Remember all those videos, that sprung up some time last year, of colourful meteors and falling debree? I believe a lot of them fell over Russia, but probably elsewhere too.
There's an ongoing race toward arms in space and we may have missed the starting gun.
I'll read the PDF later and come back with more bullshit, but for now here's food for thought;
>>5029 That's probably an over optimistic viewpoint.
USAs conventional forces have by some accounts been complacent over the past couple of decades and have fallen behind on a lot of key capabilities such as hypersonic weapons. Meanwhile the day-to-day maintenance and operations of the armed forces have become increasingly reliant on civilian contractors, to the point where during their time in Afghanistan if a tank or helicopter broke down in the middle of the warzone, soldiers weren't allowed to repair anything themselves so they had to fly in contractors at great cost.
Their space program is also a mess as the governments/NASAs own capacity has diminished over the years due to lack of funding and bonkers prioritising, meanwhile private contractors have been given generous cost+ contracts that consistently under-deliver. Boeing is years behind on their starliner capsule because NASA just handed them whatever they asked for and just trusted them to do things like actually test that their software worked. The minotaur rocket is an overpriced mess that no private satellite operator will touch with a bargepole but NASA has to pay them to launch cargo to the ISS because they signed a contract. ULA now has no heavy lift rocket because they got banned from buying any more engines from Russia and the replacement engines they bought from Jeff Bezos are years behind schedule.
SpaceX is literally a saviour to the US space industry. Without the falcon rockets they'd be properly fucked because if China or Russia did start targeting satellites the US would have no hope of getting anything back into space quick enough.
The Russian 3M22 Zircon broke Mach 7 back in 2017, but the system is reportedly still quite flaky. The Chinese have deployed the HF-ZF hypersonic glide vehicle as part of the HF-17 platform, which seems to be effective enough to have seriously rattled the Pentagon. Raytheon have supposedly successfully test-fired a hypersonic missile today, although I've yet to see independent verification.
Hypersonic gliders have no advantage over ballistic missiles if your adversary has a functioning satellite IR detection system. If you've knocked out those satellites, they're dramatically less detectable. China have proven anti-satellite capabilities. I don't know about Russia, but China's hypersonic programme has been a relatively inexpensive way of massively complicating the situation for America.
A key priority for China is defending the South China Sea against the US naval fleet and their bases in the Pacific. The HF-17/HF-ZF system isn't designed as an intercontinental system, but to augment the already excellent DF-21 and DF-26 IRBM systems. China want a diverse range of weapons systems in this role because of the obvious risk of unknowingly losing the effectiveness of a system due to espionage, but also due to the asymmetry in costs. A weapons system that costs China a few tens of millions of dollars to develop is likely to induce hundreds of millions of dollars in US spending on developing countermeasures.
China and Russia know that the US military is immensely powerful and incredibly well funded, but also slow to adapt and gratuitously inefficient. Their key strategic advantage is to create an exceptionally complex and dynamic theatre, exploiting that core weakness in US defence. You don't need better weapons systems to beat the Yanks, you just need to keep turning over new systems faster than the Yanks can figure out how to respond. Given the Kafkaesque hellscape that is the Pentagon, that isn't particularly difficult or expensive.
I have no idea why the US would want hypersonic weapons, other than the fact that they exist and they're shiny ergo America needs them.
As a complete layman pundit, it has often occurred to me that America is, in all likelihood, the paper tiger that Mao bloke always liked to call it.
The potential problems with having your entire military, government, infrastructural backbone contracted out to the lowest bidder should be obvious, but it is the American way and they are fully, zealously committed to it. Those companies are not loyal to your country or your ideology, they are loyal only to their shareholders.
The USA has effectively no ability to steer it's own ship. It will remain the pre-eminent superpower as long as the wind is blowing it's way, but one day they're going to wake up and discover their army now works for a Chinese businessman.
>>5035 >I have no idea why the US would want hypersonic weapons
As you rightly point out, America has a very large and powerful aerospace industry to sustain - too many people's jobs are tied up in it. That's why they're pursuing the idea.
>UK space insurance industry grows by a quarter despite pandemic contraction
>The UK’s space insurance industry grew by quarter in the year the pandemic hit, drawing in some £20m into the more than £16bn sector, according to fresh analysis. Linklaters associate Nicholas Puschman told City A.M. that the growth was “not surprising given that London has a well-established history in underwriting space risks and responding to the risks presented by new types of activities, such as satellite constellations. Having adequate insurance coverage is a critical step in getting a space project off the ground. Investors and lenders will want to know that the risk and potential liability arising from space assets are well covered through insurance.”
