Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica. Especially since the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect [1], denying humanity future access to low-earth orbit for the considerable future.
There is the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which forbids placing "nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner", but you can get around that by saying that it's just a conventional weapon, not nuclear or WMD. If it's for space to space combat, you could say that any weapon is potentially a WMD due to the Kessler potential, but if its space to ground, like an orbital missile platform or something, you are technically in the clear.
I'm guessing it doesn't ban weapons in space completely because of things like the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar. "No weapons in space" would ban that as well, but I think it's reasonable to have a survival kit, just in case
Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here.
I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules.
Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate.
A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude.
"Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them.
Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
Whipple shields use spaced plates to disperse the impact of a projectile on the first plate over a larger area on the second plate, and so on and so forth over four or five plates such that the final plate is not penetrated.
My father worked on high velocity impact ballistics and has some very nice multiple exposure results. The light gas guns used to propel the test cubes are just as interesting as the shields themselves.
Whipple Shields are a very important part of protecting things like the ISS, but are optimized more for chance high velocity impacts with tiny bits of debris than an adversary's targeted projectile or their robotic arm grappler, or indeed non-kinetic weapons like directed energy or EMPs which is probably the capability the US intends to imply here.
They're great for a 20mm x 5mm x 0.3mm fleck of paint or vacuum insulation weighing 30mg, not so much for a 10mm hex nut weighing 11g.
Armor can protect you against the smallest debris which post the least risk and decay the fastest. Everything else, not so much.
A question for you though - does that insulation vaporizing itself inside a whipple shield generate secondary debris comprised of the whipple shield and condensed aluminum droplets??
It's not quite as bad as that. Space is big and hitting stuff is really hard. Your hand grenade scenario has effectively been done a few times and it (obviously) didn't make LEO unusable. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
There are thousands of pieces of debris in LEO large enough to be tracked, and a lot more that's too small to track but big enough to do serious damage. This isn't good but it's not wiping everything out. Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
> Adding a few thousand more pieces of debris would not be even remotely as bad as using a tactical nuclear weapon in war would be.
The worst effect would be a nuclear weapon in space. The resulting EMP would probably fry more than enough electric and electronic devices to throw back whatever country is hit by it by decades.
The EMP effect depends on there being atmosphere to generate electrical fields from the bomb gamma flux. Being close enough and line of sight from the atmosphere can be sufficient to generate the effect in the nearby atmosphere. 400km is apparently the optimum height for coverage but not strength. Too far and inverse-square ensures the flux isn't sufficient. So just detonating a bomb "in space" may not do anything depending on the direct path distance to the satellites in question (the bomb gamma flux etc. of course poses its own threat). Look it up, the physics are interesting.
The US famously did that in the 60s (detonating nukes at roughly the height of today's ISS)[1]. Also some less famous ones, including a Soviet test that resulted in the EMP destroying a power plant [2].
Properly aimed at a populated area it would be devastating. And you can detonate bombs far from your enemy's country, then let earth's magnetic field lines transfer the EMP pulse to their territory. Good luck defending against that
That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
> That said, it'd take far more than one bomb to take down a country, unless we are talking city states
Hit the ten biggest metropolitan areas [1] with one nuke each and you'd hit about 88 million people and probably an even bigger share of all industry that isn't farming. The biggest problem is power transformers, there isn't much capacity in manufacturing them, it's already a bottleneck thanks to regular replacement and renewable energy / datacenter buildouts with 24+ months of lead time [2] - now imagine a significant war related impact, the lead time would probably skyrocket to at least a decade.
At least one source claims that the radius from a single device could be much, much larger [3], so with proper design to maximize an EMP (which even Starfish Prime wasn't intended to do), it is conceivable that dropping just two of these things over the East and West Coast respectively would cause immense damage.
A Fallout-style nuclear war, I think, would be easier to recover from than even a small exchange of EMPs.
Why do you exclude farming? Even if the tractors and other machines would still work, where would the harvest go under such circumstances? By which means? Think about how industrialized all that shit is meanwhile, with 'precision agronomy' by means of GPS, and so on? And as you said yourself: Transformers. Cooling for perishable stuff without electricity? Wanna rely on some Amish with horsedrawn carts?
Edit: Will the stocks of fertilizer last long enough, before some normalcy sets in again?
Many farmers still have really old diesel tractors around. These things run fully mechanical, sans the starter motor maybe. If there is one thing farmers are good at, it's in-field improvised repairs.
