as wide as the impactor and as deep as P you will get a pretty good approximation of the crater.
Beyond a certain speed, for any specific impactor, craters don't get much deeper, they just get wider.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 26 2020, @12:54AM (1 child)
My wife plays "spot the station" - we can go for weeks between overflights, need significant delta-v to make that "anywhere on Earth within 90 minutes" thing happen in reality.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 26 2020, @03:34AM
You need to give them a significant velocity change anyway to drop them out of orbit. You build in a bit of excess to allow targeting.
A platform could target a track a 1000 miles wide half an orbit ahead. Outside that track you might need the crowbar to do an orbit or two before impact. Ballistics is complicated but "take this orbiting 50kg steel bar and drop on this location using only 800m/s delta V" is a solved problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @09:45PM
> Guided.
Yes. Accuracy to within +/- 1 continent.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday July 25 2020, @03:07AM (3 children)
You mean they might shoot down our GPS satellites and phone carriers might not be able to sell our realtime location to anyone and everyone and the government might not be able to look it up at will? Motherfuckers might have to learn the streets they're driving on? Oh hell no, we can't have that.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @07:39AM (2 children)
Thanks for being ignorant. The phone location is already mostly not using GPS anyway and instead is using phone tower triangulation instead. A hint about that is you can see your location inside large structures, like a shopping mall or underground tunnel. A place where GPS just doesn't work.
Also, shooting any GPS satellites is definitive act of war and as such would result in major destruction of the other systems. You too can go up to an elephant and whack it in the foot with a hammer, but don't expect the elephant to be calm about it afterwards.
Finally, in a scenario without GPS, you might not have to worry about street names anymore or living for that matter.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday July 25 2020, @11:48AM
Get off my lawn!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @01:45PM
Sattelite gadget destroyed, kill all humans!
Now come on skeeter he ain't hurting nobody.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2020, @08:55PM
See subject: hello again you rotten bastards. I'm back and this time I'm here to stay.
* I hate niggers more than ever and I'm not ashamed of it one fucking bit. Fuck all kikes, too.
Don't even think about trying your spam mod bullshit with me. I own this fucking shithole and you stupid niggers can't stop me. I own this fucking shithole and you stupid niggers can't stop me. Fuck all of you rotten bastards & tranny kikes. You niggers can't hold a candle to anything I've accomplished.
APK
P.S.=> All of you fuckers like martyb can go eat shit and die... apk
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday July 26 2020, @06:18AM
With items like Elon musk's satellites of peace fleet, able to focus rays at any frequency (which is inherent in 5g and subsequent tech, which hasn't a floor frequency emission as it can manage interferences at will), and able to rely any communication back to the USA, chinks and russkies need a way to take them down should they become troublesome. The chinese will simply trigger some hardware backdoor (bet something in anything is made in china nowadays), ruskies have to zap.
Account abandoned.