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Nope. Go read some Heinlein! (Or take a basic physics course). Rocks can be brought into Earth orbit (or rather down to Earth surface, no reason to stock them

Nope. Go read some Heinlein! (Or take a basic physics course). Rocks can be brought into Earth orbit (or rather down to Earth surface, no reason to stock them in orbit), for very cheap, basically for free. All you need, is a fillip on the rock from far above in the Sun's gravity well, and you can displace its orbit so that it will fall on Earth. You can then add another little push to make it drop right on the White House instead of the Pentagon (or vice-versa) when it's closer to Earth. And you're looking too many Hollywood brainwashing spectacles. Things are not blown out of the sky. If you break a rock in two, now you have two problems, to meteorites instead of one. And if you break that rock into little pieces that would burn into the sky before reaching the surface, now you still have the fucking problem, because your atmosphere will be full of cender, and nuclear winter will be upon you. Hope you have stocked preserves for a few years! And finally, the only actors that are anything slightly more capable than sub-orbital right now are Russia and China. If you've installed a self-sufficient colonny in space or even on the Moon (or Mars), earthlings are basically toasted.

dogma1138 10y ago
I suggest you should check the energy required for orbit transfers. And I'm not looking into any hollywood spectacles, anti-sattlite weapons have been fielded by the US (And any NATO nation fielding the SM-3 missile), the EU (France/Germany/UK have anti-sattlite capability), Russia, China, with Israel and India having similar capabilities or are effectively breakout states. Also in general any nation capable of putting something into low earth orbit can effectively hit a space station, satellites are slightly harder since they can be considerably smaller, but any nation can put something into a collision orbit. This increases the list of capable actors considerably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems, and includes these days commercial companies. As for your other scenario the mass needed to cause a nuclear winter is enormous (earth gains as much as 40,000 tonnes of mass due to space dust alone each year), each year earth is being hit by countless meteorites, the lowest estimates for a body hit that would cause an impact winter is about 10km in diameter with a mass of about 3-5x10^15 (depending on it's composition). These are the major impacts that our earth experiences regularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris.... As for the directed hit, this is laughable the likelihood of you being able to calculate the hit location of a stellar body is very slim, there is almost no way to predict where it will hit because the atmospheric phase will be extremely unpredictable. If you are looking at kinetic space weapons ala "Thor's Hammer" then you have very uniform aerodynamic bodies with terminal guidance capability and even then their CEP delegates them to strategic targets e.g. a city and not tactical ones e.g. a building. P.S. Suggesting some one to read sci fi to prove a point is a bit silly. And if I wasn't clear enough in my first post, the blow it out of the sky reference is to the space station not the "rock".

dogma1138 10y ago

I suggest you should check the energy required for orbit transfers. And I'm not looking into any hollywood spectacles, anti-sattlite weapons have been fielded by the US (And any NATO nation fielding the SM-3 missile), the EU (France/Germany/UK have anti-sattlite capability), Russia, China, with Israel and India having similar capabilities or are effectively breakout states. Also in general any nation capable of putting something into low earth orbit can effectively hit a space station, satellites are slightly harder since they can be considerably smaller, but any nation can put something into a collision orbit. This increases the list of capable actors considerably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems, and includes these days commercial companies. As for your other scenario the mass needed to cause a nuclear winter is enormous (earth gains as much as 40,000 tonnes of mass due to space dust alone each year), each year earth is being hit by countless meteorites, the lowest estimates for a body hit that would cause an impact winter is about 10km in diameter with a mass of about 3-5x10^15 (depending on it's composition). These are the major impacts that our earth experiences regularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_risk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris.... As for the directed hit, this is laughable the likelihood of you being able to calculate the hit location of a stellar body is very slim, there is almost no way to predict where it will hit because the atmospheric phase will be extremely unpredictable. If you are looking at kinetic space weapons ala "Thor's Hammer" then you have very uniform aerodynamic bodies with terminal guidance capability and even then their CEP delegates them to strategic targets e.g. a city and not tactical ones e.g. a building. P.S. Suggesting some one to read sci fi to prove a point is a bit silly. And if I wasn't clear enough in my first post, the blow it out of the sky reference is to the space station not the "rock".