Satellite in space destroyed....

[Kuciwalker]

Satellites need not be nearly as expensive as they are. If there were a real threat then we would be able to mass produce them, cutting down costs immensely (a bunch of the cost is R&D and design and testing).

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


That was really bad

I know. Stream of consciousness.

[Jon Miller]

They want to scare us so they can keep the war footing up.

JM

[BeBMan]

I heard somewhere the Chinese cheated a bit - they changed the sat's course to move into the path of the incoming missile, to ensure the test is successful. That would indicate that indeed the technology they use currently sucks. However it would be foolish to believe that they can't do better sooner or later....

[Dis]

Anyone know the technology behind this?

How can a satellite moving 10 thousand miles per hour (just guessing here) be hit that easily, when we struggle to hit ballistic missiles running the same speed?

Granted most satellite courses are known in advance. And you don't have to do quick calculations on the fly. And satellites aren't changing course like a missile does (though it does curve around the earth).

hmm, maybe I answered my own question. But I am curious of the technology behind this.

[Kuciwalker]

hmm, maybe I answered my own question

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Dis
Anyone know the technology behind this?

How can a satellite moving 10 thousand miles per hour (just guessing here) be hit that easily, when we struggle to hit ballistic missiles running the same speed?

Granted most satellite courses are known in advance. And you don't have to do quick calculations on the fly. And satellites aren't changing course like a missile does (though it does curve around the earth).

hmm, maybe I answered my own question. But I am curious of the technology behind this.

You partly answered your own question. Satellite orbits are extremely predicatable, and this is a huge help. However, you also missed an important issue:

ABM systems (assuming they hit during ballistic part of flight, not powered) generally hit head-on. Their velocity and the missile's velocity are opposite (not entirely by any means, but generally not pointing close to the same direction).

Anti-satellite systems don't necessarily (and probably don't....though I don't know this for a fact) obey the same rule. While the sat's velocity may be many thousands of kilometers per hour and the satkiller velocity may also be many thousands of kilometers per hour, the closing velocity may be much lower. If the satkiller overtakes the satellite from behind, for instance, then the closing velocity might be measured in the hundreds of kph instead of thousands.

[Thorgal]

I dont think this is very difficult. Orbits calculation are not that hard. Surely some guidance is needed in the final approach to dont miss the objective for some meters though.

BTW try Orbiter you will learn a lot about these things.

[Patroklos]

They're catching up, though (not that I think that's necessarily a good thing).

5 years ago they hadn't yet put a man in space. In the 60s they still had cavalry. Like with horses.

They are closing the gap in some things, but the degrees of change are different the more advanced you go. the diference between 60's and 70's tech is no where near as great as the difference between 90's and 00's tech.

Aircraft. They just built their first home grown fighter and it is the equivalent of an F-16. That is 30 years behind. Their best airframes are still foriegn.

Warships: After 30 years of R&D they still have no carrier. They ever bought two from Russia and still can't make it work. Their newest supposedly "advanced" DDGs just mounted phased arrays, 26 years behind the US. Their nuke subs are 60's era as far as capabilities. Their one ballistic nuke sub will sink intself if used, assuming it works at all.

Basically all China does is wait for long enough for shareware to come out. After 26 years world technical expertise will advance enough that anyone can build a phased array radar, it is no longer state of the art. Meanwhile we are about to field the DDG-1000 with the next revolution in military sensors.

If you think about it, what equipment does China have that is the ****, something no one can touch?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Harry Tuttle
Except that the "1950s nuke" has to be carried by an incredibly expensive solid fuel rocket. That's a crapload of money to spend on an intercept for one measily, overlapped eye in the sky.

Do you just live to whine?

You silly enough to think the missile the Chinese used to shoot down the satellite was a nuke??

Its far cheaper for the Chinese to shoot down a US spy satellite once they can do it with no problem than it is for the US to replace them, and certainly cheaper to gain parity on the battlefield by denying the US its space assets than investing the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to match US space assets.

That is were you and Pat's (but Pats is a charicature, so there is no point speaking with him) seem to gloss over. The US has invested hundreds of billions of dollars over the decades creating the space assets that are central to US military supremacy. No other state can currently afford to match those space assets, giving the US a huge lead. But simply destroying stuff is always immenantly cheaper than making it. For just a few billion dollars, something the Chinese can certainly afford, specially since they have 1 Trillion dollars sitting in the bank, the Chinese can perfect crude but effective systems to knock down US spy satellites, and if they really wanted to be aggressive, perhaps try to go after the GPS system. The loss of those assets would be a HUGE strike against the effectiveness of US forces, a serious degredation of their capabilities.

A crude bomb blows things up just like a nice, shiny one.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Satellites need not be nearly as expensive as they are. If there were a real threat then we would be able to mass produce them, cutting down costs immensely (a bunch of the cost is R&D and design and testing).

And how do you get them into space? A slingshot?

I don't think one can really mass produce sophisticated surveillance and communications equipment, nor would it make sense to mass produce those things.

And again, the cost of putting them in place and the ability to put them into space is another bottleneck. Unless you think we can mass produce rocket launch sites.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by GePap
And how do you get them into space? A slingshot?

The launch is only a part of the cost. The costs to design and test the satellite are larger. You have to do a lot of testing to make sure it will survive to orbit, and even more to make sure it will work probably once its there.

I don't think one can really mass produce sophisticated surveillance and communications equipment, nor would it make sense to mass produce those things.

Yes they can and yes it would if we were going to be sending a bunch into space.

And again, the cost of putting them in place and the ability to put them into space is another bottleneck. Unless you think we can mass produce rocket launch sites.

No, it's not a bottleneck. Do you actual think our launch sites are already busy 24/7 launching rockets?

[Kuciwalker]

Its far cheaper for the Chinese to shoot down a US spy satellite once they can do it with no problem than it is for the US to replace them, and certainly cheaper to gain parity on the battlefield by denying the US its space assets than investing the hundreds of billions of dollars it would take to match US space assets.

In a war where our space assets are being actively eroded it is possible to take countermeasures to make it a lot harder. For instance, regular course corrections or dummy satellites.

[Patroklos]

We could just destroy their ability to shoot down our satillites in the first few hours of the conflict. Just like we would their oil pipelines, bridges, ports, air defences and the like.

The spy sats don't have to go over China, nor the coms sats, really only the GPS ones do. So we have less than perfect intel for a few days, sucks but the eventual victor is the same.

[Harry Tuttle]

Originally posted by GePap
You silly enough to think the missile the Chinese used to shoot down the satellite was a nuke??

No dummy, I was refering to your poor metaphor. Cripes.