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Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never prac

Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon (for related reasons all space propulsion is ITAR controlled) so it was never practical to ban them. Space to earth, maybe, but that isn't unless it hits vague 'WMD' categories, and I'm not sure space to ground is necessarily what the US is declaring here. I suspect whatever capability the US is referring to is far more "counter space" than WMD in scope and an incremental improvement on kinetic and electronic warfare capabilities it's long had. You can do a lot of irresponsible damage in to space assets with ground launched anti-satellite capability, as multiple tests have already demonstrated...

spwa4 11d ago
But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated. A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it. What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.
- zenbane 11d ago
  This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.
  - Forgeties79 11d ago
    You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.
    - brookst 11d ago
      “Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people. You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
      - Forgeties79 11d ago
        Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”? Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
        ang_cire 10d ago
        I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values". Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal. Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
        Forgeties79 10d ago
        The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok. Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.” Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO
  - smackeyacky 11d ago
    We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
    - bloak 11d ago
      [flagged]
      - cineticdaffodil 11d ago
        [dead]
  - victorbjorklund 11d ago
    Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
- jmspamerton 11d ago
  [dead]
- somenameforme 11d ago
  A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation? Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.' It's all just geopolitical poo flinging. ---- Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
  - feoren 11d ago
    > Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation? Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States. > I think it's something similar with China China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all. > They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide. > extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse? > It's all just geopolitical poo flinging Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices. > A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. Is your comment an example of this?
mapt 11d ago
A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules. Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate. A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude. "Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them. Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.
- lr1970 11d ago
  > Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
  - onion2k 11d ago
    What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible. I might have thought about this too much.
elnerd 11d ago
Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-thing-nasa-condemns-indias-destruction-of-satellite-and-resulting-space-junk https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...
Tangurena2 11d ago
If you have a vehicle that can reach orbit, then you have an ICBM. That's why Sputnik struck such fear into Americans.
- KellyCriterion 10d ago
  Not completely: - "if you have a vehicle that can reach orbit and it has re-entry capacities to stear it to the point you want it", then you have an ICBM :-)
tete 9d ago
> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people. Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.

spwa4 11d ago

But people want laws to not have to face this, and yet systematically refuse to actually do anything when those laws get violated. A law is fundamentally what's enforced, not what's on the paper. Which means if countries vote against any kind of enforcement, like happened here, those laws (whether rights or something else) don't exist. And they don't exist because regular people may shout about them (most don't), but they won't actually do anything, which, for most people, means pay for it. What's worrying is that human rights are definitely on the same train. When you critique this you get an angry retort that for example China commits large scale human rights violations against it's own population, and how unreasonable it is to expect anyone to do anything about it. Okay, but then we don't have human rights, please don't claim otherwise.

zenbane 11d ago
This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.
- Forgeties79 11d ago
  You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.
  - brookst 11d ago
    “Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people. You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.
    - Forgeties79 11d ago
      Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”? Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?
      - ang_cire 10d ago
        I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values". Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal. Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.
        Forgeties79 10d ago
        The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok. Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.” Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO
- smackeyacky 11d ago
  We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
  - bloak 11d ago
    [flagged]
    - cineticdaffodil 11d ago
      [dead]
- victorbjorklund 11d ago
  Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).
jmspamerton 11d ago
[dead]
somenameforme 11d ago
A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. For instance it's trivial to turn things around against the US where we have the highest prisoner population in the world, by an overwhelmingly wide margin, disproportionately made up of a single ethnic minority, who are then are pushed into forced labor. Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation? Certainly not, but it's easy to frame it in that way. And I think it's something similar with China. They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it in a way that is extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber. In the US we have nothing really comparable because the only violent/separatist movements have been extremely small scale. I expect that if we had something on an even remotely comparable scale that our reaction certainly wouldn't be more 'humane.' It's all just geopolitical poo flinging. ---- Space is going to be weaponized, simply because it's a prisoner's dilemma. If everybody chooses not to weaponize space except one person, that one person now has a massive military advantage over everybody else. No country is going to accept this, and consequently I expect that space has probably been weaponized for decades. The benefit treaties, and of the charade of pretending everybody is abiding them, is that it discourages use of such weapons except as a last resort. Normalizing them is dangerous simply because it opens the door to their deployment in more mundane contexts, like a geopolitical proxy war, rather than as a means of last resort.
- feoren 11d ago
  > Is that because we're engaged in large scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling defacto slavery for profit generation? Yes, that is absolutely correct: the United States is engaged in large-scale human rights violations against our own population and enabling slavery for profit generation. You nailed it. It's not even "de-facto" slavery, it's de-jure slavery on the actual books. Slavery is not (fully) illegal in the United States. > I think it's something similar with China China also commits wholesale human rights violations against its own people, although the scale is much worse. I strongly doubt the U.S. actually has more prisoners than China, it's just that we actually count them all. > They've had major problems with separatist movements and terrorism from the Xinjiang/Uyghur region and are similarly awkwardly trying to resolve it This is assuming good faith to the point way beyond naivete. The Chinese government is not "trying to resolve terrorism", they are committing mass murder and ethnic genocide. > extremely easy to frame as being the greatest crime against humanity since Justin Bieber Are we doing Whataboutism here? Let criticisms stand. I can say "it's wrong to round up ethnic minorities and put them in concentration camps" without it having to be the greatest crime against humanity ever. Are we really going to be forgiving all actions because someone in history did something worse? > It's all just geopolitical poo flinging Not everything is always the same. While criticisms can be levied against every country, scale and impact matter. I'm sure someone could come in and point out problems with the government of The Netherlands, and those problems should matter to the Dutch people and they should call them out and work on fixing them. But that doesn't mean it's the same as what China is doing or what for-profit prisons in the U.S. are doing, nor would it be hypocritical or "geopolitical poo flinging" for The Netherlands to be critical of those practices. > A lot of messaging is much more propaganda than reality. Is your comment an example of this?