Refrigeration is mostly an issue with meat and milk, but eh, humans have managed to do fine for millennia without it.
Fertilizer however, oh boy, that will be a nightmare. We can get by now that we know about stuff like nitrogen fixers or the beneficial effects of livestock like chicken, but it requires a serious effort to rethink mindsets.
You know that most of the chickens we have won't make it for long, outside?¹ Because they are all highly 'optimized' breeds? Even coming with a handbook for that breed, several hundred pages long. Defining exactly what to feed when in which amounts and intervals, but also temperature and lighting. Where again does one get that stuff, when everything is chaos? Could more normal, robust ones be bred and distributed fast enough to compensate? In the required amounts?
¹As folks from PETA and the likes have discovered when freeing them, several times in multiple places. Beginning since at least two decades ago, meanwhile.
I doubt farmers have enough spare pre-electronics equipment sitting around to run the entire farm at the same scale. I'm sure they could improvise a way to continue farming, but output would be substantially impacted.
Humanity managed to do fine for millennia by existing in a state of frequent malnutrition and a not insignificant number of deaths from starvation. And it was never in a world with the population density we have today.
Depends? Think southern part of the United Kingdom with London and some harbours, Belgium, Netherlands, German Rhine-Ruhr Area. All with one 'stone'. Use some more stones for other large agglomerations, like Frankfurt am Main, Paris. While were at it: Hamburg+Denmark+southern Sweden. Moscow, St.Petersburg. Greater Los Angeles would be as bad. Silicon Valley/Bay Area. As would be anything around NYC/Washington DC/Philly/Baltimore. Seattle+Vancouver? Great Lakes? Any Chinese megacity? India? All of this wouldn't need that much nukes.
All of these are more vulnerable today, because of more dependency on electronics, even if they are hardened against shit like that, or in general, but many of them aren't. Which leads to cascades of dominoes falling, taking others with them.
I really wouldn't like to see that tested today at those scales.
If someone launched a nuke in space how would other nuclear powers react? I doubt they would assume "this is probably just an EMP and not a direct nuclear strike on our territory"
If you had time to plan it, you'd probably want to put the warhead on a satellite launched by a normal satellite launcher. It'll look benign until you detonate it.
I don't know how someone like me would even tell if this treaty is taken seriously. For example, going to space is really hard and has historically been somewhat unreliable at the best of times, which may mean that back in 1967 everyone was thinking "we don't even want a 1% chance that someone's failed launch to drop a 99%-usable warhead on a random location where some tiny country or organised crime group can find it".
> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target.
True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible.
Space is really, really big. I think it's hard for us to comprehend just how much space is in space, especially in 3-dimensional terms. It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO. There's tons of room in higher orbits. It would measurably increase the risk of passing through LEO on the way to other destinations and make some orbital planes unusable for e.g. Starlink or human habitation, but when you're just passing through, the odds of getting punctured are probably still reasonable, at least for unmanned spacecraft. Keep in mind that the ISS maneuvers out of the way when there are several miles to a potential impactor, just in case. We have all our eggs in one basket right now, so everybody is really careful with that one basket.
LEO is relatively simple to destroy simply because it's already so populated with mass, and that population is growing rapidly, and because they all come pretty close to crossing each other's orbits. Collisions with even very small pieces of debris typically generate secondary debris, growing the population.
A half-hour boost phase through LEO to get to higher orbit is dramatically less risky than spending 87600 hours there over a 10-year orbital lifespan. In the event that it all goes asymptotic, what sort of timescales would be afflicted by collision risks 10^6 or 10^9 or 10^12 greater than what exist now, I am uncertain.
Low earth orbit isn't that much space though right ? It is effectively a stack of practical orbital shells. A rogue nation state can make satellite launches financially unfeasible.
It would take a lot of sand to mine all of the useful orbital space, and that's just LEO.
Nope. You just need to make it a high enough probability of your spaceship being damaged that people won't take the risk. For humans that's very low. For anything moderately expensive it's quite low.
There's tons of room in higher orbits.
You have to go through the lower orbits to get there.
> You have to go through the lower orbits to get there
Math doesn't math.
The closest solution I've seen is putting 10^6 to 10^9 kg fragmented debris in the 700 to 1,000 km band to create a 5% failure rate at fastest transit, which is economically devastating. But that assumes away grain-grain collisions.
