Anti-Satellite Weapon Used Simple Technology

Do you really believe this was a "test of a ballistic missile"? Don't be naive. What has really been done is:

1. Show the world that they CAN do it, and that they CAN get away with it.
2. Show the world that as far as China is concerned, The U.S is a paper tiger.
3. And most important, it is a well thought of, marketing maneuver. As you have already said, Rocket science in no longer rocket science, it is rather simple technology, and their potential customers, i.e: Iran, North Korea, Syria, and other members of this fine peace loving group, can easily operate, and send Satellites to their eternal cosmic grave yard. But this time it will not be their own satellites.

So what can be done? The frightening answer is- nothing.

Wangito

Certainly a good marketing ploy by the Chinese, but not too much of a threat because they did maneuver the satellite into a position so that it was much easier to hit with a ground-based weapon (they move really fast at angles difficult to intercept by land based weapons after all). I cannot see the US doing the same if someone wants to attack one of their satellites.

http://www.defensetech.org/ (just one of the many links with some more detailed facts).

Also, look at the amazing difficulty in trying to get the anti ICBM defence programs to work (which they still don't). There is a big difference between a proper space program (with controlled and obliging satellites) and a bunch of terrorists using commonly found materials from rocketry clubs (etc) to take down US satellites.

There I said the obvious!!!, but why did I say it. I said it because I would not be surprised if the media try and blow this all out of proportion. I can see the headlines now "Americas new threat - terrorist anti-satellite weapons".

Let me know when the media over in the US start to run with this story. I would be interested in how long it takes.

<

So what can be done? The frightening answer is- nothing.>

Why can't you simply say to China " Congratulations-you have shown that technology should not be used for bullying like certain devil and his goons have been"

I agree that it does not take a ton of technology to get up there, but even in the case of a non-maneuvering orbiter, one must be pretty accurate to whack into it.

The math is relatively simple, and can be done very accurately with a hand calculator in about ten minutes, but...

Then the projectile must match the math (on average) for the entire 42,000+ km trip, arriving in a cubic metre of three-dimensional space within about 1/3 of a second. That DOES require rocket science. (That's for a geo-synchronous satellite.)

To hit a GPS satellite would be less difficult as they fly low - as do spy satellites. The GPS ones have to stay on path or be dysfunctional, so you could know where any one is at any one time. Taking out the commercially used ones would be sort of counter productive.

Spy and weapons satellite change orbit on command and sometimes the command is unexpected so there is a good chance that between the time the take-down weapon starts its journey and the time it arrives where the satellite 'should be' the owners of the satellite will have moved it and not necessarily because of an attack.

I agree that the technology to launch a rocket into space is relatively simple, and information on such technology is freely available. What is harder to obtain, is guidance systems for such a missile, or the ability to track, to be able to strike a GPS, Spy or comm sat.

What is disturbing is such systems are not needed. A simple launch and release of unguided very low tech material such as aluminum shavings or like material could have the potential of destroying or at the very least blinding or damaging such satellites. Such material in space would be hard if not impossible to track and or avoid even with satellites having the capability of doing so.

Yes, I agree. If someone wanted to strike a particular satellite as a preemptive to military actions, there are few countries that have the capability of doing such. On the other hand, if the goal terroristic rather than tactical, does it really matter which one you hit?

A thought that comes to mind is "Don't depend on your GPS locator!!". I am sure that in a major war, the GPS birds would be one of the first things to get zonked.

Bill

A second thought that comes to mind is that if I were going to do it, a radar guided air to air missile could do it easily. Just mount it on an orbit capable missile, and when it is within radar range, say 50 miles or so, fire the air to air missile and let it home in on the satellite by itself.

Bill

Forgive me but, wouldn't the attacker need to be launced to much higher altitude than the prey? In order for its radar to "home in" without interference from the horizon? Just wondered.

I don't think that horizon would cause any problems, but I am not any sort of expert on the subject. The radar would be such low power that it should never see the earth. Another thought that came to mind is that we could not just take an off the shelf air to air missile and mount it on a launch vehicle because these are guided by fins. Because there is no air, the missle would have to home in using steering "jets" to use the term loosley.

Bill

good point. thanks for the reply.