>The rising popularity and viability of space tourism in the US has ushered in a wave of growth in the UK’s own industry, which grew by more than a third in the 12-month period – prior to the recent successes of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. In the decade to 2021, 145 individual investors from across nearly 40 businesses have invested almost £6bn into the country’s growing space sector – making the UK the second largest attractor of private investment in emerging space firms.
>The country’s space industry accounted for 0.31 per cent of UK GDP between 2019 and 2020. And the percentage is expected to grow exponentially over the next decade, as the country readies for its first-ever launches from UK soil later this year. In establishing a launch capability, businesses are expected to enjoy boosts to their revenue, a trend that had already been reported by 16 per cent of organisations surveyed for the government’s analysis.
https://www.cityam.com/uk-space-insurance-industry-grows-by-a-quarter-despite-pandemic-contraction/
>>5107 Those were Russians in the 90s though, iirc. You get a sell-out pass when your entire society is crumbling and your babushka needs her gas and electricity paying. Watching space be turned into just another hobby horse for the ultra-wealthy, treated with as much respect as we've treated the terrestrial world and then sold off with no regard to its importance for humanity is something I try to put out of my mind, as the 0.31% GDP these offenses make is cold comfort otherwise.
>>5109 Yes, I'm well aware. The post you replied to contained all of my very real concerns for the future of space and it's exploration and exploitation. None of those concerns were related to traffic congestion, you great cretin.
Why should I care that rich people are fucking about in space? It doesn't stop anyone else from doing whatever they want to do in space. It's not like Jeff Bezos has claimed ownership of the moon and is charging admission. Are you just jealous that some people are cleverer and more successful than the rest of us? I don't get it.
We live in a world where a group of hobbyists can build, launch and operate a satellite just for fun. Is that desecration of space, or is it only bad when rich people do it?
>>5112 >It's not like Jeff Bezos has claimed ownership of the moon and is charging admission
Not just yet, but there are concerns about that sort of capitalist fuckery in the very near future. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was a basic agreement that space and its contents belong to everyone, no borders and such. With people gearing themselves up to start mining asteroids whose net worth in stuff like rare earth metals is orders of magnitude greater than the entire world's economy, there are going to be some serious questions about ownership before too long.
Jeff doesn't just plant a flag and that's that, he needs a world that can buy the metals at profit and a state that can back his claim. He needs the underlying technology and infrastructure in place to facilitate that which is of considerable benefit to humanity, much as cratering the price of rare metals would be be broadly good over the long-run, he needs states to say "yes that's legit" with all the strings that will come with that.
What you then have is a mine. A mine that requires minimal environmental regulation because it's already an uninhabitable and radioactive hellscape.
I have to reiterate that space is fucking massive. Disputes over ownership or mineral rights are a really good kind of problem, because they'll only arise in any serious way if we've successfully become an interplanetary species. The commercial viability of extraterrestrial mining depends on incredibly cheap launches - if it's worthwhile for Bezos to mine an asteroid, then you'll be able to get a Megabus to the moon.
>I have to reiterate that space is fucking massive.
The sea is fucking massive too, relative to our planet. But that doesn't mean anyone other than about three giant companies has any realistic way to claim the resources it provides. It'll be really fun to get a Megabus to the moon, but I'll likely be stuck on the other end pissing into a moonbottle while delivering moon amazon prime boxes for moon minimum wage, because this is just the same fucking shit in a different atmosphere.
>>5117 If we can mine stuff out beyond Earth then what makes you think that they'll still be monotonous delivery jobs? At worst you'll be on the dole with a diamond shitter and gadgets that can only be made in space.
>that doesn't mean anyone other than about three giant companies has any realistic way to claim the resources it provides
Be definition falling launch costs reduces the cost of entry. It's not like we're going to run out of opportunities for mining.
>The sea is fucking massive too, relative to our planet. But that doesn't mean anyone other than about three giant companies has any realistic way to claim the resources it provides.
The whole thing hinges on incredibly cheap launch hardware. Metals are valuable, but they're also really fucking heavy. If the technology exists to mine asteroids profitably, then there will inevitably be a spaceship version of Apolloduck.
When I was a child, maybe 25 years ago, I had the brilliant idea to send rockets into space to collect space junk and bring it back. You could then make millions selling literal rubbish based on the fact that it had been in space, and that's so cool. If anyone fancies doing that, I'll be happy to let you in exchange for a mere 10% of the profits.
They won't have dole on the moon, it'll be outside of the jurisdiction of Earth governments and resemble a turn of the century company town, but with only one company, and no escape.
There might be some protections at first, with Earth governments still having some degree of responsibility to their ex-pats, but we'll see the full extent of what Amazon et al thinks of human life when the first generation of natural moon citizens are born.
>>5121 and then you worked out the energy requirements to deorbit stuff without it burning up, and thought 'fuck it, I'll just sell random spacey looking shit from ebay and print certificates of orthentisity'
Where's my 10%?