I think when I last ran the math, you'd need to sustain 5 to 10 Starship loads of fragmented debris to that orbit a week to create a proper barrier–near 100% hazard. At which point the solution becomes shooting down those launch vehicles. In a couple years (3 to 10, depending on the solar cycle), the skies would clear to about 1% hazard. That hazard, however, would persist for some time–how long is anybody's guess.
You fire a radar guided powerful laser pulse at the incoming object causing small surface ablation , intentionally a bit to the side, which will serve as a small reaction mass eject altering the trajectory of that incoming object.
This is not correct, and the experiment has been done a number of times with no real effect, most memorably in 01961, when Project West Ford put 480 million copper needles in 3500-km-high medium Earth orbit (MEO); but it's a little bit challenging to understand why.
The first reason is that outer space is just inconceivably big, even just the space in low Earth orbit (LEO). LEO has very nearly the same surface area as the Earth, which is to say, about 40% more surface area than the ocean. But the ocean averages 3.7 km thick, and LEO is 2000 km thick. So, roughly speaking, LEO is 50 times the volume of the ocean.
That's a lot of space to miss. There's about 15000 active satellites up there, mostly Starlink. Imagine there are 15000 ÷ 50 = 300 divers swimming at random places in the world's oceans, you have a gun that shoots magic bullets that go 7700m/s and never stop until they hit a diver, and you fire one into the ocean at random. How long is it going to take that bullet to hit someone? It traverses, say, 7700 cubic meters per second, but there are 1.32 × 10¹⁸ m³ (1.32 quintillion m³) of ocean it could traverse, and on average it has to traverse 4.4 quadrillion m³ before it hits someone.
It turns out that your poor bullet will bounce around the ocean for about 18000 years, which is the same thing that will happen to one of your ball bearings if it manages to stay in orbit.
The second reason is, perhaps surprisingly, air resistance. The atmosphere thins out exponentially but never quite stops. Most satellites are at a height where the orbits of even macroscopic multi-kilogram objects decay within a few years from air resistance unless you boost them; smaller objects like your ball bearings or the West Ford needles decay more rapidly. Indeed, all of the individual West Ford needles have already deorbited, despite being in MEO at four times the height of typical LEO satellites, though 44 needle clumps remain.
The third reason is the narrow nature of orbital dynamics. The reason you have to go 7600m/s is that you're in free fall, and you have to miss the Earth when you come down, by having moved far enough horizontally that the Earth isn't there any more. If your hand grenade sends the ball bearings flying backward along the orbit and/or downwards fast enough, they'll re-enter the atmosphere immediately. What's less obvious is that the ball bearings that it sends upwards will re-enter the atmosphere after half an orbit. Depending on how forceful your explosion is, only a narrow circle that stay in almost exactly the same orbit may survive.
None of the ball bearings will be lofted to a higher stable orbit. If they couldn't hit the Earth (perhaps because we replaced it with a very, very small black hole) and none of them reached escape velocity, they would all orbit back through the point where the hand grenade went off, once they'd finished an orbit. So (restoring the Earth to our scenario) even after 18000 years, your hand grenade will have only hit satellites at the same height where it went off in the first place, or slightly higher or lower.
The Kessler syndrome is a real, serious problem for space access, but it hinges crucially on the number of satellites up there to participate in the fragmentation cascade.
The wires in Project West Ford weighed something like 40 micrograms, with a diameter in the low tens of micrometers. They don’t really fit the criteria of what’s being discussed here - they would not do significant damage to other satellites, and while they could reenter the atmosphere and hit a person, you probably wouldn’t even feel it.
…and for those unfamiliar with this fun project, the idea was to provide a radio relay system that wasn’t easily disabled by an enemy. This was before communications satellites were common.
To set the scenario, we're talking about the orbits which ball bearings would end up in if you had a cardboard box full of ball bearings in a stable, circular low Earth orbit, and you set off an explosive in the middle of the box to scatter the bearings. You're wondering if the ball bearings that the explosive happened to launch prograde would end up in a stable elliptical orbit with a higher apogee rather than re-entering the atmosphere.
I'm not that strong on orbital dynamics, but I think the answer is that you're right. The ball bearings launched directly prograde would be in a new stable elliptical orbit with the perigee at the explosion point. That means I was wrong about the debris only affecting the orbital altitude where the explosion happened. But most of the ball bearings would still re-enter the sensible atmosphere within a single orbit.
