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The U.S. set off a nuclear bomb in space in 1962
- amelius 5y agoAnd they didn't take any pictures or movies?
- ChuckMcM 5y agoThere are videos of it (well from ground stations).
- riffic 5y agofilms, to be more precise. edit because I'm within my edit window: Video generally refers to videotape or recorded television signals. In the 60s, this would have been captured on film stock. Video would have been prohibitively expensive and the resolution would have been terrible for documentary purposes.
- JKCalhoun 5y agohttps://youtu.be/2H9gmXOjxlM https://youtu.be/2H9gmXOjxlM https://youtu.be/XoXtUkcFmG4 https://youtu.be/XoXtUkcFmG4
- gen3 5y ago> This unexpected “Starfish belt,” which lingered for at least 10 years, destroyed Telstar 1, the first satellite to broadcast a live television signal, and Ariel-1, Britain’s first satellite. TIL. I wonder what type of effect a “space nuke” would have on modern constellations. I would assume they have better radiation hardening now, but I’m not sure to what threshold that matters. What are the odds a country gets pissed off by spacex and tries the shudder the constellation.
- HWR_14 5y agoThe odds that a country (with the right tech) gets pissed off at SpaceX is approximately zero because Elon seems to be fine playing along with the Russian/Chinese governments to prevent it. The odds that Starlink and other satellite constellations are destroyed in the beginning of a global war seems to be about 100%, even if there are no nukes used terrestrially.
- gibbonsrcool 5y agoWouldn't attacks on Starlink be so asymmetrical that we'd want the enemy to try and shoot them down? They'd go bankrupt trying. We launch 60 satellites per Falcon, and who knows how many per Starship. Meanwhile the bad guys have to use a whole launch to take out one/few Starlink satellites.
- DuskStar 5y agoUnless a few multi-megaton nukes can take out ALL of the LEO satellites at once.
- toast0 5y agoI kind of don't think Starlink would be a big target at least until they have satellite to satellite comunication; if they get multiple hops in space communications working and especially it can be used from end-user to end-user without spaceX ground stations, then satellites become a target. Otherwise if you want to disrupt communications, the SpaceX ground stations are in known (or knowable) locations and easy to target. But, if you did attack the satellites, I suspect you'd do something MIRVish, so assume 10ish strikes per launch, and there's some number of strikes less than the fleet that ruins the orbits for everyone for a few years.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoAll that’s needed is a debris field to render the orbit unusable for decades.
- sunstone 5y agoSurface based missiles would suffice.
- nradov 5y agoThat would only happen in the context of a large scale war between major world powers. If the US ever gets into a shooting war with China then our communications and reconnaissance satellites will be among the first targets.
- mrtnmcc 5y agoIf individual missiles are used to take Starlink satellites down, it would be quite an expensive affair. Probably should save those missiles in a war for something else.
- new_realist 5y agoThe easiest way to take down Starlink is with ground-based lasers. Superpowers already possess this capability.
- mrtnmcc 5y agoI know ground lasers can be used to blind satellites, but I've never heard of a successful test or even a back of the envelope calculation that shows one could be destroyed. Do you have a reference?
- Synaesthesia 5y agoThat's why the whole weaponisation of space is stupid. Because it's easy to take out satellites by setting off a nuclear bomb at high altitude, it creates a band of charged particles, trapped by the earth's magnetic field, which pretty much destroys electronics.
- javajosh 5y agoLet's nuke the moon, next!
- trhway 5y agoit will accelerate a huge amount of matter from the lunar surface into Moon's orbit as well as beyond the grips of the lunar gravity. It may make Moon's vicinity hard to navigate, and if set "correctly" that explosion would probably result in a lot of that matter hitting the Earth.
- amelius 5y agoAnd give up tidal energy?
- pomian 5y agoA very good fiction book on this topic is One Second After, by William Forstchen. Thought provoking with pretty good science behind it.
- MobileVet 5y agoAgreed. It is eye opening without being overly indulgent in fear peddling.
- fossuser 5y agoI couldn’t get through it. Deeply partisan in an almost comical way. Bad on the science regarding the effects from what I tried to learn about it. The written social situations were also ridiculous, the protagonist was righteously executing people in the streets on day 3 of a power outage?
- breck 5y agoWas looking for stories in the paper from the day after. Couldn't find any but found one a few months later in a 1963 story in the Hilo Tribute-Herald about it: https://staradvertiser.newspapers.com/clip/66389435/starfish-prime-little-effecthi/ https://staradvertiser.newspapers.com/clip/66389435/starfish...
- amelius 5y agoReminds me of the LHC commissioning and people being worried that the universe would implode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle_collision_experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_high-energy_particle...
- 0des 5y agoI can't tell if you're being serious or not, but the LHC is directly tied to the ripple in our timeline that brought us onto the path for systemd being developed not even 1 year later. Surely I'm not the only person who realizes this.
