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| Science & Technology |
| Putin's nuke threat endangers some of America's coolest technology |
| 2024-02-21 |
| [FoxNews] Space plane, missile early warning system and GPS all threatened by Putin's nuke strategy in space. You heard Russian President Vladimir Putin is working on a nasty, new nuclear anti-satellite weapon. Leaders in Congress were briefed last week in a highly secret session, but it left me wondering: exactly what is Putin targeting? Putin could make a real mess if he detonates a nuclear weapon on orbit. I doubt Putin wants to take out all the 8,377 worldwide satellites in orbit, especially since some are Russian. More likely, he wants to threaten specific American systems. Here are three top possibilities, and they’re all pretty scary. First is the missile warning Space-Based Infrared System or SBIRS. The big satellites essentially perch 22,000 miles up and peer at the earth to detect the heat flare from missile launches. Infrared detection is crucial to missile warning and defense – over Kyiv or South Korea or the USA. It’s a 24/7 mission and there are only a handful of the big SBIRS satellites. Lockheed Martin delivered the sixth and last one in 2022. If Putin blinded SBIRS, goodbye missile warning. Then, of course, there is the Global Positioning System that keeps your daily life and America’s economy humming. Over 30 GPS satellites triangulate a radio signal to give you your location (latitude, longitude and altitude) anywhere, anytime. GPS also emits a precision timing signal. Every day you are surrounded by this magic, invisible mesh of data transport run via space. GPS data is used by cellphone towers, electric grids, ATMs, airplanes, the New York Stock Exchange, credit card transactions and, of course, your smartphone. No GPS means no maps or apps. And no precision all-weather bombing by the Air Force and Navy, either. The GPS constellation lives 12,000 miles up in medium earth orbit and runs on solar panels. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin warned as far back as 2017 that GPS was vulnerable. Most worry about jamming of the GPS signal, but a nuke on orbit could fry the solar panels. Both Russia and China have their own separate GPS-like navigation constellations, so maybe Putin wouldn’t care. His oligarch buddies could still make phone calls. Not outside Russia, though. What if Putin isn’t after a satellite, but a space plane? There’s a chance Putin wants to shake his fist at America’s X-37 unmanned spaceplane. For sure, Russia has nothing like it. The X-37 is a secretive, orbital test vehicle about the size of UPS brown van. No one will say exactly what it does, but for sure, Russia has nothing like it. The X-37B stayed up in orbit for 908 days on its last mission. Another X-37 mission just launched Dec. 28 on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy – that’s an Elon Musk rocket. Aloft, it will be "experimenting with space domain awareness technologies and investigating the radiation effects to NASA materials," the Space Force said in December. Space domain awareness is code for figuring out what everybody else is up to on orbit. Putin’s fishy space nuke may have two other goals. First, rattle the U.S. After all, American prowess in the space domain helps give Ukraine the information edge against Russia. Second, Putin wants to impress China. Every day, Russia becomes more and more the junior partner in the horrid, no-limits friendship with China. ortunately, the United States Space Force has been tracking Putin’s nonsense for quite some time now. The Pentagon is racing to build and launch a completely new architecture of smaller, networked satellites. In a few years, they will take over the key military functions which older, bigger satellites perform today, and the whole American space architecture will be much less vulnerable. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #5 Oh no Fox! Not Dah Koolest Tech! Za Roooshins kabloowy all the com and weather sats I can't play Escape from Epstein Island!? |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2024-02-21 12:02 |
| #4 The Russians have long been of the "if we can't have it, neither can you" school of thought. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2024-02-21 10:09 |
| #3 The entire human race is in for bad times if an antisat nuke is used at the altitude most intermediate orbit sats operate. There'd be so much debris that simply deploying more sats wouldn't cut it. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2024-02-21 08:05 |
| #2 I wonder if Putin's threat will be aimed at the satellites that steer drones into his Black Sea ships. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2024-02-21 08:01 |
| #1 ...Our intel couldn't see the disaster in Afghanistan with thousands of bodies on the ground, but we know for a fact that somewhere in the darkened and mostly inaccessible enigma that is Skeptical Mike is Skeptical. Mike |
| Posted by: MikeKozlowski 2024-02-21 07:53 |