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The Military Space

U.S. Space Force's First Weapon Is a Satellite Jammer (ibtimes.com) 114

Posted by EditorDavid from the star-wars dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam quotes Interesting Engineering: The United States Space force now has offensive power, though it might not be the massive orbiting weapons system that you're envisioning.

The new weapons system delivered to the space force is a jammer type array that can prevent military or intelligence combatants from accessing their military satellites. This functionality allows the space force to neutralize orbiting satellites in a matter of minutes.
The International Business Times adds that "In a previous report, the U.S. identified Russia and China as potential threats to the country's presence in space.

"The U.S. Space Force's recently confirmed that it already has 16 units of its new ground-based offensive weapon system. The agency also reported that it has already started working on the system's successor..."
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U.S. Space Force's First Weapon Is a Satellite Jammer More

U.S. Space Force's First Weapon Is a Satellite Jammer

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  • Unique weapon (Score:3, Insightful)

    by moxrespawn ( 6714000 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @06:50PM (#59994074)

    This functionality allows the space force to neutralize orbiting satellites in a matter of minutes.

    And then, that's it. No retaliatory actions happen after that.

    • Re:Unique weapon (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tuidjy ( 321055 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @08:27PM (#59994332)

      I think that having their satellites blinded is probably the best way to provoke the enemy into launching every single ICBM they have, sending a "You're on your own, do maximum damage" order to their subs, and basically ending civilization.

      And once you know the enemy has this 'blinding' capability, it will be more likely that technical problems will tempt the person at the switch to overreact.

      We were lucky that we did not end ourselves in 80s. It is now known that there were a few very close calls, and I am sure there were many, many more times that the fate of the world hung on someone not doing his job by the book, and wasting time ascertaining that enemy had not started WWIII.

      I really do not understand why anyone would want to bring those days back. As someone who lives in the United States, I am a lot less worried the conscious actions of state actors with satellites and nukes, than technical problems resulting in first strikes which are thought to be retaliatory ones.

      China will fight us economically and politically. Russia is a threat to its neighbors, but is unlikely to do more to us than what we have been doing to each other for decades (propaganda, disinformation campaigns and similar nuisances) Europe is so passive and demotivated that it is no threat. The UK is an ally, and will remain one, unless they want to be completely isolated. India, Israel and Pakistan are regional powers that are looking for allies, not enemies.

      The only reason to develop a space force would be to have better reconnaissance capabilities, and more utterly final offensive capabilities. This is neither. And frankly, is the ability to take out satellites so novel? Sure, this is a newish way of doing it. But orbital debris and land based missiles have been a known method for a long, long time.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        China will fight us economically and politically. Russia is a threat to its neighbors, but is unlikely to do more to us than what we have been doing to each other for decades (propaganda, disinformation campaigns and similar nuisances) Europe is so passive and demotivated that it is no threat. The UK is an ally, and will remain one, unless they want to be completely isolated. India, Israel and Pakistan are regional powers that are looking for allies, not enemies.

        Look, I hope you're right. But if you were taking bets in 1919 that we would have another world war 20 years later they'd probably think you're ready for the mental asylum. Or predict that two years later the US would be at war in Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11. Conflict comes suddenly, you never know when provocations cross that invisible line and it's extremely hard to predict the escalations that follow and the allies who get dragged into it. I don't think anyone plans to set off WW3 but I'd not be sur

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Koby77 ( 992785 )

        I really do not understand why anyone would want to bring those days back. As someone who lives in the United States, I am a lot less worried the conscious actions of state actors with satellites and nukes, than technical problems resulting in first strikes which are thought to be retaliatory ones.

        A lack of military preparedness does not prevent war. It encourages it. There was no shooting war in the 1980s.

        • Re:Unique weapon (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Tuidjy ( 321055 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @10:48PM (#59994758)

          I did not, at any point, say that we should stop preparing. I actually pointed out the value of reconnaissance tech and offensive weapons. I am no pacifist. As a matter of fact, I have military experience that probably dwarfs yours.

