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The thing about a space colony is an invasion is not too easy. On the other hand, a blockade is pretty easy.
by adrianmonk 6y ago
The thing about a space colony is an invasion is not too easy. On the other hand, a blockade is pretty easy.
- handedness 6y agoThirdly: A debilitating attack if you don't seek to preserve anything of the colony, is also relatively easy.
- ALittleLight 6y agoIf the colony has one or more nukes it could establish mutually assured destruction or at least a significant deterrent.
- handedness 6y agoAnd so shall history echo with rhymes, even in a vacuum.
- numpad0 6y agoWell, a habitat with propulsion in space is itself a deterrent.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoFor a colony further up the gravity well that produces resources locally, "rods from god" style weapons suddenly make much more sense than for earth-based nations. Nukes might simply not be worth the effort.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoYou don't need nukes at orbital speeds. A tungsten rod has equivalent power.
- vl 6y agoNot even close! An easy way to make upper boundary estimate: let’s say you use Falcon Heavy to deliver your kinetic weapon. Falcon Heavy burns around 500 tons of fuel. This is upper boundary for energy of your payload (since most of the energy goes to lifting rocket itself and air resistance). So even ultra-heavy payload of 64 tons will have way less then 0.5 kilotons of energy (TNT equivalent used for nukes). Any nuke is way beyond that. Of course, another way to estimate is to not to be lazy and actually multiply mv^2/2. Truly massive 64 ton kinetic weapon reaching target at 7 km/s will have energy of 1.6x10^12 J. Modest 20 kiloton nuke has energy of 8.4x10^13 J. I.e. 50 times more.
- numpad0 6y ago> let’s say you use Falcon Heavy to deliver your kinetic weapon. Why? pick up an NEO and aim for Sydney, or wherever it needs to go. Easy, unless your settlement isn't orbital or you don't have electric propulsion.
- inglor_cz 6y agoIn this snapshot of a moment, yes. But consider these things: 1. Space colonies, especially remote ones (e.g. not Moon, but Mars or Titan), are strongly motivated to be maximally independent as soon as possible. Whoever leads them must think about the possibility that the supply ships stop coming, either for some temporary disruption (pandemics on Earth, cough, cough, or even a war back home), or permanently (something has gone seriously wrong on the blue planet). And imports from Earth are expensive, because they have to be lifted out of the Earth's gravitational well. This means that the colony will try to produce everything necessary in situ for good reasons; such a colony will not be easily brought to its knees by a blockade. 2. It is easy to block a colony physically, but they will still be able to communicate back to Earth and argue their cause in front of the rest of the humanity. This will undermine the will of Earthly powers to maintain the blockade. 3. We are now in a rare situation when only one nation (the U.S.) is approaching the capability to send ships to the rest of the Solar System. It is not unlike the situation when only the Portuguese mastered the carrack and were the only ones to sail regularly from Europe to India in the late 1400s. But this situation will not last and I would guess that by 2050, at least five or six sovereign entities will have the same capability. By 2100 for sure. And their political differences will be exploited. It is unlikely that all of them would decide to start a common punitive embargo against a rebel colony.
- ozim 6y agoFor the point number 3 you might be too much under influence of SpaceX marketing and launches. China is on their way to mars as well with Tianwen-1, India is ramping up their space program, ESA is launching their stuff with Ariane vehicle as far as Jupiter, Russians with Angara have plan for crewed moon flyby in 2029. So it is not like other nations won't have that capability soon after US and not like US has it right now or next year. Second part is that there is still not that much of commercial gain in going to Mars, Moon or other place. Most of the money is made in LEO with satellite communications, gps, utilities. Space mining is not going to be profitable for really long time into the future. Where going to India was profitable right away if you had a ship to carry spices you were really ahead of the others. Space ship capability is just the starting point and we still have to find something that is worth enough to send those ships there, even with SpaceX reusable rockets it is still not worth to mine rare earth elements somewhere else in the solar system.