Blind nationalism would deter our progress as a species.
Ever since NASA chief's comment, the arguments have been very polarised. What NASA said is scientifically accurate & being one of the major stake holder in ISS it has a duty to tell its opinion. There are people in International Space Station, don't forget that their family on earth would want an answer from NASA for such incidents.
The issue in the country seems to be, not what NASA said; but why did it say that!
Yes, US has conducted similar tests & its debris went further in apogee as well & since it didn't change orbit[second application of delta-v is required to do that]; it decayed eventually. Same will happen with the debris we caused as there is not much change in perigee.
If ASATs renew new arms race across the planet & everyone starts blowing satellites, it's not good for the humanity.
If Israel can enforce deterrence as a nuclear power without conducting or acknowledging major nuclear tests, India can project space warfare ready without indulging in such activities; after all there was no doubt about our rocket engineering capabilities to start with.
Blind idealism/pacifism will wipe out countries/races/societies.
India didn't choose it's neighbors, but it is what it is. On one side is a country whose identity is defined by anti-India-nism. On the other side is China, need I say more.
Moreover, both these neighbors are ganged up by their mutual animosity of India.
India doesn't have any options but to make sure there are deterrents in place. It's a necessity.
> On one side is a country whose identity is defined by anti-India-nism. On the other side is China, need I say more
Two incredibly low blows, although I suppose this way you've made your isolated point of view very clear.
> Moreover, both these neighbors are ganged up by their mutual animosity of India.
Another way of saying this is they've been successful in maintaining strong ties via diplomacy and trade, to the benefit of their peoples.
> India doesn't have any options but to make sure there are deterrents in place. It's a necessity.
There have always been options; some of which India has rejected themselves, arguably leading to the souring of other international relations. This weapons test will hopefully lead to condemnations and repercussions, direct or indirect.
For example, I would welcome the IRSO being excluded from further policy-making as part of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC).
>Blind idealism/pacifism will wipe out countries/races/societies.
I'm sure Mahatma Gandhi & Co had to listen to such statements as well, glad that they didn't listen; Republic of India might not have been even formed otherwise.
I'm sorry, I'll have to respectfully but strongly disagree if you're going to simplify India's attainment of Independence and grant entire credit to Gandhi & Co.
There were many others who contributed, some more than others, some peacefully some not so. And, let's not forget the WW-2 after which the British were not in a strong enough position to hold on to colonies.
Also, you should ask Dalai Lama how the pacifism worked out for the Tibetans when their country was occupied by China. I surely don't want that for any country, and definitely not for India.
Another way of looking at the matter is that the invasion route also involves fighting off Indian Defense forces. Independent countries have military for a reason.
Mountains, army, food hard to eat with chopsticks—there are so many good reasons for China to continue its five-thousand-year-long streak of not attempting an invasion of the Indian subcontinent.
Acting US Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan earlier played down the threat the debris might pose to satellites in space and said it was his understanding the debris would eventually burn up in the atmosphere. Asked on Thursday whether the Pentagon stood by Shanahan's earlier assessment, spokesman Charlie Summers said: "Yes."
So it whose wordings are correct ?
Pentagon or NASA ?
The ASAT test was specifically conducted at the orbit of 380Km less than the maximum range of 100Kms because the residues will gradually decompose within weeks and there will be almost none interference to existing or upcoming orbital paths.
The Micro satellite was specifically chosen for this purpose. There is no reason for Nationalism in this.
US DOD was informed prior ASAT test & their non objection stems in we being their strategic partner.
It doesn't mean the number of debris in higher apogee or the their probability to cause harm is false(how ever low the probability might be). Anyone can verify the same, if they have the means.
NASA is answerable to public & that they did. Just like our ISRO is.
I see many, including media confusing between ISRO & DRDO in this context. DRDO was the one which conducted the ASAT test, even if ISRO was involved somehow it shouldn't be advertised; just like how NASA's involvement in any US defence related activity is contained.
