Space Force has an operational weapon, and there’s no going back

I’ve got the ISS on line one…

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Well, in the space business, confusing swooshes with double-tail darts does have great potential for confusion: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Maybe Space Force should have a more honest logo for their mission.

image

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As with embarrassing vanity license plates, this vanity project will be left to expire and won’t be renewed.

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There are some service members who could use a few hours in an agonizer

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Oh cool. I have never seen this one before, I didn’t know they had a Space Command that pre-dated Star Trek.

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What about the Jewish Space Laser?

They’ve been hived off the airforce haven’t they? Do they not get custody of some of the swords?

A new weapon?
I’d have thought dropping anything from that high up could be called a weapon.

If it’s big enough not to burn up in the atmosphere, sure. But I don’t think dropping things from orbit is really that easy. Orbit means you are going at least 8 km/s sideways…and if you let something go, it will be doing that too, so stay in orbit with you instead of falling. And I assume by “dropping” you don’t mean “push something into an orbit that will eventually decay”, you mean “have it come down fast at a specific target”, so you really need to fire it backward at rocket speeds to have it do that.

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Fair enough.
I learned most of my lessons from the Wile E. Coyote school of physics. :slight_smile:

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It really doesn’t take much retro-rocket energy to do precision deorbit from LEO. The shuttle’s OMS engines only reduced its 18,000+mph orbital speed by about 200 mph. Air resistance does the rest.

There was a serious proposal floated a while back (see “Rods From God” or “kinetic bombardment”) for a sort of ultimate bunker-buster that uses what are essentially tungsten telephone poles with pop-out maneuvering fins and a precision terminal-guidance package.

(Our treaty obligations only forbid stationing weapons of mass destruction in orbit. Weapons of very precise, limited destruction, like these, are not forbidden.)

It was one of Jerry Pournelle’s pet projects.

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