It is radar guided. Using a seeker. You need to lock onto a target using radar. Whether it is an active or passive type system depends on how it is done. It can be done from the ground, from an aircraft, another satellite or from the missile itself. Lanch and leave capability is alot better, harder to intercept and alot more sophisticated. We also can get into a jamming discussion here regarding this.

<(KISS) Keep it simple, stupid >

You said it all!

KISS, It's the golden rule!!

As a side issue to your comment I pass this conversation on which I recently had with a young engineer. He had been in service as a Merchant Marine and tells me they still practiced celestial navigation.............. and that the Navy doesn't. I would be pleased for someone to dispute this as factual.

Actually we are using this type of navigation at NASA. It's an inertial stellar compass that puts out a point of reference data signal for navigation. The reason is for tracking objects that may collide with the earth, or for stellar navigation itself. Your attitude in reference to the compass will be determined. Almost like our own magnetic north in space. (If it doesn't get destroyed by space junk lol!) The Air Force and Navy will most likely start to use the compass as well as for commercial ships etc.

The frightening part of this is the fact that a lot of really big boats are dependant on sat/com/guidance. How do they get home when the satellites get killed. The analogy would be how many of us can still find and use a slide rule. I'll bet this crowd still has one or two stuffed in a drawer somewhere.

I think they showed us how to use a slide rule in school a long time ago and may have quized us on it, but hand held calculators were around back then. My father although knows how to use one very well and he is 70 years old. What I do have to say about calculators is people would call my HP "reverse polish." Once you use one, you never want to go back to the conventional types. Reverse logic is so straight forward, it's how you would do it out on paper.

In high school slide rule was criteria for us. My father gave me my first HP in the early 70's. I concur with your opinion and like you have have had that argument with other users for years.

I always liked when people would say, "Let me borrow your calculator" and then the look of frustration ensues lol! They would basically throw the thing back at me. I'd get a kick out of that.

Ain't that the truth. But the truth be told when the power goes off it doesn't matter HP or TI, they all quit working. Slide rules don't require batteries. Envision a world where wonderous technology fails us. At that point a viking has a better chance of navigation than a sans gps navy.

I hear that. Losing some GPS birds to space debris would suck for sure. Imagine being a land surveyor. It's all GPS now, not like when I was running rod as a summer job while going to school, getting back to the office and doing a compelation of notes and plan plotting using a protractor. Now they download all the software into a plotter and it kicks out a drawing with all the points in relation to actual geodetric plate locational data. The loss of gps will affect so much is my point I'd say. I'm only 45 years old, so I'm one of the last guys in the field that can do it by hand and using the computer. These kids coming out of school in the last 15 years will have a harder time adapting. Give me the old drafting board and some mylar lol! It's all CAD now. I'm glad I can still do both.

Hi Pepper, in answer to your question;

"I'll bet this crowd still has one or two stuffed in a drawer somewhere."

Two actually, in my desk second drawer done on the left . It's with all my drawing templates and drafting tools and yes I can and do still use them all occasionally just to keep my skills up.

TLGEngCo, in response to;

"What I do have to say about calculators is people would call my HP "reverse polish." Once you use one, you never want to go back to the conventional types. Reverse logic is so straight forward, it's how you would do it out on paper."

I agree, I loved working with my HP calculators, however I have moved to a notebook compute and a spreadsheet beats the hall out of a programmable calculator. The only thing I miss is the notebook doesn't have a calculator application that works like a HP. Dose anybody know of a calculator application that works like an HP calculator or am I going to write one myself?

My notebook gets used for just about everything and I rarely leave home without it. Yes it is bigger than a calculator but it's no more difficult to carry than the brief case most people use to carry their calculator in. I only wish they had notebooks around when I was at school and university, it would have made my life so much easier. I know I am showing my age but I when I was at high school I was the only person that had access to a computer and that was an IBM-360 that filled a room, no where near as powerful or portable as a notebook.

I got stuck using a Univac when I was over at R.A.F. Lakenheath, what an old guy that was. Should have been a Burroughs you would figure. I was lucky enough to get back to the U.S where we had a Radio Shack TS-80....(S$%T Box!!) I'm glad they have come a mega long way.

Wow. A computer in high school.

The university I attended had 24 desk top machines.........all reserved for the double E's. We got to keypunch Fortran and send it to Miami.