The term 'peaceful space exploration' exists for a reason.
Why would a former Beoing executive, who has had nothing to do with Beoing's space-related ventures in his 30 years there, know anything about orbital mechanics?
> the Pentagon stood by Shanahan's earlier assessment
Why would anyone at the pentagon who wanted to keep their job/position publicly release a conflict with a statement from their upper management?
Worth noting: India is the fourth(!) country that destroyed a satellite in orbit.
While I would love nothing more but for it be the last country to do so, the precedent was set some time ago. The one that China destroyed in 2007 (or 2008?) was by far the biggest, creating thousands of pieces of debris bigger than a golf ball. 270 pieces (detected so far after India destroyed a satellite) seems pretty insignificant in comparison.
This smacks of a justification through tu quoque fallacy. Just because other nations destroyed satellites doesn't mean this type of weapons testing should continue. We should criticize nations that did this before AND India.
Polluting LEO to the point where we endanger our ability to get off the earth is extremely myopic.
> Polluting LEO to the point where we endanger our ability to get off the earth is extremely myopic.
Not a notable risk here. All this debris is short-term. If the Chinese satellite had been at the same altitude, all its debris would be long gone by now.
Plenty of people within the US objected to ASAT testing when the US planned it and then did it. We're not all blind followers defined by our citizenship, in the US or in India.
> the "we" cannot be one of the nations that did this before
Why not? The US is the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in a war, and we even nuked space in 1962, more or less just to see what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime . I don't see why that disqualifies either me, or the US government, from criticizing these things.
If we want to use bridge jumping in this context, it would be like saying that you can't tell people they shouldnt jump off of bridges if you've jumped off a bridge before. Which is complete nonsense.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of the problem. Imagine you took a car and you drove in a straight line in any direction in the US where you'd loop back at the end. And now imagine somebody else did the same thing. How likely would you be to collide? You'd have either 0 or 1 collision point in your paths. Usually it'd be 0. And even in the case where you had 1, the chances of you both hitting that point at the exact same time would be infinitesimally low. Now have thousands of cars do the same thing. And all the above still holds true over one 'iteration', or two or three or... However, any two cars that have at least one intersection point will eventually collide (excepting a perfectly synchronized orbit timing) so long as they keep going. It might take a long time, as in potentially thousands of years, but if you get enough cars doing this and you run them long enough - eventually you'll get a pair that will have a collision within some foreseeable time. This is analogous to how things collide in space, except space is much bigger.
In other words Kesseler syndrome does not create some sort of impassable barrier -- in the above analog imagine your risk of getting hit by a car if you stand in one place for 30 seconds - again, basically 0. It just makes collisions, over the longrun, more likely to occur between orbiting bodies. There's absolutely no risk of impairing our ability to get off Earth -- just our ability to circle around it for years in fixed orbits. And in reality, I think it's almost certain we'll eventually see a Kessler syndrome type event. The first thing two capable nations involved in an armed conflict would do is to destroy each others' satellites, resulting in a severe mutual crippling of both offensive and defensive capabilities (as well as civil chaos - imagine if GPS/comms were all taken out tomorrow!) at very low cost. So the only way we do not see a Kessler Syndrome type event is if there's literally never a significant armed conflict between any of US/Russia/China/India, and whatever other future nations develop this technology. The odds of that seem to be pretty much 0.
What makes the Kessler scenario worse is that every collision creates dozens or hundreds more cars, increasing the probability of a subsequent collision. Through positive feedback, large classes of orbits become unusable for meaningful mission lifetimes, even if the odds were still low for an individual spacecraft to have a collision in some short time window.
I doubt that “we might be able to shoot down your satellites too” is a good deterrent. I also don’t buy that the US aimed slightly next to the targets and just accidentally destroyed satellites, no way that higher ups would be satisfied by that
The China's example is there because it puts the threat mentioned in the title into a perspective.
We definitely shouldn't destroy any satellites, but we already did. I don't see a reason not to compare them when we discuss how big is the threat.