          I expressed doubt in the usefulness of blinding the adversary without destroying him first, or at least simultaneously. Peace is best kept when you know what your opponent is doing, and when you are armed so that you do not look like a victim. This 'blinding the satellites' approach is similar to squirting lemon juice in the eyes of someone who's holding a sawed-off shotgun, and is trapped with you in an elevator.

          Even if you want to project power, and even if you want to moderately escalate a conflict, blinding the satellites is a terrible idea. You want the adversary to know what you are doing, namely that you are not starting WWIII, because otherwise they will assume the worst. If you are about the do the worst, you may as well start by firing missiles from right outside their borders (bases or subs) If you blind them, they will assume that this is exactly what you are doing.

          So, this capability sends a very nasty message, because the only point I see is to either hurt a much weaker state actor, or to get a minute advantage when launching a first strike.

          Two things I would not like people to think that we are about to do.

        • The United States has been better prepared for war than any other country since the end of WWII and we had lots of shooting wars in other decades. I don't think the lack of a "shooting war" in the 1980s really backs up your point. Sure, military spending became ridiculously excessive in the 1980s, but our military was already so powerful that it didn't act as a greater deterrent than before or after that period.

        • Except the Grenada War (1983), Doviet Afghanistan War (1979-1989), and the Falklands War (1992) ...to name a few.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Except that thing in the Falklands, the Iran/Iraq war, some Arab-Israeli stuff, the South African Border War, Angolan civil war, some stuff between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan, India/Pakistan....

          But I guess you meant *American* wars. It was a quiet decade. The US bombed Libya, engaged in extensive proxy or covert wars in South America and invaded Grenada and Panama.

        • We were fighting the Soviet Union constantly during the 80s. It just wasn't US soldiers killing Soviet soldier and vice versa. We both just used proxies to fight the other or their proxies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Over 100,000 dead just in Central America would disagree. It may not have been Americans and Soviets dying but there was no shortage of slaughter caused and/or carried out by the two superpowers.

      • ...there are ways to retaliate to the loss of situational/operational communications that don't involve immediately launching ICBM's. Please slow down and consider that the people on every side of every prospective missile-based nuclear exchange are incentivised against being seen as an initial nuclear transgressor, and that the rest of the world would not look kindly on a nation who acted irrationally to a loss of some military communication technologies.

      • I think that having their satellites blinded is probably the best way to provoke the enemy into launching every single ICBM they have, sending a "You're on your own, do maximum damage" order to their subs, and basically ending civilization.

        Nice theory, now for some facts..

        When you think about satellites and their use in communications for the management and dispatch of nuclear weapons, you've got to understand a couple of things. First, Satellites are only PART of the redundant communications paths used to guarantee the messages get through. Second, Submarines don't/can't use satellites for coms when submerged (EHF and above just doesn't go through water more than a few inches), so they have to be really close to the surface. Submarines a

  • MAD says: Go blind == loose'em b4 you lose'em (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ehack ( 115197 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @07:00PM (#59994100) Journal

    It's basic nuclear doctrine: Launch your ground-based assets before they risk getting hit.

    So blinding enemy satellites is just about the worst thing you can do to a nuclear-armed adversary.

    • I'm pretty sure you don't need satellites to compute a ballistic trajectory for a nuclear weapon... Or for that matter - flying aircraft over the poles to drop weapons.

      In fact its so stupid simple to nuke another country that's what no-one would ever dare do it - hence MAD.

    • This isn't new... not sure why anyone would even think it, how could satellite jamming be new? The TFA even says this, it's a firmware upgrade, big whoop. There are also a lot of naive assumptions being made about the capabilities and intended usage of these. How many of these would be required to even achieve what you are talking about? This many? Twice as many? Thousands more, a ton of luck and a short window of opportunity? You don't know, so lay off the hysteria a little.

      "The Counter Communicat

    • The threat here isn't enemy observation satellites, it's enemy hunter-killer satellites, which the Russians and Chinese have been launching.

