Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations has compared U.S. President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense program to a “protection racket” after Trump said his northern neighbor can pay $61 billion to join the program or it could be free if the country agrees to annexation.
But you’re against any form of space defense? Or just this?
Satellite self-defense systems are actually pretty efficient at protecting a satellite, and they don’t pose an undo risk to the rest of us in the ground.
But any kind of orbital missile defense system, is going to have to be inconceivably large and prohibitively expensive, just to reach a point of basic viability. The planet is huge. And considering that the kinds of attacks that systems like these are designed to prevent, will be traveling at orbital velocities…you need to have missile systems everywhere. If you don’t, then you won’t be able to “catch” the hostile missiles you’re trying to intercept.
That means potentially thousands, if not tens or even hundreds of thousands, of launch satellites in orbit. And we’re not talking about small satellites here. In order to accelerate to the kinds of speeds required to intercept an ICBM, these missiles will need a lot of fuel…or they’ll have to have even more of them in orbit, so that any path that ICBM takes will have at least one defense satellite in a position to passively intercept it.
Low to medium Earth orbit would have to be blanketed in these satellites. And that’s just to protect one country. If the US starts doing this…so will China. And Russia. And everyone else who’s afraid of these satellites will be used offensively as well as defensively. Because the same missiles that can potentially intercept an ICBM in flight, can also do an incredible amount of damage to a surface target, with little to no warning. They would be everywhere above us. All of us. And could just drop a missile directly down on any point below them.
This gets even more complicated, when you think about the satellite to satellite defenses required to defend each one of these launch platforms from each other. Logistically speaking, it turns into a cluster-fuck, really fast. You could potentially see billion dollar satellites getting shot out of the sky as soon as they reach orbit, and before they have a chance to reach their intended firing positions. How many times could you stand to lose them, before the cost of trying to send them up there became prohibitive? How much of your GDP would you be willing to spend in order to simply maintain that system?
Other countries wouldn’t just be shooting down our satellites for the same reason they don’t just blow up our naval or aerial fleets. Moot point.
Baby steps. Start small and build it up. Figure out new, more feasible weapons. Other countries are already thinking about and experimenting with space defense. Not just us.
When your bones have been repurposed for crude oil and when all of Earth’s resources have gone dry, the people of that time will think of space military the same way we think of the Air Force.
"start small and build up doesn’t work. Total cove age is the only way to ensure protection. That’s what makes systems like this ridiculous. Unless you have total coverage, you may as well not have anything at all, because it would be functionally useless.
Don’t let your hate for Trump blind your ability to conceptualize innovation.
With that logic nothing would ever be created. Think about fighter jets. In the beginning you have one. Doesn’t do much, but if you keep building eventually it becomes something really effective. Come on.
Lol! It has nothing to do with Trump. It was also a stupid idea when Reagan wanted to do it. It has nothing to do with “innovation” or politics. It’s just physics.
It doesn’t matter how long you do something wasteful and pointless. It doesn’t improve over time. It just costs more.
Don’t let your hatred of Trump and Reagan and your knowledge of physics blind you to the better points of what could be achieved by boiling the earths oceans!
Knowledge of physics. Nobody here knows enough about physics to claim anything to be impossible. Things we once thought were impossible are suddenly possible. Happens all the time. Don’t let one bad idea by somebody you don’t like blind you to progress.
You’re like a cave person to people who will one day have enormous satellites with advanced weaponry on them. Don’t stop dreaming. Space militarization will happen whether you like it or not. Better to think about how it could happen then why one idea can’t. More importantly, think about how we could defend ourselves, not how we could attack others.
Actually, I would say you sound more like the cave person in this discussion. “Sounds great, let’s do it” is not a reasoned nor analytical approach.
Is it possible to build it? Maybe. Perhaps even probably. Does it make sense to build it? That’s a much better question. Overwhelmingly, the scientific response, since Regan first proposed it, has been “No”.
The biggest problem is the “plus 1” problem. Say you have an array of 100 killer satellites, each with an intercepting missile. Well an adversary can see all 100 satellites, and simply has to launch 101 ICBMs — or 100 cheap “dummy” missiles and 1 real one. It only takes 1 getting through to vaporize an entire city. The killer satellites would likely be a billion dollars or more each, and they are rendered completely useless by a relatively inexpensive fake missile — mostly costing just the price of fuel. You can’t take the chance that any launched missiles are not real, so you must intercept all of them. No matter how many killer satellites you have, it will be trivial to swamp them with cheap fakes and have a few real ones hidden in the volley. Inevitably some of the real ones will get through.
There’s another huge problem someone else alluded to — such a satellite system would be trivial to completely destroy before even launching any ICBMs. The most likely deployment would be LEO (low earth orbit). Destroying any satellite (either from another satellite or from a ground based launch) would send debris out in every direction. That debris would then collide with other satellites, starting a chain reaction that would likely take out most of the satellites in LEO trajectories around earth (including things like starlink, etc).
There are tonnes of other problems with Star Wars/Golden Dome/Iron Dome but just these 2, I think, make it a complete non-starter with our current technology.
I get how seductive the idea is. And one day, perhaps with high energy lasers and technology we clearly are decades away from today, then it might be possible. Spending 100+ BILLION dollars on this today is simple a pipe dream — or the greatest scam in history (more likely).
There’s the intellectual. It’ll happen. It’ll start small then grow to something much more effective. I’m not saying Reagan or Trump’s ideas are the winners, but there is something that could work eventually.
To your two arguments: “plus 1” problem applies to ground defense systems too, and satellites can be equipped with shielding to protect from shrapnel. Lots of other factors to take into account but my point is these same issues came up in the past with other tech and we’ve overcome them.