As I said I was the only person at the high school and that included the teachers. The way it came about was that there was that a Museum in conjunction with IBM, that ran a course in computer programming during the school holidays. If you successfully completed the course (about 5 of us did) the museum would give you access to their IBM-360 computer for a couple of hours every other Sunday. You had to punch your own cards and if the program didn't run you went to the back of the queue but I did learn to program in PL1 and had some fun.

It wasn't much better when I started university but by the time I finished computers were starting to become common and were being used for more mundane tasks.

It was surprising how many requests I got as soon as it became known that I had access to a computer. It was also a great thing to drop when going for interviews as a cadet engineer. Back then people that could program computers were fairly scarce animals.

I suppose I sort of grew up at the same time as computers did, it was definitely an interesting time. That course in the school holidays definitely gave me an advantage that none of the other students had. When you are competing with hundreds of other equally qualified students it little things like this that can get you across the line.

Replying to you and all the others,

Calculators, laptops, computers, etc etc. today they all have one thing in common and that thing brings us all back to the original thread,

• They are all MADE IN China.

Wangito

Wangito, I recall when all were made in Japan so, curiosity getting the best of me I checked around the house.

My wifes 2 Texas Instrument calculators are "assembeled" in Italy

Cannon calculator assembled in China

My 2 HP caluculators are made in the USA, that probably dates me fairly well doesn't it TLGEngrCO

Magellan handheld GPS assembled in Mexico

Nikon Camera Camera Made in Thailand ??????????????????

Maybe I can throw some of this stuff hard enough to acheive escape velocity and bounce one off a satellite or 2 myself............except my HP's. I'll keep them.

The frightening answer to your orginal question is we choose to do nothing

My wife just bought a brand new HP laptop over the internet. The box finally came to the door, and in examining it we discovered it had been shipped from Shanghai China. WOW!! How the world has shrunk.

Imagine the points of origin for all the pieces parts in your wife's new HP and the world really gets small. There might actually be something in that laptop that says microscopically..............made in the USA.

Evolution? Mandarin is now taught in UK schools. There was a time when German was difficult to find...

If you are running Windows a calculator is available as an Accesessory. This can be used as a simple calculator or a scientific calculator. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the scientific calculator emulated an HP type.

Good old "Basic" provides a relatively simple way of doing quite complex calculations. In the old days a version used to come with DOS for use with Edit for writing things like batch files. This used to be included on Windows CD's under Old Windows or somesuch.

If you do not have access to this I can recomend BBC Basic for Windows see www.rtrussel.co.uk

AL

Freedom is a fragile and precious commodity. Guard it well!

Reverse logic is way faster than a standard calculator. If you have a constant, it is even faster to set up alittle program and just add in the variables, banging on the run stop lol! Ask any real HP user what I just said and they just smile.

Hi Al,

I am familiar with the windows calculator and usually keep it running in the background ready to use if I need a calculator. Unfortunately the scientific form of it doesn't use the inverse Polish notation that the HP calculators use. It works the same way that the ordinary calculators do with you entering each parameter separated by an operator and executed with the = button. For example 1 + 2 = 3

The HP calculators used a stack where you would enter each of the parameters into the stack by pressing the enter button then select the function that you wished the calculator to perform on the entered data. For example 1 ← 2 + gives you the answer 3 with ← meaning the enter key.

The advantage of inverse polish notation is that you can perform functions that require more than two inputs by stacking the data with the enter key. For example if you wanted to know the value a 1Ω, 2Ω and 3Ω resistor in parallel you would go 1← 2←3←⌠where the ⌠is a key that you have set up to do the calculation for resistors in parallel.

I am also reasonably proficient in programming in Visual Basic so if I get my finger out it wouldn't be too big a task to program one up. I was just wondering if somebody had already done it but thanks for the suggestion anyway.

If I do program up a calculator for Windows that works like a HP would anybody out there be interested in a copy and what functions would you use the most?

In theory all you need to do is to get two satellites on a converging trajectory and let the kinetic energy do the rest. As others have pointed out this isn't as easy as one might think, you deed some sort of dynamic positioning system like this one from Northrop_Grumman.

The other thing that you need to keep in mind is that if you have a dynamic positioning system that is using some sort of active system to sense the position and velocity of the target satellite then the target satellite can do the reverse and sense the position and velocity of the killer satellite. All that you need to do is move a couple of meters in any direction at the last moment and the killer will miss.

