The world today looks nothing like the world of the 1960s. It looks a lot more like the world of the early 1910s and 1930s. Multiple countries vie for advantage.

> Since 2015, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel, France, and North Korea have all established military space programs. China’s and Russia’s space commands are close on the heels of the United States, and according to the Secure World Foundation, the United States has idled certain of its offensive-technology programs while China and Russia actively test the same capabilities. ...

There's a theory of what causes war among major powers that goes like this. Wars result when one side miscalculates how the other side will respond. You can see elements of this in WWI. Certainly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor fits the bill. And it almost did us in during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Combine multiple players jockeying for position, a close connection between space and nuclear weapon command and control, and a new domain that blunts the advantages of incumbants, and you get a fertile breeding ground for crisis.

Then there's the "use it or lose it" angle to consider and the fact the US has the most to lose in all of this:

> All military assets are surrounded by a “use it or lose it” ethos, says Joan Johnson-Freese, the author of Space Warfare in the 21st Century and a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. Once conflict begins, all holdings are seen to be at risk: you need to fire that missile before it’s taken out. “The military is taught to assume the worst, and to react to it,” she told me. “Because space assets are so far away, and there is a high potential to not be sure what is happening, high risk and threat must be assumed.” This is commonly referred to as “the tyranny of distance.” When the rules are not plain, whether in peacetime or war, the situation is “exponentially” more dangerous. ...

Yeah, if the gloves come off and all the "planning" projects are "actualized", things are going to change very quickly.

Orbit isn't like the ground though. You can see that offense is relatively straightforward (kinetic weapons and lasers), defense is practically impossible (hard to stop lasers and kinetic weapons), and the collateral damage is akin to nuclear fallout: space junk will persist for long after the seconds-long battle lasts.

I think what would be necessary is some sort of perverse royal kidnapping: you'd need high-level leaders of space factions have family and friends in all the habitats to dissuade military action.

The challenge to settle space is that civilian habitats are extremely vulnerable to extremely basic attacks, and we're simply too warlike.

But if we don't even get to the point of space habitats, and a long orbital war poisons near-space with junk, we may have imprisoned ourselves. It almost makes the need to get to mars and the moon even more paramount in the relatively brief armistice in space.

Fifty years later, in 2013, some of the dipoles that had not deployed correctly still remained in clumps, contributing a small amount of the orbital debris tracked by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office. Their numbers have been diminishing over time as they occasionally re-enter. As of March 2020, 36 clumps of needles were still known to be in orbit.

I wouldn't want to be hit by that, while being in not much more than an inflated tin can ;)

Talking about "hypersonic weapons" is talking about gliding or maneuvering hypersonic warheads or cruise missiles. (btw. Space Shuttle was hypersonic glider)

China and Russia are developing hypersonic gliders to maintain their capability and create more variance. The US ballistic missile defense can't protect the US from Russia or China (nor it is intended to do), but it requires some adjustments. More ICBM's, warheads throw weight, and counter-countermeasures and different trajectories.

For example, the fractional orbital bombardment that China tested is an old concept. Together with a gliding warhead, it means that China can maintain deterrence with fewer missiles.

Further, even if it were solved, one might imagine proliferating smaller nuclear delivery systems all over the place (as in anything that floats). Getting them all in a coordinated, near-simultaneous way to preclude a large number of launches would be difficult.

I guess the same applies for Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey.

edit: I mean 'nuking it's own land'.

[poof!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing

Fun fact: Permissive Action Links were originally conceived of to solve a fundamental problem with nuclear sharing: how do you keep a foreign rogue pilot/unit/country from starting general war with the Soviets when they have physical custody of the weapons?

Tomorrow, When the War Began, I'd rather rewatch both Red Dawn, Bushwick and have a real Dragon Day in The Divide.

Yee-Haw!

> When the rules are not plain, whether in peacetime or war, the situation is “exponentially” more dangerous

That's a good thing. No doubt the US would win most wars but I'd be happier if countries with no bone in the fight could protect themselves from accidental annihilation. Development of Anti-weapons to disarm and disable potential space advantages up to an including complete destruction of GPS, Research sats (yes, including Telescopes) and even the ISS- wholesale.