The Δv required to deorbit from LEO is surprisingly small. In https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-... we find that deorbiting the International Space Station to a controllable place in "a remote area in the ocean" from its current 415 km altitude requires only 57m/s of Δv. The more precisely controlled Space Shuttle re-entry used 90m/s of Δv: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/calculating-.... It seems crazy that a change in orbital speed of only 1% would be enough, but there it is. There's a lot of explanation in that SE question.
The ISS document also explains that even the enormous ISS will deorbit by itself in "roughly one-to-two years without reboosts", which is why most LEO satellites are in somewhat higher orbits.
>A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time
But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated.
A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it.
What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values".
Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.
Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok.
Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.”
Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO
A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.'
It's all just geopolitical poo flinging.
----
Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
> Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation?
Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States.
> I think it's something similar with China
China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all.
> They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it
This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide.
> extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber
Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse?
> It's all just geopolitical poo flinging
Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices.
> A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality.
Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2]
> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon
Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people.
Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.
Yes, but again that was a conventional weapon, and would have been fine under the treaty. I don't exactly condone it but it was also crap and never flew again. This video https://youtu.be/e-n_V5iEwAs goes into some of the reasons it was a particularly crap idea
I have little doubt that the OST was circumvented by definitional tricks. That is how the game of treaties and power is played. Something like rods from God or a conventional bomb orbiting platform wouldn't be considered a WMD but most certainly are the types of weapons common folk would think the OST forbids.
I suspect since the OST didn't ban orbital weapons capable of attacking the surface outright that some of the signing parties already had them and didn't want to give them up.
>the survival guns on Soyuz (if they still fly them), used for defending yourself against wild animals in the event that you land in a forest or similar
Not to mention the 23mm cannon on Salyut 3, in case you needed to take out the wild animals from orbit.
Like Pompey “ Will you stop reciting laws to us? We are men girded with swords”
Might also mean, our civilization gets wiped out due to our stupidity m. In 1000 years, other galaxies also wonder, why are there no aliens? Are we the most advanced civilization?
Then get get “high IQ” president and wipe themselves out.
What is the point of any treaty with the current US administration which does not play by international laws? Rules and laws that the USA itself spearheaded after WW2.
The Soviets attached cannons to space stations, and the Chinese are believed to have deployed space-based weapons. The USA is actually a laggard in this field.
Exactly. Most of these things are just big world politics. Same for AI, btw.
"OMG dont do this this is horrible" as the other country does it and hasn't talked about it or haven't been caught doing it.
It's all information wars at the end of the day, and HN is not impervious to any of it. Its like OAI and Anthropic saying we should all slow down AI model work. Like, lol, right. As if others would do that.
The only way to be safe, so far, has to be that everyone is second guessing everyone's capabilities - not "ahah they dont do it anyway lets go crush em".
Same as nuclear weapons basically, we all have them.
To be fair, this move is coming after fairly strong evidence that Russia and China have been breaking the treaty by deploying weapons into space for years. Which the US has highlighted many times in the past.
At some point you have to acknowledge that the treaty is no longer being respected, and match capabilities to avoid being left at a disadvantage.
That said, I'm sure there were tons of people in the US military establishment who had been pushing for this for decades and were ecstatic at being allowed to do it at a broad scale.
Neither Russia nor China's known weapons deployment is likely to breach the very narrow restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty, and the latest capability the US has vaguely claimed probably doesn't either.
In practice, the US has had practical counter space and electronic warfare capabilities in space for decades (even a regular satellite with enough delta V is a viable weapon, but superpowers have more targeted capabilities than that), and the observable difference is that the current administration's approach leans more towards bragging.
The Chinese have been bragging about taking out one of their own satellites in a test of their capabilities for 8 years now. Russia would but they don't have the money to even try.
This place is no better than X...seriously...it is just too small for the propaganda operations to target and yet it is still just as bad. I don't even think it is HN's fault, just the skew of the population HN attracts.
Not even sure who I'm supposed to be propagandising for here, but as the person that actually works on European dual use satellite tech I can assure you it's well established fact that all superpowers have taken out their own satellites with ASAT weaponry (Russia more recently than China fwiw, though China's in-space capabilities are likely a lot better). None of those are a violation of the very narrow anti-WMD proscriptions in the Outer Space Treaty, and whatever counterspace capability the US is vaguely announcing here (or indeed the capability they and their adversaries have had for years) is unlikely to be either.
