There were some news earlier about some supposed undisclosed US orbital weapons, but I don’t see the point besides driving more investment to Lockheed Martin and SpaceX on hype.

Any kinectic payload (“rods from god”) will require way more kinetic energy to orbit and then deorbit from a ballistic trajectory. The terminal velocity will likely not be hypersonic without reentry thrust anyways. Any explosive payload would have the same issues as above, but also need to be able to be exposed to cosmic radiation for possibly very long timeframe with extremely difficult maintanence.

Given so much of current rocket warfare is based on interception and dodging interception, I don’t see the advantage to this. Maybe it reduces launch detection chances? Am I missing something super obvious?

    • Conselheiro@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      10 days ago

      That video is actually kinda bad scientifically for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest turn off for me is that they don’t address how air resistance behaves very differently at supersonic speeds and at different pressures to what would be expected in their experiment, or how much energy is actually wasted by orbiting and then deorbiting compared to lifting the payload up with a helicopter.

      “Suborbital” kinetic weapons are actually already used a lot in modern asymmetrical and conventional warfare. I Did a Thing has a video on drone-dropped metal “projectiles”, and AFAIK the famous(ly underused) Russian Oreshnik is technically nuclear-capable but has only been deployed with kinetic MIRVs so far.

  • enmanuel1250@lemmygrad.ml
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    10 days ago

    There are other types of orbital weapons besides orbital artillery. For example: Space-to-Space missiles, my suspicion is that their mistery weapon is an anti-stellite system of some kind like a kill sat that pursue and disable other satellites or a satellite with hidden missiles, enabling them to take down say the Baidu gps network.

    Edit: it’s a pretty fucking bad situation if it’s a space-space weapon since that normalizes Kessler syndrome… Since now anyone and their mother will begin making countermeassures

    • Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 days ago

      Yes, these orbital weapons the U.S. is talking about are all satellite killers or satellite jammers.

      No one is going to bother shooting rods from god onto Earth because the weapons’ orbital path is too predictable via basic Newtonian physics. You’ll know exactly where it will be in the sky, so you can hide from it.

    • Conselheiro@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      10 days ago

      Makes a lot of sense, thanks! Can’t wait for the same companies promising to colonise Mars in 10 years for the past 20 years to make Earth’s low orbit completely unescapable!