7 ms·

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

by r3bl 8y ago

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.

yumraj 8y ago
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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test#Space_debris_tracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
tomrod 8y ago
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.
- r3bl 8y ago
  I'd call this anything but whataboutism. 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?
  - portpecos 8y ago
    The answer is simple. The US set the precedence for a Military Industrial Complex without any consequence. And now US doesn’t like that India did something in self-defense of an aggressive China and her terrorist sponsoring friend Pakistan.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  You can reliably predict a whataboutism argument will be in the top comments on any HN post that follows the format: [Country] did [bad thing] that affected [everyone/other countries] It's to the point that there's typically limited discussion about the topic itself and a lot of back and forth whataboutism.
  - spectramax 8y ago
    It is really disappointing. 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”. We need to stop doing this guys.
    - portpecos 8y ago
      >We need to stop doing this guys And the US needs to stop selling weapons to terrorist sponsoring nations too. The US is the largest exporter of Arms in the entire world. Even the previous Liberal administration sold $115 Billion to Saudi Barbaria. https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKC... But the US ain’t stopping this, guys.
    - Pharmakon 8y ago
      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.
      - dwaltrip 8y ago
- msravi 8y ago
  > We should criticize nations that did this before AND India. Sure. Just that the "we" cannot be one of the nations that did this before, as is the case here. That's hypocrisy and entitlement.
  - scotty79 8y ago
    Governments change. New one might criticise its own country along with others for doing dumb thing in the past.
  - guitarbill 8y ago
    Because learning from previous mistakes is somehow a sin?
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      "If all your friends jumped off a bridge then would you too?" Just because other people did something stupid doesn't make it not stupid.
      - DangitBobby 8y ago
        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.
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    No HN account is a nation, surely?
    - Djibouti 8y ago
      Mostly true.
  - glennpratt 8y ago
    By that argument "we" can't criticize and resist nuclear proliferation. I completely reject that assertion.
- rjf72 8y ago
  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.
  - mokus 8y ago
    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.
- __m 8y ago
  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
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > 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.
jplayer01 8y ago
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.
- portpecos 8y ago
  Oh right, so the US sets the precedence for a military industrial complex, China continues it, and now the onus is on India to stop the precedence? You sell F-16’s to Terrorist Sponsoring Nations, FFS. Your previous administration sold $115 Billion worth of arms to a Terrorist Sponsoring Nation, FFS. https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKC...
- r3bl 8y ago
  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.
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    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.
    - r3bl 8y ago
      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.

by r3bl 8y ago

yumraj 8y ago

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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test#Space_debris_tracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

tomrod 8y ago

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.

r3bl 8y ago
I'd call this anything but whataboutism. 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?
- portpecos 8y ago
  The answer is simple. The US set the precedence for a Military Industrial Complex without any consequence. And now US doesn’t like that India did something in self-defense of an aggressive China and her terrorist sponsoring friend Pakistan.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
You can reliably predict a whataboutism argument will be in the top comments on any HN post that follows the format: [Country] did [bad thing] that affected [everyone/other countries] It's to the point that there's typically limited discussion about the topic itself and a lot of back and forth whataboutism.
- spectramax 8y ago
  It is really disappointing. 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”. We need to stop doing this guys.
  - portpecos 8y ago
    >We need to stop doing this guys And the US needs to stop selling weapons to terrorist sponsoring nations too. The US is the largest exporter of Arms in the entire world. Even the previous Liberal administration sold $115 Billion to Saudi Barbaria. https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKC... But the US ain’t stopping this, guys.
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    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.
    - dwaltrip 8y ago
msravi 8y ago
> We should criticize nations that did this before AND India. Sure. Just that the "we" cannot be one of the nations that did this before, as is the case here. That's hypocrisy and entitlement.
- scotty79 8y ago
  Governments change. New one might criticise its own country along with others for doing dumb thing in the past.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  Because learning from previous mistakes is somehow a sin?
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    "If all your friends jumped off a bridge then would you too?" Just because other people did something stupid doesn't make it not stupid.
    - DangitBobby 8y ago
      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.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  No HN account is a nation, surely?
  - Djibouti 8y ago
    Mostly true.
- glennpratt 8y ago
  By that argument "we" can't criticize and resist nuclear proliferation. I completely reject that assertion.
rjf72 8y ago
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.
- mokus 8y ago
  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.
__m 8y ago
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
Dylan16807 8y ago
> 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.

jplayer01 8y ago

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.

portpecos 8y ago
Oh right, so the US sets the precedence for a military industrial complex, China continues it, and now the onus is on India to stop the precedence? You sell F-16’s to Terrorist Sponsoring Nations, FFS. Your previous administration sold $115 Billion worth of arms to a Terrorist Sponsoring Nation, FFS. https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ https://www.reuters.com/article/US-usa-saudi-security-idUSKC...
r3bl 8y ago
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.
- jplayer01 8y ago
  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.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    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.