      The best use-case for these jammers is to prevent the enemy from killing your satellites by not being able to communicate with their killer satellites, or perhaps jamming their navigation satellites to prevent precision strikes on you.

      You want them to be able to continue to know that you haven't launched a nuclear strike, unless of course you actually have....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        So instead they will just launch surface to space anti-satellite missiles, and develop autonomous hunter-killer satellites that just start search-and-destroy if they get jammed.

        Militarising space is a really bad idea.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Satellites go around the planet. Mobile jammers only affect a small area. These things are designed to cut off satellite communications over a battlefield. Things like fancy military sat phones and drone guidance.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        which the Russians and Chinese have been launching.

        Of course the US would never do any such thing, no, never . . .

        We had satellite killers on orbit by the mid-1970s, and land based spy satellite blinders before the end of that decade. It's not rocket science. (Oh, wait...)

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Yes, but the game continues beyond that. Transmitters and receivers frequency hop, use spread spectrum and various other tricks. None of the tricks are prefect.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

          Everything you mention was exactly what we designed around 25 years back. I'd love to hear what's new.

          Laser based comms, quantum key distribution, wider ranges of frequencies and far more mobility on the part of both the satellites themselves and the ground "stations". None of course really addresses your point, this is somewhat useless as a real force-projection against peer adversaries. Assume that the most likely reason this is being PRd has far more to do with Space Force beginning to flex their muscle to try and gain a piece of the DoD budget.

          I for one would have preferred them to have started the "Sp

          • Assume that the most likely reason this is being PRd has far more to do with Space Force beginning to flex their muscle to try and gain a piece of the DoD budget.

            Just so. Remember, the Space Force has existed, as part of the Air Force, for decades. But up till now, its budget was part of the Air Force's budget. Now, it'll have to make a case for its own budget....

        • I suspect the people who know the newer schemes aren't allow to talk about it. I'm involved in some technology around the periphery of this problem, but unfortunately its proprietary (not classified in my case).

          Energy per bit hasn't changed very much, but the required energy per computation has gone way down, and I can imagine a variety of schemes that take advantage of that.

          If you look at the DARPA proposal calls, you can see what sorts of directions they are thinking.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          What's new is your wifi does it now.

    • Your phase shifters are going to need to be able to handle a lot of power.

  • With launch costs falling, satellites will carry explosive charges tuned for maximum Kessler Syndrome to dissuade jamming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

      With launch costs falling, satellites will carry explosive charges tuned for maximum Kessler Syndrome to dissuade jamming.

      Jeebus, please NO. Just NO. What kind of misanthropic-a**hole would even suggest this is reasonable/realistic? I'll be charitable to assume you were trying to be funny, but this joke is not only "too soon" its a permanently never-funny turd.

      MAD is just that! You would kill future human off-planet options for short term "strategic" gain? Krushchev and Adropov would be proud of your exploitation of the weakness of man.

      • It could be a very viable strategy for a smaller power - if your enemy has space superiority, you're pretty well toward screwed. But it's relatively easy to deny them that, and you're not in a position to be a primary beneficiary of orbital assets anyway.

        It's a horrifying thought, but something well worth considering as we begin to seriously develop orbit. A Kessler Syndrome would impose very asymmetric costs, so it behooves those who would disproportionately pay those costs not to militarize (or otherwis

      • MAD is an astounding success. The number of deaths from wars has dropped to almost nothing since the nuclear era. And on top of that, not a single conflict has broken out between nuclear powers.

        Sure, there are risks, but you are rejecting evidence.

  • though it might not be the massive orbiting weapons system that you're envisioning.

    I guess that means no Memento Mori [fandom.com].

  • They've not achieved Space Balls levels of technology. Sir, they're jamming us!
  • If it wuz me I'd put a 9mm handgun action on the satellite, along with some nav software. I'm guessing 2 things:

    1) 9 mm ammo weight is insignificant compared to the weight of a kill-sat
    2) treating 9mm slugs like buckshot in space could be effective.