The idea of using a satellite that breaks up and produces a screen of smaller particles is fraught with danger and may backfire badly. Every time you shoot down a satellite it produces thousands, if not millions, of smaller chunks each with the potential to knock down a further satellite. Do it too often and it will make it difficult for any satellite to survive for long and could make every satellite useless.

Personally I think destroying things that are in space regardless of who owns them and what they are use for should be actively opposed. Do it too often and space might be off limits to everybody, no mater what their intent, for a very long time. It's just another for of environmental vandalism that shows how irresponsible world leaders can be.

You need to have guidence to get the missile close enough to a satellite, but you don't have to have a direct hit. A MIRV armed with a safe and arming device just needs to be close enough to get a return signal from the target fast enough to self detonate, sending fragmentation into the target. Low tech., but effective. Overall news of this is disappointing seeing our birds and shuttle have to fly through the debris created by these tests. As I've said before, we stopped testing in 1985 because of this. Need to be worried? Space junk is something that will ruin exploration and or, communications for all for of us. We can still fly higher and faster than anyone else, it's just a step back in my opinion.

Thought on all the space junk... I believe that the government (probably NASA) tracks alot of the space junk of any significant size. It would be neat if we could launch a "garbage truck" satellite to accumulate the space junk. After it was full, we could fire it into the sun... which would just add fuel to the fire.

If the garbage truck could survive in that environment without getting fragged to death. Some of this debris is moving way faster than a bullet.

I would think that debris would have to maintain a specific speed to stay in a specific orbit. Otherwise, it would either fall back to earth, or escape beyond earth's gravitational field. Where the danger lies is when the shuttle (for example) is passing through the orbit of the space junk. I am hoping that Jorrie might get in here and throw in his two cents. He is much more into orbital mechanics than I.

"Some of this debris is moving way faster than a bullet."

All of this junk is moving much faster than a bullet, something like 7 times faster. It's the relative velocity that is the killer. If you are in an equatorial orbit and you happen to come across an object in an intersecting polar orbit then using Pythagoras the closing velocity will be just under 10 Kms^-1. Let is suffice that anything traveling at that sort of velocity can cause an enormous amount of damage if it hits you. The windshield in the shuttle was damaged by a spec of paint traveling at a similar velocity and it is literally bullet proof.

It's complicated but the higher up an object is the slower it's traveling and as a satellites orbit decays it actually speeds up. If you want to dock with something like the space station then you need to have them on intersecting orbits that have a relative velocity that is manageable, that's why it usually takes them a couple of days to approach and dock.

It is not uncommon to see and object travelling at a few miles per second or 10's of miles per second. Yes, the speed is all reletive to another. Enough so that a 4500 fps difference seems like a bullet type velocity and do some major damage.

Hope this simple technology wouldn't destroy the world order!

Your Hope is well founded.

A 3-phase supply is easiest to regulate!

Or should we say-"Two is a company. Three is a crowd"

I guess the US (and others) had better equip ALL their satellites with defensive technology. This threat has been around since the 60's when the Soviet Union was saber rattling about orbiting missles with nuclear warheads. Interestingly part of the US Air Force's input to Apollo program management was a program called "Skysweeper". This program was to adapt a deployable collander shaped net mounted on the front of the S4-B booster which had manuevering and re-start capability. The booster was to catch up with the target and boost it and itself into the sun. In theory it could "sweep" many targets into it's 100 foot diameter steel mesh net(think chain link fencing) and clear the skies of hostile intent. Also, lest we forget, the "Samos" satellite of the 60's which was a "killer satellite" designed to hunt and destroy hostile satellites, rogue missiles and anything else in it's sights.

FYI - Defense Update reports that "according to intelligence reports, China tested laser countermeasures to blind US reconnaissance satellites passing over China. It was reported that for the past several months, Chinese lasers have been 'illuminating' US spy satellites".

• Pessimists, do nothing
• Optimists, learn Chinese.

You really want to TRY and understand the Chinese way of thinking, Here's a recommended reading :

Red Dragon Rising , E.Timperlake, C.Triplett ll et-al. ISBN 0-85926-258-4. According to the authors ,

• Tiananmen square was the first.
• Taiwan comes next,
• The U.S is the last on the list.

Shocking, a must reading.

Wangito.

Hmm, use all the old commercial fishing nets. Just leave them in a large path, entangle everything, create a big mess up there.