EDIT: to those who downvote this comment, I'd love an explanation why you think I shouldn't make this comparison. As far as I know, no country destroyed more than one, so how else am I supposed to compare them?
Also, HN finds usage of “whataboutism” a cliche perpetuated by The Last Week Tonight (John Oliver).
It is whataboutism. I don’t give a shit if it was perpetuated by some TV show. What matters is that HN needs to stop comparisons and distracting the conversation to historical artifacts “oh look, US engaged in Slavery 150 years ago so it is unfair to criticize working conditions at Foxconn”.
I’ve come to accept in a pretty short time that when it comes to subject matter experts in narrow fields, especially in IT and mathematics, this site has a lot to offer. Where almost everything else is concerned it’s just Reddit with more passive aggression. The obvious solution is acceptance, and avoidance, rather than hoping that scolding or bikeshedding is going to somehow change matters.
tl;dr HN is great at some things, and for the rest is just as good or bad as the rest of the internet, just with less humor and self-awareness.
It's definitely a step above Reddit. The average comment is noticeably more informative. Yes, anything political can get messy and ugly sometimes, but I don't think it is comparable to most of Reddit. Certainly not the default subreddits.
There are subreddits that are higher quality for specific topics, but you have to go hunting to find them.
You have to hunt here too, unless you like seeing the same people get into the same fights every week. I’ve found many of the best comments nearer the bottom than the top. Meanwhile Reddits like /history, /compsci, /science, /math, /space, /physics, and /chemistry are all extremely well moderated, informative, and frankly tend to be less of a monoculture. I like HN, but it has some obvious issues that are baked into its dna as a VC-backed board.
Of course if you compare HN to /politics then HN is vastly superior, but then if you compare the average non-technical thread here to anything in /science HN comes off the worse for it. Even putting aside ideological pissing matches bikeshedding, semantic arguments and language wars, you get a lot of weird self-help stuff here that would be funny if people weren’t so desperately sincere about it.
But it is important to look at it. The US in many cases seems to do something that's not good for humanity, but because they did it first they're not held accountable. It's hypocritical.
According to Wikipedia, regarding the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test [0]:
This event was the largest recorded creation of space debris in history with more than 2,000 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger) officially cataloged in the immediate aftermath, and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.
As of October 2016, a total of 3,438 pieces of debris had been detected, with 571 decayed and 2,867 still in orbit nine years after the incident.
So because the US engaged in nuclear weapons tests above ground decades ago, it's okay for everybody else to do it too? I'm not sure how the bad behavior of others makes this behavior any less bad. I'm sure China destroying that satellite was widely criticized at the time too, but at some point we need to be able to sit back and say "Well, that's just not acceptable", regardless of who's still doing it or who's done it before. People commit murder everyday, that still doesn't make it okay.
China faced no consequences, US faced no consequences a year after the Chinese one, and I doubt India will face any consequences now.
It's absolutely not okay and no country should do it. Saying "you shouldn't" to everyone else isn't gonna be effective at all when the precedent is set. Singing a treaty (like the nuclear treaties we've signed) might.
Unfortunately, there’s a clear difference between nation states and us that I don’t feel it’s productive to say, “Well, there’s no treaty, so obviously you and me are okay with it”. My country does plenty of things that are questionable or immoral. I’m still not okay with it. Do the politicians care? Nope. But their doing it despite my objections doesn’t make it any less immoral.
Having a working anti-satellite program is nothing but a benefit to a country, with the possibility to negatively impact anyone else who has stuff in orbit.
There are a very few problems that are comparable. The only ones that I could think of is climate change and nuclear program, because it's theoretically possible to harm humanity as a whole while doing no harm to locals.
Nobody gets killed, there are no consequences that they could even theoretically face, the possible dangers are someone else's, and you publicly display a defense mechanism that only the strongest nations posses.
From the government's perspective, this is nearly perfect. They'll be talked to sternly by some people, so what? That's where treaties can help, because other nations could point to it and say "we've agreed we won't do this because it harms humanity as a whole".