Russia was at least planning to launch a space-to-space laser back in 1987, but the prototype (essentially just a mass simulator, no lasers inside) failed on launch quite spectacularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
What kind of evidence are you expecting? Detailed photographs of the satellites on orbit?
These are credible institutions, with their statements regarding unusual orbital movements backed up by observations made by several independent groups.
The Chinese themselves blew up one of their own satellites as a test of their own capabilities. The missile was launched from the ground but targeted from orbit. They themselves say this and have since they did it 8 years ago. Your ignorance isn't an argument.
I'd like to see evidence which supports the claims and not have to rely on a call to authority fallacy[1] in order to agree with this collective-derived reality.
I have no doubt that there are weapons in space - Russian, Chinese, American - why wouldn't there be? - but I still want to see actual evidence.
None of the sources you give are impartial - all of them serve to profit from perpetuating fear of Chinese space activities.
Too often, xenophobic movements rely on authority figures to perpetuate their myths. Don't you agree?
What evidence would satisfy you that there are weapons in space? You either have to check yourself somehow, or trust a third party. Is there a third party you trust to provide evidence?
If they did, then all three are equally guilty of breaching the treaty and making weapons in space a new norm. That's plausible, sure.
If they didn't, it makes sense why they'd choose to compete on the same playing field now, as the norm is already broken.
None of what I'm posting is about saying the US are the 'good guys' here. Neither the US, Russia, nor China are 'good' for creating a new space arms race that puts everyone at more risk. It might be something we can understand from a purely rational perspective while disliking that it's happening.
Not really, LBH, if RU and PRC ask US to kneecap US launch tempo or set some Washington naval treaty tonnage to space limits, US would lol.
Rationally US (hegemonic stability) is incentivized to be uniquely bad, i.e. significantly MORE guilty of introducing new/more escalatory arms race conditions by virtue of having most space capability/tech stack, and incentivized to maintain capability gap. US typical the one pushing boundaries to seek absolute security because it cannot (and currently does not have to) accept parity.
Followed by RU simply because they're broke and have to do desperate shit like Cosmos 2542. Meanwhile PRC counterspace rollout has been within norm, i.e. match capability of others, land->space direct ascent ASAT, coorbital rendezvous / proximity ops, EW/dazzlers (land+space). PRC cooking from the regular menu, partly because catchup, but PRC also way past RU in space now, but hasn't introduced any destabilizing novel counter space tech that would escalate space arms race except doing normal stuff at scale that triggers US anxiety over size of gap. But ultimately, no one is forcing US to break meta continuously because it rationally won't accept vulnerability.
DoD/W didn't have to weaponize SpaceX... but they did, so we should not be surprised in future if general international space admin/order breaks down in future. i.e. US/SpaceX got first come first serve dibs on favourable civilian LEO orbital shells assignment from UN/ITU, but now SpaceX now civil military fusion platform, so probably expect PRC counter space mega constellations to simply ignore US space entitlements in future.
We don't know what the US does. They are just as enigmatic as the Chinese to the point that US Congress is not even allowed to learn about the secret projects.
Space is more like international waters legally. The outer space treaty is rooted in maritime law principles. The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US. There will likely be some escalation in debris and damage resulting from that might eventually result in some kind of action. But most of the damage here would be economical and sending more stuff up is now very cheap. Manned flight is relatively infrequent and aside from the space station and very short lived space tourism, most activity in space is unmanned.
So, if a lot of satellites get taken out that's a problem but if a few get lost, nobody will care. The space station and other important stuff can be in relatively safe orbits. There's also the notion that a lot of the debris in low earth object comes down pretty quickly. Lots of unstable orbits. LEO is where most of the activity is for things like starlink and competing constellations. Which moderates the risk a bit.
SpaceX satellites are doing about 1000 collision avoidance maneuvers every single day. The addition of new networks is going to congest things even more and the risk of unavoidable cascading failure keeps increasing at a massive rate.
Those are pre-emptive moves for minimizing what is a very small chance of collisions, not narrowly escaped near certain collisions. Air traffic control does a similar thing with keeping planes spaced apart in zones under their control. In space a small thruster nudge will have a huge impact at a very low cost
That depends what you mean by "open ocean"? Vessels near ports or in defined traffic lanes frequently maneuver to avoid collisions as per the rules of the road. Outside territorial waters it's less common but still happens occasionally. Either way, those avoidance maneuvers are such routine events that no one really gathers data on them.
Loads of those result in crashes with some involving hundreds of cars.
