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That's nothing. The real money will be in missile defense. Currently a single ground based interceptor costs, according to wikipedia [1], at least $74 million.

That's nothing. The real money will be in missile defense. Currently a single ground based interceptor costs, according to wikipedia [1], at least $74 million. Such an interceptor carries one kill vehicle [2] that weights about 64 kilograms. A Starship is able to put 100 tons of stuff in orbit, so it could send a huge swarm of such kill vehicles which could take care of hundreds of incoming threats. And because the Starship is reusable, this could all happen for cheaper than a single current interceptor. Starship has the potential to magnify basically overnight the US's missile defense capability by a factor of 100. Now you can do the math: F-35 has a lifetime cost north of 1 trillion, one single aircraft carrier has a price tag of $13 billion, one B-21 Raider is expected to cost about $600 million. How much would the US be willing to pay for an airtight ballistic missile defense system? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-Based_Interceptor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle

deleted 3y ago
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shade 3y ago
As I recall, this was more or less the concept behind Brilliant Pebbles [0], except Starship makes it cost-effective to launch. I'm not going to argue whether building it is a good idea, but it also seems like Starship has the potential to make launching a kinetic bombardment system [1] possible given the large payload capacity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles#Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles#Brilliant_Pe... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_United_States_Air_Force_proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_Unite...
- ironyman 3y ago
  LEO mega constellations are the future of space militarization. NRO + Space Development Agency is relentlessly moving ahead here with Starshield, next gen recon programs and missile tracking layers. Anyone who isn’t aggressively building production facilities to churn out tens of thousands of LEO satellites and the rockets necessary to launch them (ideally reusable rockets), and developing civilian commercial use cases from telecommunications to ADAS to spread some of the costs, might as well by living in the 2010s still.
  - audunw 3y ago
    Ideally reusable? I think given that SpaceX are now basically guaranteed to provide 100% reusability for the US, anyone trying to keep up, to even remotely match their capabilities, without reusability, will basically bankrupt themselves. I.e. falling in the same trap the Soviet Union did vs USA during the Cold War. In other words: if a country wants to play this game, reusability is a hard requirement.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  The brilliant pebbles were supposed to be stationed in orbit. What I'm talking about is simply an upgrade of the current ground based missile defense. The immense capacity of the Starship makes this possible. It also completely reverses the old cost calculus of offsense-defense in the ICBM space: in the past you could simply counteract an attempt at a comprehensive missile defense system by building one thousand more ICBMs, and if that was not enough, two thousand or ten thousand. It was cheaper to add one more ICBM than to add the capability to stop it. In the near future that will stop being the case. The ICBM has to have, after all, a nuke, and a nuke will never be very cheap. The kill vehicle is simply a block of steel, or some other metal. A maneuverable one, but still, a much cheaper piece of equipment than a nuclear warhead. By the way, the fancy term for the nuclear warhead is "reentry vehicle", and, as the name implies, it has to be build to withstand the tremendous shocks of reentering the atmosphere. Not so with a kill vehicle: if it needs to reenter the atmosphere it means it failed to do its job and it's not needed anymore. Of course, Russia and China have seen the writing on the wall, and that's why they started looking for alternate ways of delivering nukes. I'm talking here about hypersonic, nuclear capable, weapons. Regardless, my point is that in the near future, SpaceX will get some eye-popping contracts from the Pentagon, and specifically for missile defense reasons.
  - blago 3y ago
    Are you saying that there will be a large number of Starships on duty for immediate launch to deploy kill vehicles over an arbitrary area in space over and around the US? I'm no expert but this sounds pretty different form what Starship is designed to do. And not cheap at all.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      I think u/credit_guy means that with Starship the U.S. could put a constellation of anti-missile missiles in orbit and keep them there for the long haul. If Falcon 9 can put up 5,500 sats in a few years, Starship could greatly increase the rate at which the U.S. can build not just comms constellations but also reconnaissance ("spy") constellations, missile defense constellations, anti-sat constellations, maybe even nuke constellations, who knows. I suspect that missile defense constellations would have to be truly gargantuan though, because of some N thousand missile defense sats most will not be able to reach the missiles being launched at any given point, thus to counter a 1,000 ICBM/SLBM threat the missile def constellation might have to have 20x -maybe even 100x- that many space-launched anti-missile missiles. That seems prohibitively expensive even if internal Starship launch costs ever come down below $5 million each.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Interceptors need to be ready to launch at a moment's notice. How would Starship satisfy that requirement?
dotnet00 3y ago
Unless you're stuffing orbit to the point of having an interceptor within every couple of sqkm (so millions if not billions of them, with active navigation of course), orbit is not a great place to put interceptors. They can't just sit over a location, so any given interceptor would on average be ~45 minutes away from the missile. On the other hand, if you're talking about having Starship launch interceptors in response to an incoming missile, it's entirely the wrong kind of rocket for the purpose. Being cryo-fueled makes it unrealistic to keep it sitting ready for launch, and it has way too low of a TWR for missile defense purposes. Missile defense systems need very high TWR, and hypergolic or solid fueled rockets, which can sit around fueled for years on end.