We've "solved" the nuclear crisis by signing treaties, and we can solve this one the same way. We have an international organization that can walk into any space in any country (that signed the treaty) under any suspicion that they might be making a nuclear bomb. Destruction of satellites, in comparison, is much more obvious and easy to spot.
It’s because the topic is how you set norms and ethics. If your ethics are relativistic and entirely dependent on how ethical or unethical your peers are, I’d suggest that your ethics aren’t ethics and more like an opportunistic world view devoid of such.
It’s obvious you are confused between peers and adversaries.
When it comes to national security, the only best ethic is to reciprocate one’s adversaries polities and acts, and prove one is a credible deterrent.
India initiated non-violent political movements, but that does not mean Indians should remain mute spectator while its gigantic neighbour who has made it obvious that it wants to be a world economic-military superpower indulges in arms race.
Calling such deterrence “opportunistic” and “devoid” is a bit too rich.
>So because the US engaged in nuclear weapons tests above ground decades ago, it's okay for everybody else to do it too?
Yes, pretty much. If a country doesn't want other countries to do a certain action then they themselves shouldn't do it either. You can't expect to be able to benefit from something and then deny other countries the same, unless you want to be a tyrant.
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/04/
most of the debris will stay on orbit for several weeks to months: by half a year from now, most of it should be gone however, except for a few lingering pieces.
Probability is very low similar to the one in the below article.
Don't know latin in any way shape or form. Just was curious and used this like a small puzzle. Added a bit more context to words that weren't very self explanatory.
TOTUS - all/whole
VESTRI - your
ARCANA - secrets
NOCTI - night? - 'used in formation of compound words' [0]
NOBIS - us/we
EST - to be - "can be translated as 'it is,' 'he/she is,' or simply 'is.' It is the third person singular of the present tense of the verb 'to be'" [1]
Sooo my guess would be something along the lines "All the secrets of the night belong to us?"
If someone knows any better I would love to be corrected.
I suspect it uses the wrong case (declension) for some of those words and I'm not sure if arcana can be used as a noun--I've forgotten some of my Latin. My best guesses:
What was intended: "all the secrets of your night are ours"
It actually says something closer to: "all the secrets of your night are to us"
It should use noster, as opposed to nos (nobis in the dative case), if I understand the intended meaning correctly.
The reason I suspect wrong case is that nobis is in the dative case whereas I think it should be a nominative in order to agree with the subject (so "noster" in order to agree with totus).
Why are you linking to a completely unrelated article about the chances of a human being hit by debris from a Chinese space station falling out of orbit in this discussion?
The original article says it is hard to estimate the increased risk due to this incident but says one NASA official estimates an increased chance of the ISS needing to maneuver to avoid debris from 20% to 30%, although that estimate should really be given with an associated time period to be meaningful.
Just wait until an armed conflict. China/Russia/US/India will take about 20 minutes to blast every satellite in the sky. Then space will be inaccessible for decades at least.
To a large extent, LEO aggression can be modeled even more dissuasively (collapsing into MAD) via game theory.
If I blow up your satellites, and I don't know where the pieces are liable to go, then I imperil my own satellites in a similar orbit.
Ergo, if I have space assets and ASAT capability, the strictly dominating strategy is to publicly declare I will only deploy my ASAT weapons in defense or if strategic red lines are breached (e.g. territorial invasion).
Consequently, it's in the US's best interests for other countries with ASAT capabilities to increase their satellite capabilities.
"Bombed" is rather nebulous. Are you referring to a strategic bombing campaign or a tactical strike?
If the latter, then yes. I believe they, the US, and most other countries in the world would rather suffer a tactical strike than crack the lid on indiscriminate ASAT usage.
India announces that if China bombs Delhi, all options are on the table.
China mulls over the potential ASAT repercussions and decides the strike isn't worth it.