Just one collision in space carries an ever-increasing risk of cascading into a major event with long-term effects (there's no a good way to call in a space wrecker to haul billions of tiny bits out of orbit).
Debris from a collision on water won't spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds.
> spread out into millions of floating pieces that speed around faster than a bullet, ripping random ships on the other side of the world to shreds
This isn't how debris clouds work. The most-complex ones occur when entirely separate orbits collide were you get an X-shaped (versus cylndricla or conic) debris cloud. But the energies of the collision inputs sharply curtail the orbits and places in said orbits the debris fragments can generally reach.
Idk, Iridium-Cosmos debris are still absolutely everywhere [0] after almost 20 years. The only place a ship collision's gonna leave debris is directly under it.
Space is big. Volume grows with radius in a way our intutiions don't seem to intuitively understand. Yes, debris in a space collision go further. But they're still bound by their energies. And that larger volume of collision debris (plus all other stuff in orbit minus the Moon) is still a smaller fraction of the orbital space than e.g. commercial air space on earth, and yes, that's including oceans.
Space is huge, but being on land has some advantages too. It's true that volume grows, but satellites don't have brakes in the way that cars do, nor is there a cleanup crew that removes the debris after a crash.
You can remove curbs and any other barrier to simulate the fact that cars can maneuver away from a crash site, but if no site is ever cleaned, and no car has meaningful brakes, crash sites are much scarier.
> The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US.
Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.
Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.
> Space really should be a neutral ground like Antarctica
"They are dismantling these systems because they do not expect they will ever have a use for these weapons. Not because chemical weapons are immoral. Because they are ineffective, whereas landmines, cluster munitions and nuclear weapons are assumed to have future uses. Morality was never at issue, effectiveness was.
That has some big consequences, most of which are actually unpleasant. It means that efforts to ban ‘immoral’ weapons that are effective will likely never succeed. The model that activists thought they were building on is a foundation of sand – the only way you ban weapons is after they are basically useless anyway (to cut that point finer: you get to ban weapons after they stop being useful to the great powers, who may then enforce the ban on smaller states). The idea that we might summon up enough moral indignation to set these weapons aside seems unfounded. We are not nearly so moral as my high school teachers imagined, nor are we so cowardly as a ‘Fremen apologist’ might think. We’ve simply made an amoral calculation about effectiveness" [1].
> the consequences of space debris might trigger the Kessler effect
Kessler is terribly understood in the public consciousness. There is no known solution for generally denying access to space using anything less than orders of magnitudes of the resources it would take to just continually shoot everything down. In high orbits, Kessler can deny specific orbits–GEO is a notable one that we could generationally fuck. But the idea that nobody will be able to go to space, much less LEO, is wrong and distracts from the real issues with space-based weapons, especially ones in LEO.
This just isn’t feasible it’s like wanting the ocean to be free of weapons. Space is most of what there is, nations that want to defend themselves will have to utilize space as a war fighting domain all we can do is put that off
That would likely require basically banning GPS, imaging and communication satellites too, if we get a WW3 I would be shocked if there weren't physical attacks against those assets by anyone with the requisite launch capabilities because they're just that useful to militaries. Maybe it gets relegated mostly to jamming them instead but I'd be surprised if that level of restraint happened.
Of course. But those are also limited to the areas around the jammers too. In a broader hot conflict there'd be a good reason to disrupt the opposition's GPS capabilities across the globe not just locally. It'd be pretty bad economically for many countries to lose GPS access in their homeland but difficult to achieve without a way to disrupt the satellites directly.
There's not really enough stuff up there to cause the kessler syndrome yet, maybe at some specific bands you could cause some annoyances... but ~75% of satellites are operating in bands that would decay into the atmosphere, fortunately it's just easier to operate in the decaying band anyway
They're not dumb; everyone knows this. It's like the old "mutually assured destruction" image of two people standing in a pool of gasoline, each with matches at the ready.
So one option is they're not planning kinetic weapons: directed EMP to burn out electronics, laser to burn out cameras, etc.
Another option is whoever deploys a kinetic weapon does not have investment at that rough altitude and wants to deny all players there; an outsider maybe.
I agree with the principle but Russia and China absolutely already have armed satellites in orbit, so that needs to be negotiated before unilaterally stopping.
Not really possible. For example, the Soviet Union had naval radar satellites (RORSAT) in space that could directly guide missiles to specific ships.
If a war would have kicked of in europe where transatlantic convoys would have been critical those satellites would have to be shot down by ASAT weapons.