mapt 11d ago

A bullet travels at a relative speed of about 250 to 1250m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 600-16000 joules. Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. Getting hit by something moving that fast is roughly equivalent to getting hit by a whole ammo case of bullets at the same speed. There is no armor that can protect you; Even the most solid objects behave like fluids at this relative velocity, potentially incurring more damage from the explosion / shockwave splatter than a thinner object that would allow you to overpenetrate. A cardboard box of ball bearings with a handgrenade in it in LEO being triggered could wipe out nearly everything up there, and depending on the exact altitude it could effectively mine LEO and prevent humanity from using it for a long time, with a selectable duration between months or millennia depending on altitude. "Space warfare" in LEO is a matter of everybody walking around with a personal nuclear weapon strapped to their back that can be activated on a hair trigger. We may well wipe everything out by accident, if it gets too crowded or because somebody stubbed their toe. Regardless, there is no selectivity, and any actor with space launch capability can blot out our access at will in ways that will outlive them. Basically our only hope of continued use is things that persuade us to refrain from attempting to incorporate space into a theatre of war. That box of ball bearings should have higher stakes on the escalation ladder than a tactical nuclear strike. And it probably shouldn't be there in the first place.

lr1970 11d ago
> Everything in low Earth orbit is moving at 7600m/s. A ~10g projectile moving that fast has an energy of 580,000 joules. What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. I practice it will be smaller or larger (if the bullet is incoming). But steering an incoming projectile is way harder.
- onion2k 11d ago
  What matters is the relative velocity of the projectile towards the target. True. If you really want to mess space up forever you need to launch a rocket full of sand, slingshot around the moon, and gently sprinkle it in an retrograde orbit. That would be fast enough for something as small as a grain of sand to create pinhole-sized punctures in anything put in orbit, and after a few years the sand would be spread out enough to make any launch essentially impossible. I might have thought about this too much.

elnerd 11d ago

Every spacefaring nation seems to have had their go in blowing up satellites using anti satellite weapons [1] and smashing satellites into other satellites [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-thing-nasa-condemns-indias-destruction-of-satellite-and-resulting-space-junk https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/apr/02/a-terrible-t...

Tangurena2 11d ago

If you have a vehicle that can reach orbit, then you have an ICBM. That's why Sputnik struck such fear into Americans.

KellyCriterion 10d ago
Not completely: - "if you have a vehicle that can reach orbit and it has re-entry capacities to stear it to the point you want it", then you have an ICBM :-)

tete 9d ago

> Realistically pretty much anything in orbit is a viable space to space weapon Isn't pretty much anything viable as a weapon on earth as well? A knife, a fist, a car, a rock, a baseball club, a (non-military) drone, a lot of supermarket chemicals, etc. Viable enough that all of them have been used countless times to kill people. Still we ban weapons in many places where a lot of these things might be allowed.