    I'll leave it up to the interested reader on how the Taurus Judge with 410 loads would work. I'm guessing satellites don't have much armor....
  • I was really hoping for a laser that would slice satellites into pieces.
  • Low hanging fruit. What would you expect, an orbiting sledgehammer? Moonraker (1979)?

    Then again, just imagine: Battlebots in SpAAAAce [youtube.com]

    • I would expect flying crowbars. These were proposed by Jerry Pournelle as orbital anti-tank weapons decades ago.They require little guidance, just enough fuel to decay their orbit and land as molten hypervelocity rounds capable of destroying an armored battallion.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwywit ( 1109409 )

        IIRC they were about 11 feet long, tungsten, designed to not only penetrate but obliterate tanks. Imagine the spalling.

        Now, make them out of DU and imagine the fireball. Yes I know it's pyrophoric and not fission.

        • DU is no good.
          The reason tungsten is wanted is for its high melting point.
          If your impactor melts into blobs on re-entry (like DU will) then it will lose all of its gained velocity and fall at TV, which isn't impressive.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dwywit ( 1109409 )

            Damn! Still, tungsten at re-entry velocity will still make a mess of whatever it hits, and if it's a tank, a nice fireball also.

            What happens to the ones that hit concrete? Tarmac? A steel-and-concrete office block?

            • No effing idea, but I know of the idea as "rods from god"
              Presumably, if the rods avoid melting, have a low enough drag profile, and manage to hit at anywhere close to orbital velocity, the result would be... tremendous.
              Like a meteor impact. I suspect it would penetrate concrete and rock with ease. A tank may as well be made of paper at those energies.

              Of course, one could increase the mass of the impactor by perhaps filling them with DU, and rely on however much tungsten it takes for them to retain their

      • Superheavy/starship might actually make putting stuff in orbit cheap enough for kinetic kill devices to be a thing... All the bonuses of nukes, none of the pesky radiation.

        • Radiation is only of minimal concern for H-bombs. There's no fallout; it's a localized effect. And that locality is already fucked by the bomb.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Fusion bombs all contain a regular fission bomb as a primary, and lots of them actually have a bunch of extra fissionable material to boost the yield. They can be made cleaner the bigger they are, but the big ones are pretty useless anyway.

          • > Radiation is only of minimal concern for H-bombs.. There's no fallout; it's a localized effect.

            This was a claim disproven when magazines published some technical details of H-bombs, especially The Progressive magazine in 1979. The critical uranium shell, which focuses the A-bomb light pressure onto the core's deuterium and tritium, creates a startlingly dirty fallout. H-bombs are _not_ clean and never were due to the lethally fallout from this atomized shield spreading for miles after the explosion. I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        It's a neat idea, but they're horrifyingly expensive. Unless you make them on the moon....

  • This is a horrible move (Score:3, Informative)

    by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @07:38PM (#59994228)

    A space arms race was tried in the 1980's with Reagan's Star Wars program. None of the weapons *worked*, especially the nuclear bomb pumped X-Ray laser. If you have a nuclear bomb in orbit, it's most effective to fire it for EMP or drop it on a ground target.

    • Re:This is a horrible move (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @07:54PM (#59994258)

      That Star Wars has no relevance to the subject of electronic countermeasures, a field the U.S. has lead in for decades. China at least has acted very irresponsibly with regards to satellites in the past, it's good we can interfere with theirs.

      • Re:This is a horrible move (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday April 27, 2020 @04:51AM (#59995644) Homepage Journal

        China has acted irresponsibly in the past? Project West Ford, Program 437, Starfish Prime, the ASM-135 ASAT and associated tests...

        And now you want to make it worse by starting an arms race over anti-satellite technology and encouraging more irresponsible behaviour.

        • You must be young. At the time of Starfish the other entity in space was the Soviet Union announced and end to moratorium on their testing moreover was moving ballastic missiles into Cuba 90 miles from our coast.

          1980s Anti-satellite programs was response to Soviet programs such as Terra-3.

          It seems you think the USA has to be bitch and roll over and "just take it." Nope.