Funny you mention Antarctica. Pretty sure that place is also heavily militarized. Some Norwegian sailors has being severely punished for sailing boats there.
The funny thing is people in conspiracy circle has being taking about that space has being militarized for years! China and Japan just openly talked them:
I really don't see why you'd disable WebAssembly and allow JavaScript instead. Expecting developers to make a fallback for a baseline-supported feature for any reason but backwards compatibility with runtimes that do not so support WASM is extremely silly.
I also have JS disabled in Firefox on my phone. It's on by default on my laptop, as I apparently visit different sites when my butt is planted in a chair.
My wish is actually for the days of NPAPI where Webassembly would be just another plugin (like Flash) and browsers clung to mainly HTML, JS, and CSS. Then developers wouldn't be quite so keen to rely on it and the web would be much less bloated. Yes, those days are long gone... As a tradeoff, I'd settle for a simple toolbar icon that lit up when Webassembly is running, and/or a high level UI (just like Location, Camera, and Microphone) so I can enable it for just those sites that need it. I tried selling Mozilla on the idea once but they apparently weren't interested.
Baselines aren't entirely universal. I remember the days when the Mozilla (or early Firefox) browser was the only viable web client for Linux, but some sites still opted to run behind ActiveX. Today I don't think you'll find a Haiku or Amiga browser with Webassembly support, nor Firefox for Linux on IBM Power motherboards. It's easy to forget that just because most any 'nix or BSD OS has a plethora of choices, that others aren't still dealing with the "ActiveX" situation and feeling like everybody's out to get them.
1Password can't even include ARM builds of their app in their existing packages [1]. I am highly skeptical of anything DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) is the benevolent dictator of, and for good reason [2]. Perhaps that money would be spent better elsewhere in the ecosystem.
Far from it, EU law would need to be transposed in some very specific areas covered by the agreement, and mechanisms are in place to limit what retorsions can be put in place if Switzerland refuses such transposition.
You clearly have no idea how the EU works; she is the head of the Commission, which is nominated by the Council (27 elected heads of state), and needs to be approved in by the Parliament (directly elected). So sure, yeah, she isn't directly elected, but she still needs a massive amount of multinational political support.
Even then, all the power is in the Commission; the Commission is split in areas (competition, energy, trade, etc.), and each country nominates a commissioner in each area, and the total Commission gets approved once again by democratically elected Parliament. The head of the Commission has only one single vote, and a majority vote decides if anything passes, and even the Parliament has to approve it. That said, I think we all want Parliament to have the ability to propose legislation.
So don't take this ignorant take in here and present it as some kind of dictatorship and a fundamental flaw of the EU that undermines it all; the EU has been a massive positive force for the continent, and people like you just like to shit on it.
What do you call a state with an unelected president? This role has come about with no citizens in the EU being asked to approve it or vote for it. Being selected by a handful of bureaucrats is a creepy technocracy with zero pretensions for being a functioning democracy. Foolishness to see it any other way.
It highly depends. Everything from "monarchy" to "indirect democracy".
Even the Americans don't elect their president directly, they have a special council inbetween to distribute more power to the sparsely populated states.
Russia is a direct democracy (the people do directly elect their leader) but also the example of why technicalities like that make no difference in how fair politics are.
Who, in Europe, even knew they were getting a de facto president who they could not choose? This is meant to be a rationalised organisation with lofty egalitarian ideals, and yet it has to struggle to compete against descents into chaos and corruption in USA and Russia.
The Euro is actually one of the reasons they want to join; even their prime minister stated it explicitly. It would be a more stable currency than their own.
It really should be required for manufacturers to publish full details about how the hardware works so that alternative software can be developed. I'd wholly support that.
Apple, for instance, does not provide low level device documentation sufficient for creating open source drivers - for instance - publishing documentation on the Apple GPU and coprocessor would have reduced the development effort of the Asahi GPU driver by 90%.
If Apple was compelled to release low level documentation for their Apple Silicon hardware (audio, usb, gpu, power management, etc) - Linux would have been running on Apple hardware long ago.
There is plenty of gas in the EU; we decided that it was undesirable to extract. Honestly pathetic; strategic autonomy and energy security is much more important.
Yes. Strategically Europe keeps getting things wrong while, e.g., China keeps getting thingss right: they leverage their domestic coal reserves while going all in on nuclear and renewable, and they do it comprehensively with battery tech, solar panels tech, and EVs, too, as you can't lower dependency on foreign oil if all your cars run on petrol. But in fairness they didn't have the lobby of a powerful "legacy" auto industry (another textbook case of innovator's dilemma?)