My personal hunch is that a Dune like destroy the spice gambit is Taiwan's best bet to hold off military annexation. They could rig their semiconductor fabs and the other things the CCP wants with thermite or something similar and make it known that if the mainland invades it all goes up in smoke.

[1] https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl...

[1]https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html

On a much lower level, sure, but now they are really competitive.

They didn’t realize the iPhone would make the economics work.

You can't rig national pride with thermite. Western Germany wanted to reunite with eastern Germany not for any economic reasons but because of a sense of national unity.

[1] not sure how true this is these days for Taiwan, but it definitely was the case historically.

To be sure I don't mean to imply that you can't have an opinion on it otherwise, but rather the public discussion online and in media regarding Taiwan is so insanely divorced from the reality on the ground that I find most people who are not in some way connected to Taiwan have a warped view of history and public opinion regarding this issue. A state of affairs which is very much on purpose due to mainland pressure and propaganda, and the one-China agreement which forces Taiwan and its allies to be mute regarding its status and the desires of its people in public discourse.

Taiwan was never meaningfully part of China. The people who historically lived in, who presently make up 80% of the population, never considered themselves Chinese nationals. They have no shared identity with mainland China. They speak a different language, they eat different food, and they are descended from people who moved to Taiwan specifically because it was a self-ruled frontier land very far removed from Ming dynasty. When the Qing conquered, they had a hell of a time governing these very independent people--there were uprisings and unrest against the government almost every other year. The Japanese didn't fare much better, nor did the foreign military junta that took over in 1949.

Never during any of this history or the present day did the Taiwanese people want to conquer China, peacefully "reunite" with China (how do you "reunite" when you were never united in the first place? It'd be like Afghanistan "reuniting" with the United States), or whatever other interpretation you might take from the one-China agreement. The foreign military dictator who ruled Taiwan with an iron fist during the martial law period did want to "reunify" with China. But neither this guy nor his army were Taiwanese, and his dream doesn't reflect in any way what the Taiwanese people wanted then or now.

The one single time that Taiwan moved ever so slightly towards "reunification" was in the early part of this last decade where the then-ruling KMT nationalist party entered negotiations with China to setup some free trade agreements (think: NAFTA but for China + Taiwan), and the public fear over possible reunification was so large that the legislature building was occupied in protest, the ruling party utterly lost the following elections, and had its assets frozen under a corruption investigation. The success of the Taiwan protest would inspire the Hong Kong protestors a few years later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Student_Movement

Taiwanese will riot in the streets if it'll prevent reunification.

To be clear, the only person in Taiwan who ever truly wanted to re-conquer the mainland was the foreign dictator who did in fact used to rule China before the communists. When he died and martial law ended, China forced Taiwan into an agreement to keep his policy as the official stance or face invasion, because a continuing "civil war" fit their desired narrative better than Taiwanese independence. The Taiwanese have had their backs against the wall ever since.

In any case though, I think regardless of whether it can be called an invasion or a reunification, the point stands that there can be motivations for doing so that are not monetary (i.e. taking over the fabs) but have more to do with national identity and pride, and I think for the PRC this is such an issue, at least in part.

Does that sound like a fair statement to you?

But Taiwan leadership goes along with the one-China nonsense because what other choice do they have? They can't stand up to China on their own, as the US has implied it will only intervene in a conflict if China invades without provocation. So Taiwan's free and independent existence hinges on them doing everything possible to make sure that they do nothing that can possibly be construed as "provoking" China.

But yeah, the PRC's reasons for wanting to invade Taiwan seem to be entirely around national identity, pride, and the personal legacy of Xi Jinping. I doubt there's much economic drive for doing so.

And for what it's worth, the Taiwanese desire to NOT be part of China (PRC or otherwise) are also driven by a sense of national identity and pride. It was actually economic arguments which led to the cross-straight agreements which caused the downfall of the KMT.

Your statement is inaccurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan,_China#Background_and_a...

