norskog@fortune.UUCP (Lance Norskog) (03/19/84)
About putting BB's into space:
The true Bedouin never poisons his neighbor's well,
no matter how he feels about the creep.
Lance C. Norskog
Fortune Systems, 101 Twin Dolphin Drive, Redwood City, CA
{cbosgd,hpda,harpo,sri-unix,amd70,decvax!ihnp4,allegra}!fortune!norskogbrucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (03/25/84)
------------- Thank you, Kieran Carroll, for setting the record straight about how easy it is to kill a space station. I was going to make the same points, and you have saved my fingers some work. One point I would like to add is that the simplest satellite killer of all, good against space stations too, is a few kilos of BBs, put into a nearly identical orbit to the target, but with the opposite rotational sense. Total impact velocity nearly twice orbital velocity (>15 KPS total for LEO) means a lot of kinetic energy. So it costs a little more deltaV to get it into orbit because you have the Earth's rotation bucking instead of aiding you. You can still carry a lot of BBs on something the size of a Thor-Delta. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!tektronix!orca!brucec CSNET: orca!brucec@tektronix ARPA: orca!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay
brucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (03/26/84)
-------- >> The true Bedouin never poisons his neighbor's well, >> no matter how he feels about the creep. >> Very true, Lance, but somehow I don't see the combatants in an orbital combat as Bedouins. Note that neither the U.S. nor the USSR seems very concerned about the effect on central Europe of a major tank/tactical nuclear battle. And not too many people in the government or the military listened to the protests against Operations Argus and Starfish (they detonated nuclear bombs on LEO to see the effect on the ionosphere) or Operation Haystack (this one dumped a few kilos of metal needles into orbit to see if they would reflect radio waves). The moral seems to be that those who don't live there don't care what their actions do to the habitability or usability of a place. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!tektronix!orca!brucec CSNET: orca!brucec@tektronix ARPA: orca!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay USMail: M/S 61-183 Tektronix, Inc. P.O. Box 1000 Wilsonville, OR 97070
giles@ucf-cs.UUCP (Bruce Giles) (03/26/84)
Who said anything about permanently poisoning the well? Launch the BBs into a suborbital trajectory, and time the launch so that at some point in time they will occupy the same `point' in space as the space station. The entire time from launch --> collision --> reentry of BBs would be less than one hour. Of course, you still have to worry about space station fragments, but they should be relatively easy to avoid. ave discordia going bump in the night ... bruce giles decvax!ucf-cs!giles university of central florida giles.ucf-cs@Rand-Relay orlando, florida 32816
kcarroll@utzoo.UUCP (Kieran A. Carroll) (03/27/84)
* With reference to how easy it is to kill a space station, Ben Bova once wrote an amusing short story about how easy it'd be to terrorize a lunar colony. The setting: an American lunar settlement, which is near its Russian counterpart; both of them are armed with light artillery. The plot: tensions had reached a high level on the moon; the American and Russian bases finally started shooting at each other. The barrage only lasted a day; they both stopped after they figured out what effect their projectiles were having. Tou see, both sides had been firing high-velocity rounds, most of which missed the intended target. The rounds had enough velocity to go into orbit around the moon; after one orbit, the American's barrage had circled the satellite, and blew holes in the American base. Similarly with the Russians. Both sides soon realized that their own fire was endangering them more than the other side's, since the laws of orbital mechanics assured that a bullet fired with elliptical-orbit velocity would eventually come back to its launch site, whereas the Russian marksmen only got through >some< of the time. The story takes place several years after the short battle; the American base commander is explaining to a congressional budget investigator (or some such official) just why they need yet >another< high- powered computer at the base: to calculate the ever-changing orbits of the years-old volleys, so they'l know when to... ...DUCK!!! -Kieran A. Carroll ...decvax!utzoo!kcarroll
al@ames-lm.UUCP (Al Globus) (03/28/84)
While it may be easy to kludge up a space weapon, such weapons should be easier to counter and less deadly than those developed with gigabucks. Also, a minor point. The vast majority of all satellites go in more or less the same direction. The reason is straightforward. If you launch East you get up to 1000 miles/hour free velocity from the Earth's rotation. If you launch west you have to overcome up to 1000 miles/hour before you get any forward motion at all. This blurb is in response to someone who thought satellites go every which way and could easily be set into head on collisions.
REM%MIT-MC@sri-unix.UUCP (04/02/84)
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
From: DBraunstein.ES@Xerox.ARPA
I've never heard of any nuclear tests that were conducted in earth
orbit, but I guess they probably occured before 1963 (year of test
ban treaty).
I think the person who used "LEO" to describe the location of the
H-bomb tests was using inappropriate terminology, since the weapons
were sub-orbital lobs, not actually orbiting Earth. Perhaps they were
in the same place that a LEO satellite might be, but LEO refers to a
real orbit, i.e. a phase-space locale (position plus velocity), not
just to a simple distance from Earth. The H-bomb test was just "up in
space", not "in Low-Earth Orbit". I think you are correct, there never
were any H-bomb tests from actual orbit.
FROM:37'28N122'08W415-323-0720.PCNET (about 3 miles from Stanford)