It's been annoying to me as an end user that so many basic things require nightly. I use nightly as my main toolchain, but enabling unstable features makes a project nightly-only, which is undesired for crates that don't already revolve around the unstable feature.
I most often encounter unstable features when I reach for a basic common-sense utility method and discover that it's not stable. Like just earlier today I would have reached for bool::toggle which not only is unstable, but is also newly added as of like a month ago! but some unstable methods have been sitting around for years.
And now that IntelliJ-Rust is proprietary, I can't even make a feature request anymore for the ability to exclude unstable features from the autocomplete. So they will taunt me forever, perfect little helpers just locked away.
> It's been annoying to me as an end user that so many basic things require nightly
It used to be the case a decade ago, but now I wouldn't agree that any "basic" things require nightly (I wouldn't call portable SIMD "basic" at all for instance).
> Like just earlier today I would have reached for bool::toggle which not only is unstable, but is also newly added as of like a month ago!
This is very likely not the kind of feature that will stay on nightly for a long time, but is instead one of the many convenience feature that land on stable every release. The 6-weeks release cadence with beta in between means there's always at least 6 weeks and up to 3 months between the time a feature land on nightly and the day it reaches stable, even if the feature is as consensual as this one.
> And now that IntelliJ-Rust is proprietary, I can't even make a feature request anymore for the ability to exclude unstable features from the autocomplete.
Can't you tell it to use stable as the default target, and use nightly manually in cargo?
> This is very likely not the kind of feature that will stay on nightly for a long time, but is instead one of the many convenience feature that land on stable every release.
Easy example of a basic method that has been unstable for a really long time: [T]::as_slice [0] since 2024 [1]. Apparently, stabilization was attempted earlier this year [2] but was then rolled back [3]. While clearly it was not yet ready for stabilization, it still took over a year before the first attempt.
Another one: Option::zip_with [4] since 2020 because nobody's figured out if it's worth having over .zip(...).map(...). Option::zip was actually stabilized [5] later in 2020 but Option::zip_with has since been sitting in limbo for over five years.
Another one: <*const [T]>::as_ptr also since 2020 [6]. I can't remember if there's an alternative now but dealing with slice pointers without relying on unstable methods has historically been very difficult/annoying. I ran into a bunch of this kinda stuff while working on a crate for iterating over rows/columns of image buffer subregions, because I wanted to use and support slice pointers. (Specifically I think getting the length of the slice pointer was nearly impossible without invoking UB, because constructing a reference (which was the only safe way to access a len method) could break aliasing rules. However I think the len method on slice pointers was stabilized a while ago so that particular problem is no more.) Speaking of which, <*mut [T]>::split_at_mut has been unstable since 2022 [7]...
I'm not saying there's no reason for any of this, just that as a Rust developer it's been frustrating. There are enough of these all over the place that it feels like a real occurring problem, even if it's not reasonable to expect a volunteer open-source project to pay full attention to everything ever.
> Are you saying it doesn't suggest unstable features when using a stable toolchain? That was not my experience before I started using nightly.
Oh really? I've never used any Jetbrain product so I don't know but if it's indeed the case even when you don't even use a nightly toolchain that sounds like a very bad design.
For these sort of things, I wish they would have some semi-stable beta or prerelease tracks other than just nightly so you could use the new features on a somewhat stable branch. If something is in nightly that is too crazy for a lot of projects to really try and exercise it because so much is changing constantly. Like a monthly or quarterly stabilization would be amazing, that may still have experimental features not making it into stable, but has a period of bugfixing w/o intentionally breaking changes to settle down.
Eh, it's hard to prove absence, and time is a beneficial quantity here. The longer something sits on nightly, the greater the chance that bugs are identified before it reaches stable and its usage significantly increases.
A lot of bugs with SIMD libraries are in the domain of interactions, not functionality--e.g. SIMD malfunctions on rare chips, chips with previously-unseen combinations of hardware/userspace firmware/microcode behavior, compilers run in weird harnesses that lie about hardware capabilities, and so on. I assume that's the case with Rust's portable SIMD as well.
If your QA is unpredictable individual use-cases (as with most OSS projects), then there's no way to measure "testing complete" or "coverage"; letting it bake for awhile is the best approach available.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
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