India Now Has Anti-Satellite (ASAT) Missiles
Intercept test, against ICBM target, conducted circa May 2017. (Defense News).
That photo is one of ours being tested against one of ours. We already have the anti-satellite (ASAT )missiles in place.
India announced that it has sent a missile up to destroy one of its satellites that had either shut down or was intended to be a target from the beginning, and that the test was successful, as shown in the animated video.
Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=Pzhtc-rFbvM
The article at Sky & Telescope is here: https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/what-indias-anti-satellite-test-means-for-space-debris/
As the article from Sky & Telescope says, we’ve been doing stuff like this since 1985. India has now caught up with us.
Category: International Affairs
Space junk generators.
FTA:
If one of those pieces of junk hits your house, your homeowner’s insurance cover won’t cover the damage. I asked about it. Airplane debris, meteors, space junk – no cverage, so sorry. 🙂
I could sell it on e-bay and get a small fortune for it, though.
Ditto. And meteors are worth quite a bit of money, especially if they show the effects of atmospheric friction.
How about hiring actor Richard Benjamin to pilot a space junk garbage space ship like he did in the TV series Quark 1977-1978 or any survivor of Salvage 1.
That show cool, its time for a reedoo.
AOC would never last in India, with them shooting down one of their satellites…oh, the horrors of spacejunk, “pollutting” our environment…
Then again, I could have sworn that cows are sacred creatures there…
😉
bollywood
Yeah, cows are sacred animals in the Hindu religion and they roam the streets freely in India, thus when one takes a dump on the sidewalk, do they say “HOLY SHIT, do not step in, please!”
…”We already have the anti-satellite (ASAT )missiles in place.”
Do we? I have not read anything indicating the ABM capable missiles like the Navy SM-whatevers have anti-satellite capability. Hitting a satellite is a different game than hitting something coming down toward ground.
The only ASAT weapon in the US inventory I recall was the ASM-135, back in the 1980’s which was launched from an F-15 doing a zoom climb. The program was terminated by Congress, in it’s wisdom, back during the days when they were all geeked to freeze nuclear weapons and such.
I would be happy it someone can correct me and say “Why, yes indeed, the US has great ASAT capability and wipe out all enemy satellites in the blink of an eye”. Actually I’d settle for “in the span of a few hours”.
“And CLEAN UP YOUR MESS.” Remember those orders? Seems like every projectile I ever helped launch was eventually, if not sooner, affected by that pesky gravity thingy that ol’ Issac talked about when the apple hit him in the head. Y’all remember him, the fellow that came before the fruity cookie named after a town in the PDRofMA? Who is gonna clean up the mess of space junk that poses a danger?
Hitting a bullet with a bullet. Another technological advance figured out by Americans that our generous immigration and education systems allowed others to figure out how to do it too.
“Hitting a bullet with a bullet.” In this case, not quite. More like hitting fat, predictable target with a bullet. While impressive, the Indians won’t be playing ICBM skeet any time soon.
Spoke in general terms. Even a predictable orbit, it’s still a small target from a long way off. Got to get close enough to let the heat seeking or radar equipment to work. IMO the true advances in all types of space and military hardware, we did it. Sputnik woke us up, we jumped out to lead, but until lately we’ve been lagging.
How many of our advances have either been out and out stolen or just reverse engineered?
India’s National Armoury still produces a Webley knock off in .32 S&W Long.
I love Webley’s and am fond of their action. But…why are they still producing Victorian technology when modern revolvers with swing-out cylinders would be much cheaper?
A more sneaky approach would be small long-duration thruster packs with seekers, a catcher/grapple, and low signatures. They would slip into a close trailing orbit and go dark. On command, they deploy a net-like basket and catch up. On contact and catch, go to max thrust, down or wobble.
At a minimum, damage and degrade position. At best break and/or de-orbit.
The things would be small, and could go up as “ballast” on other launches, or a “failed” launch could be hauling a fleet of them.
Any serious ASAT engagement is going to produce so many careening fragments and chunks as to render most orbits quite hazardous, for all players.
One busy afternoon could put the world back into the 1950s for communication and navigation, for decades.
Turning off LORAN-C may have been premature.
Do they still teach land nav by map and compass in the Armed Forces?
I think they do, but compasses don’t show true north any more, because the magnetic north is now west of Ellesmere Island in northern Canada at 81.3°N/110.8°W.
I may or may not know some guys that were “Experimenting” with a pipe and steel ball..Something may have went wrong and the ball took the wrong trajectory…The ball may have traveled into the garage of a house…It did make the newspaper and was labeled as “Space Debris”…
Not terribly worried if it took them three decades to achieve 1985 capabilities. As AW1Ed mentioned, any stable orbit is predictable for years to come. HITTING that something is more complex.