- burnerthrow008 3y ago
  ICBMs aren't uniformly randomly distributed across the globe, though. You would only need to cover a few selected orbital inclinations, corresponding to the latitude of the launch sites (albeit with a large number of RAs, but probably nothing more than what SpaceX already does for Starlink). The calculus is even better for the most-probable launch scenario, over-the-pole, since all the high-inclination interceptor orbits will converge in the same region as the ICBMs. For SBLMs the calculus is theoretically a bit less favorable, but most of Russia's SSNs will be in the Arctic Ocean anyway to avoid USN attack submarines.
  - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
    ICBM boost phase only lasts about four minutes. Detection takes a minute or two. LEO orbit time is as low as 90 minutes, so you need at least 45 satellites orbiting the desired location to reach a single missile in time. This doesn't include orbit drift or account for the chances of the interceptor missing.
    - wmf 3y ago
      Interceptors don't go into orbit at all.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
jonplackett 3y ago
Aren’t you forgetting that Russia / China can just play this game too - at least to the extent of putting some nukes in orbit that can just drop on their target in minutes and wouldn’t be intercept-able?
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  An actual nuke is space is a huge escalation. Then the US would likely have hunter/killer satellites trailing every chinese and russian satellite. Remember, with Starship the US will have at least 1/10th the cost of space deployment (goal is 1/100th).
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    But putting up 1000s of anti ballistic middle satellites somehow _isn’t_ a huge escalation? My point is one escalation leads to another so the lead you think you’ll have is not as big as you’d expect. You just provoke the other side to escalate too.
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      I agree it is an escalation but: 1) Putin is the one invading and threatening nukes on the doorstep of NATO 2) MAD only works, kind of ironically, if both sides aren't mad/insane. But authoritarians are often a bit nuts. There also were the false alarm scares from the cold war. Putin has highly consolidated power, and it would appear Xi has even MORE power and cult of personality 3) I think it works best as an unknown capability. One of the things about nukes is that people know what they can do, know if you have them, know the consequences. But what may work better than the game theory of MAD is that MAD is the BEST CASE for someone launching a strike. With unknown missile defense capability, the worst case is you launch a strike, get nothing from it, and the only assured destruction may be yours.
      - jonplackett 3y ago
        There are a litany of problems with your thinking. 1) we brought nato next door to putin in Ukraine. That’s why there’s a war. Go read more about this if you aren’t sure why the war is happening. It’s quite interesting. 2) it’s impossible to keep some capability like that secret. Do you know how the Soviet Union got nukes in the first place? They ‘borrowed’ the technology from the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies There is no reason to believe the USA could keep this info secret. And every reason to believe it would result in Russia / China finding out and then doing whatever is necessary to counter it = probably nukes in space if that’s their only option. The main problem with all this, and why MAD probably still applies, is that even if one single thermonuclear weapon gets though, you’re totally screwed.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
What is the feasibility of laser weapons in space now? The solar panels are all way better, the Navy is deploying point defense lasers...
- credit_guy 3y ago
  There is no scenario in the foreseeable future (decades) to have a laser powerful enough to kill an incoming nuclear warhead. For the simple reason that the reentry vehicle is designed to withstand the enormous amounts of heat released during the reentry. It is very unlikely a laser can put a comparable amount of heat on the reentry vehicle, and do that from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Given that, the only time an ICBM is vulnerable to a laser weapon is during the takeoff time. During that part of the attack, the ICBM are protected by the atmosphere itself. A laser maintains its power very well in vacuum, but not in air, especially if there are clouds. So, one needs to be close to the launch point. In other words, you need a very dense network of satellites that would carry these lasers to provide the coverage necessary. Even with such a network, it would be quite trivial to come up with inexpensive countermeasures: simply launch more missiles, some of which do not carry warheads.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  The hardest thing to do in space is cool off. The only way is through radiation (or maybe launching heat away in the form of hot stuff, but that's not practical at this time). That means that a laser weapon will need long cool-down periods.
crotchfire 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god
- uticus 3y ago
  Or more generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette. Similar to WWI, where old tech (gunpowder, cast metal, etc) was scaled and automated to deliver a new scenario.
perihelions 3y ago
The end point of that (hypothetical) arms race would be China in 15-25 years having its own Starship clone, and thousands of nuclear weapons in low Earth orbit. Their purpose being that you could de-orbit a nuclear weapon nearly instantly, evading the other side's space-based intercept capability. (An ICBM, by comparison, would be a sitting duck to space-based interceptors, with its 30-minute long, predictable, trajectory). Would we be better off? We'd be in the same position (MAD), only a trillion dollars shorter and also nuclear war now has a 30-second latency instead of a 30-minute one. And also we've created a novel type of nuclear instability: one where we have the possibility of a preemptive strike by orbiting interceptors against orbiting nuclear weapons, one that happens in seconds and is determined entirely by AI. False positives and false negatives are both extinction events.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

