Posted on 06/22/2018 5:47:37 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Russia has pledged severe repercussions if President Donald Trump’s order to set up a new, space-oriented military branch violates a treaty banning nuclear weapons in the cosmos.
Trump said this week he will establish a sixth branch of the military named the “Space Force,” pending budgetary approval from the U.S. Congress. The idea could require the U.S. to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction but not conventional arms in space.
Viktor Bondarev, head of the Committee on Defense and Security of Russia's upper parliamentary house, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency he hoped “there’s still remnants of common sense in the American political elite” that would compel the U.S. to remain in the pact.
“But if the U.S. withdraws from the treaty, then of course, not only ours but other states will follow with a tough response aimed at ensuring global security,” Bondarev told RIA on Tuesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
I agree with the sentiment on robustness. Unfortunately, as Spock once said, it is always easier to destroy than to create. Space is VERY expensive. Most satellite cost millions if not a billion dollars to build and launch. It takes very little to disable them from the ground if you have an adversary with the inclination to do so.
Space will never (or at least in my lifetime and probably the life time of my children) be populated to the point where the reluctance to press a button that exists for nuclear deterrence is present. So we can spend Trillions (that’s what it would cost) to have all our space assets armor plated, or we can stay in our budget and work all the cost, schedule, and performance trades to get best bang for the buck, and try to use other forms of influence (economic and political power) to shape the environment so that we don’t have to spend the treasury on space battleships that are obsolete shortly after they are launched.
Congress wont approve the trillions (and arguably shouldn’t), so the reality is we figure out the best way we can afford to deal with it.
That's the crux of the problem on land and sea too. It took 250 million dollars to repair the USS Cole from $250 worth of explosives. The land war costs are also quite asymmetric.
So we can spend Trillions (that’s what it would cost) to have all our space assets armor plated
Many are already going to be destroyed by inevitable solar flares and others are armor plated to some extent against such threats. But they key is in the sentence of yours I quoted above, the satellites that cost a billion dollars have been "obsolete" for decades, and we just don't want to admit it. As for spending trillions, that's unlikely. That calculation comes from spending a billion dollars on a satellite, it's obsolete.
Maybe they’ll stop giving us a ride up there. We are still working on a manned launch capability.
One, we don’t have them. And no, we didn’t use them. But good sci-fi.
Not convinced yet about that. Lots of history with 'better, faster, cheaper' where you can only pick 2 of the 3 options. Also familiar with a lot of proponents of cheap cube sats, but they have yet to demonstrate the capability of the legacy assets, either in performance, robustness, or longevity.
Well, you are somewhat wrong on a couple of your adjectives and soon, completely wrong on all of your adjectives. Technology is finally catching up to the theory which has been around for decades and is gaining traction in many other domains. Technology does an ever-expanding range of functionality better, faster, AND cheaper.
Oh they’ve been weaponizing space for years.
We’re late to the game.
Not where space is concerned. You probably have little understanding of the requirements that go into large scale systems that support the warfighter. While a cell phone can due much more today for less than a computer could do 10 years ago, it does not have to be made to stand the rigors of a high radiation environment, or the shock and loads of launch. We barely have foundries left in this country, much less around the globe, that can make radiation hardened parts that will survive for years or decades in space. Keeping that technology available is expensive. Off the shelf only works for short lived low Earth orbit stuff, and then it cant be counted on past about 90 days. The warfighter need better than that.
LEO means low latency which means real time guidance among other capabilities. All the support to the warfighter will get better, faster (to deploy), cheaper AND longer-lived.
Your replies again tell me you have no concept of what a national system to support the warfighter includes and how it has to work 24/7/365 and the complexities of getting vital data from sensors to cockpits (as one of many examples). It cant ever go down, be out of service, and must supply products that you cant get through COTS. It has to be robust to all sorts of attack and it has to be secure from hacking. You can wish for something that ain’t if you want, but the reality remains.
Unfortunately you appear have no knowledge of distributed sensing, distributed processing, and distributed comms. Cyber security for distributed systems also has decades of theory behind it. Your mentality is antiquated and that is unfortunate.
I will give you an unclassified example so you might understand better.
GPS. To maintain GPS service world wide 24/7/365 with the accuracy required by the warfighter to ensure the when we drop bombs they land exactly on target and not 50 feet away where there might be our own soldiers, we have to build and fly 30+ satellites in the high radiation environment of MEO. Those satellite have to have rubidium or cesium atomic clocks that must keep time to nanoseconds. Clocks like that cost millions just by themselves, forget everything else on the satellite. And you have to carry multiple clocks in case one starts going out of spec. The satellites take years to build and test. The testing is more expensive that the building, but we test so we don’t spend 100 million dollars to launch something just to have it fail on orbit. Follow the satellite with a worldwide ground network so you can track performance and upload the tracking data to the spacecraft at least once each day no matter where its at, all secure from attack or hacking. Follow this with systems on the ground to monitor and correct issues in near real time. Before you get done accounting for all this, you have a small marching army with one mission in mind...to make sure that we can drop a bomb anywhere in the world at any time from 40,000 ft and know that it an go down a designated chimney of one house and not damage the house next door. You don’t get this capability cheap.
Your replies have you focused on the cost of a satellite. You have to refocus on what it takes to make the mission successful.
Your GPS esxample is a perfect example of outdated thinking. GPS is dead.
I challenge you to describe one space system that is successfully doing distributed sensing, distributed processing, and distributed comms. Those are currently the subjects of college papers and have yet to be fielded. Sounds nice but show me.
Tell that to the rest of the world, which is trying their best to emulate GPS.
Russia tried this before, and it didn’t work out well for them, both in the 60s and the 80s...
It’s always funny when a country with an economy the size of Canada threatens to “bury” us.
Of course replicating antiquated ideas is mostly whatl China does, although they have done some interesting quantum work that I believe is original. But current quantum implementations are expensive, like your GPS. That will change however, like everything else.
I'm pretty sure by that point in his career, Roger Moore would have had to wear a girdle to look like that.
The reason is hasn't been done is antiquated thinking.
Ok, blame it on everyone else's thinking, not on practical cost and reliability issues...
If you think GPS is dead, then there is no point in my spending further time on the subject. I am antiquated. (antiquated also got us to the moon in 69. Lets see your distributed systems do that.)
A manned system (to go to the moon) is going to be mainly centralized, gold plated and expensive. But a satellite system is not manned.
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