If you look at their history and policies it clearly does not feel the same way you do. There's a big wikipedia article that I linked there that says otherwise. Prove me wrong on this and I'll happily admit defeat.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29063869

Would you say the Republic of China does not claim dominion over what we in the west call mainland China? Yes or No? It's a very simple question that I doubt you will answer.

Is it really that hard to say yes or no?

I would also expect all major powers having very detailed intel of where to strike to cripple it all with some staff working there.

It was super important long before covid highlighted its importance for whole global economy, now even average Joe heard about 'em chips shortage.

But when it was coined, I don't think they were concerned about satellites being blown up.

Russia Has Four Potential "Killer Satellites" In Orbit, At Least That We Know About

> The problem is that any satellite that can maneuver itself very close to another one, and may have small arms or probes to physically interact with its target, is inherently capable of being a weapon. Any such repair system could easily smash sensitive optics and other components, or simply slam into the target, acting as a kinetic weapon

The future of space warfare, as it's currently understood, will involve:

1- Satellites attacking other satellites with: 1a- robotic arms 1b- small projectiles 1c- jamming device 1d- lasers

2- missiles fired from the atmosphere

3- jamming stations on the ground (https://www.google.com/amp/s/futurism.com/space-force-first-...)

More generally, space isn't safe for blue team anymore. Russia and China have aggressive ambitions to be able to dominate space and aren't restrained by any code of ethics, something China is also doing in artificial intelligence research (not bothering with "frameworks" and "guiding principles for responsible AI").

Most experts agree that space will become another area of strategic competition where the major powers deter each other with mutual destruction doctrines, because the loss of global satellite communications, weather satellites and positioning systems, and the potential creation of millions of orbital debris that would result from a confrontation would be too dire to credibly contemplate.

As opposed to the operational ASAT system that the United States operates?

> space isn't safe for blue team anymore

'Blue Team' that's the good guys, right?

Besides the fact that space is inherently unsafe, it is the United States that has taken the lead in the militarization of space. Heck the US Space Force even has a website: https://www.spaceforce.mil/ , I'd assume they have some actual capabilities as well.

> something China is also doing in artificial intelligence research (not bothering with "frameworks" and "guiding principles for responsible AI")

Which of course doesn't happen anywhere else.

Really, I think your comment could use some balance. From the point of view of an inhabitant of a small nation that does not have its own space capability it sure looks like the United States is a very large part of the problem.

It's basically a rebranding of an existing organization called US Air Force Space Command, which controls all military orbital launches and most military satellites (I believe NRO is its own separate thing). They just wanted it to be less specifically tied to the Air Force, and for its chief to be on equal footing to a service chief.

In the immediate sense yes: Space Force was just taking existing departments and putting them in a separate organisation.

But this has long term effects, cutting them free of the Air Force oversight means they are no longer bound to the Earth in a very concrete sense. It seems that while they were part of the Air Force, someone though it fun to put in their mandate that they should defend all US interests in space, which in particular means everything NASA has sent out.

Now that they are an independent organisation, that what they develop their culture around. Space Force is already putting out material with a view on how to fight around the moon! There's nothing much on the moon of course, but still they are anxious to know how to put weapons there for when there might be.

If given enough money, there's little question that Space Force would seek to achieve dominance over the Solar System.

Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-135_ASAT

Critically launching from aircraft to orbit is not that helpful, but if you don’t need to orbit it makes a huge difference.

You don't need to match orbits, for kinetic satellite weapons. You just need to change to an orbit that directly intersects, or comes close enough to it at some point to launch a daughter projectile.

For a kinetic vehicle, matching orbits actually decreases the net kill energy.

You want a head-on train wreck, not a following-too-close fender bender.

“The problem is that any satellite that can maneuver itself very close to another one, and may have small arms or probes to physically interact with its target, is inherently capable of being a weapon.”

If your anti satellite weapon is in orbit you just wasted a lot of energy getting it there.

Are you implying that the US military has a code of ethics it follows more than Russia or China? I would advise you to read up on the recent history of latin America and the Middle East if you believe such fantasies.