    • The weapons weren't intended to "work". They were designed to work even if they didn't work. See Possony and Pournelle's Strategy of Technology which successfully bankrupted the Soviet Union.

    • The SDI program worked perfectly. The Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with projects we didn't heavily fund. How was that a failure? It was the biggest psyche out ever!

      • The Russians played the same game, we just had deeper pockets. Most of the missiles they had didn't have real warheads on em, but we had to assume they did...

        • If the Russians were playing that game, U.S.S.R. had more idiots than I thought. That's like al-Qaeda mounting a land invasion of the U.S. The economy of Russia wasn't in the same league as America. Hadn't been since WWI. They were losing the economics game fast and hard. To engage in economic warfare post-WWII America is the height of stupidity.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Unfortunately the cult of Saint Ronnie Raygun has an absurd number of followers in the US and he's given far too much credit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Didn't heavily fund??? By the time Clinton came into office the Star Wars budget rivaled Apollo.

        Afghanistan did far more to bankrupt the Soviets, and that was a Carter project. It had the effect of not only costing a tremendous amount of money but also of sending thousands of Soviet kids home in boxes for no discernible reason, provoking the populace to reject its leadership and put US-corrupted populist tools in office.

      • > The SDI program worked perfectly The Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to keep up

        It was one more nail in the coffin of that political regime. It was a very _dangerous_ nail, one that encouraged a "use them while we still can" approach to nuclear missiles. There was a host of other issues: I'm alarmed at the attempt to restart a space arms race.

  • The radar is jammed! (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday April 26, 2020 @07:39PM (#59994230)

    I would enlist in Space Force just to say that.

  • I thought everyone agreed there would be no space wars?

    • Yeah, and World War I was the War to End all Wars, right? Pull the other one...

    • This isn't space war. This is a ground war using weapons against systems in space.

  • I'm surprised the White House isn't crediting it to Trump already, after all he gets unilateral credit for creating the Space Force itself; we were told it was his idea, his idea alone, and nobody before was ever smart enough to think of it. All hail Lord Trump and all his fantastic MAGA-ness.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Next he'll take credit for presciently convincing Reagan to hollow out Cheyenne Mountain to house his new Space Farce.

  • What happened to Fuckerberg's CryptoShekel ?

    And they need a new flag:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/consp... [reddit.com]

    • The crypto initiative bit the dust when everyone of the partners backed out after the government threatened them with liability for money laundering, terrorism or other activity on the network. Basically the governments pointed out to everyone involved that they were going to hold them to the same financial rules as the normal banking system (the know your client rules in particular are particularly onerous in a crypto system). Something that would make crypto financial transitions more expensive than using

  • There is no way this was started less than 4 Months a go ... so nothing to do with Space force ...

    • Yes, this is a part of the scheduled transfers of projects, resources and assets from AF to SF. From one of the links...

      The system was first designed and introduced in 2004, but it has been in constant development since, now having reached the new Block 10.2 standard module that the Space Force received. The updates to the system over time essentially allow it to block more frequencies than it ever has been able to before.

  • Without Space Force this weapon would have been in the hands of one of the existing military departments. Thanks to Trump we can now rest easy that an extra department with an extra interdepartmental barrier has been created to prevent it from being used if needed.

    Woot Spaceforce!

  • I believe now should be a time to start considering an update of the Outer Space Treaty to include a ban on offensive weaponry.

    The origins of this treaty was to prevent sovereign claims celestial bodies but didn't include guidance for mining of asteroids or other celestial bodies.

    Perhaps we could try to include any offensive weaponry that could inhibit the usage of other satellites?

    Our upper atmosphere needs to be where we draw the line on our conflicts.

  • The only difference here is we're being NICE about it by simply jamming it vs blowing it out of the sky.

    We have had the latter capability for quite some time now. The only problem with obliterating the satellite is the debris field is
    likely to wreak havok on other satellites in orbit that were not the intended target.

    Make no mistake about it, the next major conflict is going to see the destruction of a whole lot of those satellites in orbit in the
    opening salvos. The one who will win said conflict will be

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