shade 3y ago

As I recall, this was more or less the concept behind Brilliant Pebbles [0], except Starship makes it cost-effective to launch. I'm not going to argue whether building it is a good idea, but it also seems like Starship has the potential to make launching a kinetic bombardment system [1] possible given the large payload capacity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles#Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles#Brilliant_Pe... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_United_States_Air_Force_proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#2003_Unite...

ironyman 3y ago
LEO mega constellations are the future of space militarization. NRO + Space Development Agency is relentlessly moving ahead here with Starshield, next gen recon programs and missile tracking layers. Anyone who isn’t aggressively building production facilities to churn out tens of thousands of LEO satellites and the rockets necessary to launch them (ideally reusable rockets), and developing civilian commercial use cases from telecommunications to ADAS to spread some of the costs, might as well by living in the 2010s still.
- audunw 3y ago
  Ideally reusable? I think given that SpaceX are now basically guaranteed to provide 100% reusability for the US, anyone trying to keep up, to even remotely match their capabilities, without reusability, will basically bankrupt themselves. I.e. falling in the same trap the Soviet Union did vs USA during the Cold War. In other words: if a country wants to play this game, reusability is a hard requirement.
credit_guy 3y ago
The brilliant pebbles were supposed to be stationed in orbit. What I'm talking about is simply an upgrade of the current ground based missile defense. The immense capacity of the Starship makes this possible. It also completely reverses the old cost calculus of offsense-defense in the ICBM space: in the past you could simply counteract an attempt at a comprehensive missile defense system by building one thousand more ICBMs, and if that was not enough, two thousand or ten thousand. It was cheaper to add one more ICBM than to add the capability to stop it. In the near future that will stop being the case. The ICBM has to have, after all, a nuke, and a nuke will never be very cheap. The kill vehicle is simply a block of steel, or some other metal. A maneuverable one, but still, a much cheaper piece of equipment than a nuclear warhead. By the way, the fancy term for the nuclear warhead is "reentry vehicle", and, as the name implies, it has to be build to withstand the tremendous shocks of reentering the atmosphere. Not so with a kill vehicle: if it needs to reenter the atmosphere it means it failed to do its job and it's not needed anymore. Of course, Russia and China have seen the writing on the wall, and that's why they started looking for alternate ways of delivering nukes. I'm talking here about hypersonic, nuclear capable, weapons. Regardless, my point is that in the near future, SpaceX will get some eye-popping contracts from the Pentagon, and specifically for missile defense reasons.
- blago 3y ago
  Are you saying that there will be a large number of Starships on duty for immediate launch to deploy kill vehicles over an arbitrary area in space over and around the US? I'm no expert but this sounds pretty different form what Starship is designed to do. And not cheap at all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    I think u/credit_guy means that with Starship the U.S. could put a constellation of anti-missile missiles in orbit and keep them there for the long haul. If Falcon 9 can put up 5,500 sats in a few years, Starship could greatly increase the rate at which the U.S. can build not just comms constellations but also reconnaissance ("spy") constellations, missile defense constellations, anti-sat constellations, maybe even nuke constellations, who knows. I suspect that missile defense constellations would have to be truly gargantuan though, because of some N thousand missile defense sats most will not be able to reach the missiles being launched at any given point, thus to counter a 1,000 ICBM/SLBM threat the missile def constellation might have to have 20x -maybe even 100x- that many space-launched anti-missile missiles. That seems prohibitively expensive even if internal Starship launch costs ever come down below $5 million each.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Interceptors need to be ready to launch at a moment's notice. How would Starship satisfy that requirement?

dotnet00 3y ago

Unless you're stuffing orbit to the point of having an interceptor within every couple of sqkm (so millions if not billions of them, with active navigation of course), orbit is not a great place to put interceptors. They can't just sit over a location, so any given interceptor would on average be ~45 minutes away from the missile. On the other hand, if you're talking about having Starship launch interceptors in response to an incoming missile, it's entirely the wrong kind of rocket for the purpose. Being cryo-fueled makes it unrealistic to keep it sitting ready for launch, and it has way too low of a TWR for missile defense purposes. Missile defense systems need very high TWR, and hypergolic or solid fueled rockets, which can sit around fueled for years on end.

