Re: Kinetic kill weaponry in LEO/GEO...

On Sep 30, 12:31 am, Mike Williams <nos...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Wasn't it Johnny1a who wrote:





As noted in the guns on the Salyut thread, anything moving at orbital
velocity is a potential threat. It seems to me that in space combat
in Earth (or any planet) orbit, kinetic weapons look very tempting
from an attacker POV, especially against manned craft, punch a hole in
it and you've given the enemy something else to do besides fighting
you, and quite possibly disabled them. Punch holes in heat radiators
or sensors or the drive, and you're really messed up their day.

But...every projectile that _misses_ keeps right on going along an
orbital trajectory defined by its velocity, and some of them will
miss. The surest way to make sure you hit the enemy is fire quite a
few projectiles.

It strikes me that this might make kinetic weapons a questionable
weapon if you're planning to hang around in orbit yourself for very
long. Might the potential of being hit (later) by your own weapons
create a disincentive to use them (at least in close planetary
orbit)? Would rifles have been used in Earthside warfare if the
bullets that missed their potential targets kept swirling around the
battlefield indefinitely until they hit _something_?

Be aware that there's an awful lot of room out there for. There are
estimated to be 600,000 items of space junk larger than 1cm currently in
orbit, and most of that is in or around LEO. That existing junk doesn't
cause enough of a threat to stop the launching of new satellites into
the danger zone.

It sounds like a lot of objects, but another statistic is that at the
densest part of the space debris field, there's about one particle
larger than 1mm per 5000 cubic kilometres of space.

The chances of hitting something the second time round are pretty slim.

True, but keep in mind that we're talking, more or less, about
incidental junk. My question involves the side-effects of large-scale
warfare, which right now we couldn't wage in near-Earth space even if
we needed to, we don't have the techology/resources yet.

If a large engagement occurred between a significant number of
spacecraft, you could end up with a _lot_ of projectiles used in a
short time, and some of them would be flying in precisely the general
orbital paths that spacecraft would be wanting to use.


This year's Chinese anti-satellite missile test released about 35,000
items of debris larger than 1cm and an estimated million items larger
than 1mm. Enough to kill its target and provoke controllers of other
satellites to move them away from the orbiting debris cloud for a while.


Exactly my point. Now imagine that _thousands_ of such incidents have
occurred in a very short time, and raise the diameter of each size
category by one order of magnitude.


.

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