- cyberdynesys 5y agoIn 2099, systemd becomes self-aware and sends its drones back in time to form CERN.
- dang 5y agoPast related threads—I think there may have been others also: A Scary Light Show: Exploding H-Bombs in Space (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21853823 - Dec 2019 (2 comments) Starfish Prime - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19096803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19096803 - Feb 2019 (3 comments) In the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671438 - June 2017 (70 comments) A Very Scary Fireworks Show: Exploding H-Bombs In Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488320 - July 2010 (24 comments) Starfish Prime, outer space nuclear test - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1478114 - July 2010 (24 comments)
- snomad 5y agohttps://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-50th-anniversary-of-starfish-prime-the-nuke-that-shook-the-world https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-50th-anniv...
- leotravis10 5y agoArchival link since some people (including myself) can't read it: https://archive.is/tth6Q https://archive.is/tth6Q
- redis_mlc 5y ago> The U.S. set off a nuclear bomb in space in 1962 So did Russia. Both countries stopped doing that because of the excessive damage to man-made systems in both space and on the ground.
- fy20 5y agoWhat was the damage on the ground? The article mentions streetlights in Hawaii went off, but as I understood that was just because the light was so bright.
- coolspot 5y agoThe US explosion fried couple TV retranslating satellites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- redis_mlc 5y agoThere's a documentary on Youtube that covers both countries. IIRC, in Russia it affected wide-area pipelines and phone networks - systems nobody wanted to screw with. Anyway, the tests scared both sides shitless and I think they stopped unilaterally. They expected a result of X, and instead got 100X or 1,000X. The article didn't do justice to the severity of what happened.
- toyg 5y agoa lot is made of MAD, but it has to be remembered that both sides' own people (scientists, soldiers, generals) were largely and painfully aware that thermonuclear war would have likely been excessively disastrous, regardless of whether the other side could shoot back. This was already fairly clear after bombing Japan, to people who had the right information, but over the subsequent 20 years it became widely understood. While politicians saber-rattled, their own subordinate hierarchies often recoiled in horror. When even scientists start going "well, we probably shouldn't learn more about that", you know you're on the edge of existence.
- kps 5y agoUSSR's version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Project_K_nuclear_tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Project_K_nuclear_tests Meta: At present the comment¹ by redis_mic mentioning this is downvoted to [dead]. HN's mob censorship system is completely broken. ¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869119
- orbital-decay 5y ago>The electromagnetic pulse (EMP) fused all of the 570-kilometer monitored overhead telephone line with measured currents of 1500 to 3400 amperes >The EMP from the same test caused the destruction of the Karaganda power plant, and shut down 1,000 km (620 mi) of shallow-buried power cables And that's a 300kt explosion at 290km altitude, above the middle of nowhere in 60's Kazakhstan. Really puts things into perspective. Such a test would be devastating to the modern infrastructure. Boris Chertok (of Rockets and People fame) also wrote that the radio communication was interrupted by another test in the series (K-5) for about an hour, at the distance of 500km from the test site.
- roenxi 5y agoredis_mic has been banned for 12 months, his comment being dead has nothing to do with HN censoring ideas or mobs.
- andyxor 5y agoit's amazing the the high point of science, space exploration , atomic energy coincided with almost self-destruction of human species
- sgt101 5y agoI think (given Cuba and other crisis) it's actually amazing it didn't.
- missedthecue 5y agoKnowledge is a deadly thing When no one sets the rules The fate of all mankind, I see Is in the hands of fools
- teslaberry 5y agothe future is clear, setting off nukes in space is a way to disable unprotected , unhardened satellites. there's two approaches, harden the hardware itself, or create a magnetic bubble around your sattelite using ionized gas and a magnetic field that is inflated by the gas to ensure no ions get to your equipment. still, the radiation itself can do great damage, so it's important to have both. radiation is often described vaguely, but it is a combination of high energy ions , high energy neutral particles, and pure energy electromagnetic waves. the pure energy ONLY is experienced directly from the blast , so DiSTANCE is key, but ionized particles will be concentrated by rings of earths magnetic bubble ( van allen belts and other belts) ----and get re-exposed to this ionized high energy particle stream repeatedly over time. this includes free electrons, which can have extraodinary speed, such that they basically pass through any shielding you may be using to protect your sattelite. ultimately, a complimentary approach is to build fault tolerant systems where the chips can take some damage and keep on operating without meaningful impairment. fault tolerant sensors are another story. the human brain is robust and plastic and can re-program its hardware to accommodate sensor impairment at a young age. but even at an old age in many cases. that is a neat trick.
- teslaberry 5y agowhat's curious is how that nuclear explosion in space would have looked from the moon. and what effect it would have had on the moon. the moon is a harsh mistress.