That's the inherent safety of MAD. It requires no trust in your counterparty -- only convincing them that you will extract a heavy toll if (and only if!) they take a specific action.
>The catastrophic scenarios predict an increase in the number of collisions per year, as opposed to a physically impassable barrier to space exploration that occurs in higher orbits.
Oh just wait till the spaceX internet satellites are setup, and the amazon internet satellites. Low earth orbit is about to be full, debris up there is going to be super dangerous
If a rogue nation develops such missile technology then they could cause incredible disruption to the rest of the world. E.g. think of the DPRK being able to knock out GPS satellites - this missile tech could bring is western currency for the DPRK if the like of al-Quieda or the Taleban were willing to pay millions of $$$ to them for downing US military sats.
GPS satellites aren't in low earth orbit, though. I'd imagine taking out something 12,000 miles up is going to remain out of reach for countries like the DPRK.
There's some fear mongering over China related to this[1], but I don't think the capability has ever been demonstrated because of the implications.
Maybe the illustrious members of HN should stick to their strengths and come up with a technological solution to the following two:
- how can a nation achieve equivalent ability as this without actually destroying a satellite
- how can such debris be rendered harmless
What I don't get is that not only the surface in question is enormous (even more vast than the oceans), but also in 3d (think tens of thousands of layers of ocean surface). How can a few dozen 10cm debris be such a big deal? They may be deadly if a collision occur but how likely is such a collision?
These are several hundred objects travelling with enough momentum to do catastrophic damage to launch vehicles and other orbiting equipment. They’re not icebergs floating on the ocean, they’re bullets whizzing through that volume at incredible velocities.
Would you get on a plane if every airport runway doubled as an active shooting range?
Through which we have to send all our launches. The debris field is growing and this and other tests are contributing to it. The debris isn’t likely to be homogeneous over this volume either.
Our launch sites are tiny spaces designed to reduce launch cost by getting a boost from the earths rotation or to select particular orbits. That these narrow corridors may be polluted with debris from satellites launched into very similar orbits is frightening in the extreme.
One aspect you miss in your analogy is that when you include the time dimension, the probability of a collision is proportional to swept volume (and thus speed), rather than static volume. So while the space is really large, really fast objects can have substantially large swept volumes.
After conducting such tests what was India’s plan to remove such debris? Just because “they did it why can’t we do it?” rationale is not to support this act. They should be hold accountable.
This is plastic in the ocean for earth's orbit. We'll never be able to remove the debris. It's only a small amount now, but give it a few hundred years...
Well, replace on a orbit with on any orbit on my comment, that's closer to what I meant.
I was also talking about normal orbits, not the highly excentric stuff you get after an explosion. Since the GP was about long term concerns, that's more fitting. Yes, the debris of this one explosion will be almost all (or maybe literally all) gone in a month.
And yes, hundreds of years is still an overstatement. But decades would be an understatement for many of the objects we put into LEO.
From severity to probability, nearly everything on news or discussion sites about Kessler Syndrome seems to be a severe misconception.
Good attempt for discrediting a successful mission. The agressive title couldn't be substantiated in entire article, ...and what about those 3 nations that caused debris before, if so!
Ever since NASA chief's comment, the arguments have been very polarised. What NASA said is scientifically accurate & being one of the major stake holder in ISS it has a duty to tell its opinion. There are people in International Space Station, don't forget that their family on earth would want an answer from NASA for such incidents.
The issue in the country seems to be, not what NASA said; but why did it say that!
Yes, US has conducted similar tests & its debris went further in apogee as well & since it didn't change orbit[second application of delta-v is required to do that]; it decayed eventually. Same will happen with the debris we caused as there is not much change in perigee.
If ASATs renew new arms race across the planet & everyone starts blowing satellites, it's not good for the humanity.
If Israel can enforce deterrence as a nuclear power without conducting or acknowledging major nuclear tests, India can project space warfare ready without indulging in such activities; after all there was no doubt about our rocket engineering capabilities to start with.
Edit : Typo