burnerthrow008 3y ago
ICBMs aren't uniformly randomly distributed across the globe, though. You would only need to cover a few selected orbital inclinations, corresponding to the latitude of the launch sites (albeit with a large number of RAs, but probably nothing more than what SpaceX already does for Starlink). The calculus is even better for the most-probable launch scenario, over-the-pole, since all the high-inclination interceptor orbits will converge in the same region as the ICBMs. For SBLMs the calculus is theoretically a bit less favorable, but most of Russia's SSNs will be in the Arctic Ocean anyway to avoid USN attack submarines.
- raisedbyninjas 3y ago
  ICBM boost phase only lasts about four minutes. Detection takes a minute or two. LEO orbit time is as low as 90 minutes, so you need at least 45 satellites orbiting the desired location to reach a single missile in time. This doesn't include orbit drift or account for the chances of the interceptor missing.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Interceptors don't go into orbit at all.
friend_and_foe 3y ago

jonplackett 3y ago

Aren’t you forgetting that Russia / China can just play this game too - at least to the extent of putting some nukes in orbit that can just drop on their target in minutes and wouldn’t be intercept-able?

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
An actual nuke is space is a huge escalation. Then the US would likely have hunter/killer satellites trailing every chinese and russian satellite. Remember, with Starship the US will have at least 1/10th the cost of space deployment (goal is 1/100th).
- jonplackett 3y ago
  But putting up 1000s of anti ballistic middle satellites somehow _isn’t_ a huge escalation? My point is one escalation leads to another so the lead you think you’ll have is not as big as you’d expect. You just provoke the other side to escalate too.
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    I agree it is an escalation but: 1) Putin is the one invading and threatening nukes on the doorstep of NATO 2) MAD only works, kind of ironically, if both sides aren't mad/insane. But authoritarians are often a bit nuts. There also were the false alarm scares from the cold war. Putin has highly consolidated power, and it would appear Xi has even MORE power and cult of personality 3) I think it works best as an unknown capability. One of the things about nukes is that people know what they can do, know if you have them, know the consequences. But what may work better than the game theory of MAD is that MAD is the BEST CASE for someone launching a strike. With unknown missile defense capability, the worst case is you launch a strike, get nothing from it, and the only assured destruction may be yours.
    - jonplackett 3y ago
      There are a litany of problems with your thinking. 1) we brought nato next door to putin in Ukraine. That’s why there’s a war. Go read more about this if you aren’t sure why the war is happening. It’s quite interesting. 2) it’s impossible to keep some capability like that secret. Do you know how the Soviet Union got nukes in the first place? They ‘borrowed’ the technology from the USA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies There is no reason to believe the USA could keep this info secret. And every reason to believe it would result in Russia / China finding out and then doing whatever is necessary to counter it = probably nukes in space if that’s their only option. The main problem with all this, and why MAD probably still applies, is that even if one single thermonuclear weapon gets though, you’re totally screwed.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

What is the feasibility of laser weapons in space now? The solar panels are all way better, the Navy is deploying point defense lasers...

credit_guy 3y ago
There is no scenario in the foreseeable future (decades) to have a laser powerful enough to kill an incoming nuclear warhead. For the simple reason that the reentry vehicle is designed to withstand the enormous amounts of heat released during the reentry. It is very unlikely a laser can put a comparable amount of heat on the reentry vehicle, and do that from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Given that, the only time an ICBM is vulnerable to a laser weapon is during the takeoff time. During that part of the attack, the ICBM are protected by the atmosphere itself. A laser maintains its power very well in vacuum, but not in air, especially if there are clouds. So, one needs to be close to the launch point. In other words, you need a very dense network of satellites that would carry these lasers to provide the coverage necessary. Even with such a network, it would be quite trivial to come up with inexpensive countermeasures: simply launch more missiles, some of which do not carry warheads.
cryptonector 3y ago
The hardest thing to do in space is cool off. The only way is through radiation (or maybe launching heat away in the form of hot stuff, but that's not practical at this time). That means that a laser weapon will need long cool-down periods.

crotchfire 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_from_god

uticus 3y ago
Or more generally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flechette. Similar to WWI, where old tech (gunpowder, cast metal, etc) was scaled and automated to deliver a new scenario.

perihelions 3y ago

The end point of that (hypothetical) arms race would be China in 15-25 years having its own Starship clone, and thousands of nuclear weapons in low Earth orbit. Their purpose being that you could de-orbit a nuclear weapon nearly instantly, evading the other side's space-based intercept capability. (An ICBM, by comparison, would be a sitting duck to space-based interceptors, with its 30-minute long, predictable, trajectory). Would we be better off? We'd be in the same position (MAD), only a trillion dollars shorter and also nuclear war now has a 30-second latency instead of a 30-minute one. And also we've created a novel type of nuclear instability: one where we have the possibility of a preemptive strike by orbiting interceptors against orbiting nuclear weapons, one that happens in seconds and is determined entirely by AI. False positives and false negatives are both extinction events.