Contrast with the USSR's occupation of Afghanistan, or their more recent contributions to the Syrian Civil War. Collateral damage is _not_ a consideration when they decide to go kinetic. Barrel bombing civilians _is the point_.

give ... me ... a break. are you seriously implying US (aka blue team) are good guys and have some higher standards?

Things like USA-USSR nuclear disarmament treaties only worked because they included mechanisms for strict verification by the other side. For not developing space arms, you would have to rely on trust, and (as the article mentions) international trust is in very short supply.

No, the true reason too many in the USG sees a code of conduct as undesirable is that they believe the US is so far ahead its dominance would be restricted if it had pledged to no do whatever the fuck it wants in space.

And because opposition is grounded in maintaining dominance, something that's not yet entirely edible in today's political climate, they cannot muster more persuasive arguments than "we can't have common rules because then the US would have to follow them but the others wouldn't".

This is obvious trash: if the opposition breaks the treaty the US would not respect it either, and in any case the US has not shown hesitancy to withdraw from treaties even without violations as of late.

SpaceX bringing massive capabilities of orbital launch makes blue team stronger than ever. There's no competition anymore.

Would be so interesting if a nation state ever takes over a future starlink. Definitely cheaper to hack it than rebuild SpaceX.

I don't follow how a linear process would lead to an exponential result, can you please explain?

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[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110515132446/http://webpages.c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

So effectively, roughly paraphrasing GP's comment is that if the launch rate remains constant at its current historical high level (and it could easily go up further) and this leads to more objects in space (which is a safe assumption) then the moment of the triggering of the Kessler syndrome gets moved forward in time, would that be correct?

If you have a number of events, like meetings, moving one forward is putting it first, or earlier. But if you have a single event, with no notional queue, wouldn't moving it to an earlier point in time be "moved backward in time"? :)

Then you might get space hooks, orbital cannons, asteroid/moon mining etc. It's kind of akin to Moore's "law" which really is an observation of continual investment, research, and production to enable larger and larger economic uses.

Space has a near-infinite (relative to our experience) of "potential use cases": there's a lot of usable matter out there, boatloads of always-on solar energy without pesky clouds, atmospheres, or night-time, and of course a LOT of room, and no gravity.

So if you get economic profit from launching things into space, and the cost of the launching gradually goes down, even linearly, the amount of use will be a multiple of the linear cost improvement.

I guess Moore's law was what it was because what was being optimized was two-dimensional shrinking.

Space in orbit is a bit of two dimensional (orbital planes) with stacking, but then in deep space it will be purely three dimensional expansion. That's pretty exponential as a driving force.

I’m pretty easy to convince that the risk is sigmoid and the early part looks exponential. But this justification does not lead there.

Sorry, wrong: very much sub exponentially in fact quadratic Sum_i^n i = n(n+1)/2

You should be a little more concerned about the pollution on Earth.

I'm glad we built cities over pristine nature. Hope we can do the same in space.

There is a limit to how much we can pollute space.

I personally think we're going to lose space for at least a 1000 years, along with every other disaster this century. It will be for some asinine, short sited reason, i.e., power or money.

For something to stay up 1000 years, even a small object like a lost nut, it must orbit at least 900 km away from the Earth.

https://www.spaceacademy.net.au/watch/debris/orblife.htm

And Kessler syndrome, even if fully developed, will likely not prevent you from flying to other celestial bodies. Compared to an orbit, you only spend a very short time in the region cluttered by debris when leaving the Earth entirely.

Agreed about the needle-in-haystacks part, though.

Not really. The universe is about 93 billion light-years in size and won't ever be traversable in a finite amount of time.

Your comment seems to indicate that you think of "space" as earth orbit. Starship is specifically about going beyond orbit.

It's time to move beyond scarcity thinking.

We are in a desperate race to expand to space vs destroy ourselves before we get there. If you think that race has been won while three nations have the power to end the human race at the press of a nuclear launch button, you're naive.

The Great Filter has a gun pointed squarely at our head and is very slowly pulling the trigger.

Space fantasies aren't part of avoiding scarcity thinking. Space fantasies are a distraction to getting everyone's needs met.

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comic/energy-slaves/

Our current "post scarcity" world is built on shaky grounds. But it doesn't have to collapse.

BTW, the best argument for longevity research that I've come across to date is that if people lived for a thousand years suddenly there would be a lot of support for stabilization of our eco-systems.

Our food supply is still mostly human powered. Tractors will get better.

We'll have to do something other than surveil people and shit-post on the internet to fill our time. Oh well.

Basic electrical knowledge is way too widespread for anything less than total apocalypse to push us more than 50-100 years back in tech-level.

Schematics and parts to assemble simple TTL computers are sufficiently widespread that computing would definitely continue. Small-scale electrical infrastructure is very simple and easy to set up, especially with the large number of high-quality manual tools available almost everywhere.

Even if we let Kessler syndrome run unchecked to the point of no return where it destroys a large portion of satellites, we will either start serious clean-up of certain orbits to allow military observation and communication satellites to go up again, or we will develop better collision avoidance or self-defence systems.

We've written a check we aren't able to cash. The solution isn't to keep writing checks.

There is no one with money who is interested or capable of solving our problems.

Put together, I space pollution will basically be a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, at least for a very, very long time. And beyond that, space is empty, so we aren’t even destroying anything to do stuff

It would be great if we could move our most polluting activities (factories, refineries) to the Moon or Mars.

Design sketch from 1978, with numbers: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/1976.skyhook/pap...

> getting into the destination body's orbit

I said round-trip energy costs. The delta-v for arriving cargo to enter orbit equals the delta-v for departing cargo. Over a full cycle of sending equal payloads both ways, the net change of energy and momentum is zero. I linked to an analysis of one way to harness this. When the skyhook in the linked example boosts a payload from Venus-Earth Hohmann to Earth-Mars Hohmann, the skyhook's orbit gets perturbed; but it gets the opposite perturbation on the boost on the opposite traffic.

(This is not the only non-rocket approach to free-space transport with potentially low marginal cost.)

Niche applications like low-temperature ZBLAN manufacturing might make more sense.

The delta-v required to move objects between planets is measured in thousands of m/s (e.g. just getting to low earth orbit requires about 10000 m/s), and the fuel required goes up exponentially with delta-v.

As Elon Musk put it: "If you had crack-cocaine on Mars, in prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here."

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...

I also don't think that's the focus of the article and doesn't pertain to space. The article gives lots of examples of new competition from china & russia, but explicitly says for example that "the United States has idled certain of its offensive-technology programs while China and Russia actively test the same capabilities" which implies parity if not advantage.

To me that asymmetric quote from Oriana Skylar Mastro seems to more reference what I do genuinely find scary: the US military's heavy heavy reliance on technology and tech controlled via space.

can any of our planes even fly without computers? I assume all major powers can hack basically anything.

I would hope the smarter than me military advisors have thought that through...

"China attacked U.S. satellites operated by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. In the latter case, they gained control of the craft, but stopped short of issuing it commands"

"Among the spacefaring nations, the United States is by far the most exposed"

"I think it’s no-holds-barred. Because the U.S. has the most to lose."

Just by growing from behind technologically adversaries might have an advantage in they have stuff that works without computers & satellites.

Though I would personally bet we might still have a small asymmetric advantage in space defense and offense.

we obviously have an advantage in rapid deployment. Have been flying a mini shuttle for over 10 years. Have SpaceX. Seems wise to me to have extra satellites lying underground for rapid deployment. And hopefully we have more stuff that isn't trackable - it seems some of the shuttle stuff we know about is at least hard to track by amateurs.

This means that an escalation that wipes out all space resources for everyone is effectively a major loss for USA, as they lose a lot of capabilities, investment and comparative advantage, while those who had less resources up there did not suffer much because they had much less to lose; If anyone would be starting a major land/sea/air conflict with USA, then taking all space stuff out of the picture would be very useful for them.

If launches are cheap (e.g. a few million USD targeted by Starship), you can use more off the shelf hardware and iterate to see what works. Replacing satellites is not such a big deal.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...