They really need an international treaty to stop these valueless demonstrations of power.
Sure it shows you've got capabilities for shooting down really low satelites, but it also shows you don't have consideration for the effect this will have. If we don't cooperate globally and stop so much space debris being created some orbital ranges could become impractical to use and manned space flight becomes even more dangerous.
You have to look through the geopolitical aspect. Treaties, historically have been favorable for those who ride the high horse, bystanders gut mud slung upon them. In the 60's India was pressurized not to develop Nuclear bombs, but it was secretly known pakistan was developing it with the help of china and stolen tech.
If India had signed the NPT back then, it would not have have anykind of deterrence action against Pakistan where they had full scale war and USA coming to pakistans's Aid when India was trying to liberate East Pakistan where there was full scale genocide of ethnic Bangla people going, that we now know as Bangladesh. They developed the bombs but with a no first use policy.
Now in 2019 with 2 front war with both Pakistan and china, where both party have actively militarized the border with them and playing the proxy war it was sure coming. China vetoing 2 times action against J-E-M terrorist group based in Pakistan that are active in insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir state of India. They are also actively claiming the state of Arunachal Pradesh as the territory like they did with Tibet
China has also amassed large number of military installation near the North-Eastern border of India and have actively tried en roaching into Indian territories, several kilometers sometimes into the past few year resulting in border skirmishes sometimes.
Last time India declined the UNSC seat and gave it to china & they are still regretting the the decision. They are hoping the next NPT for Space will have India's seat already reserved.
If other nations are going to play game of dual diplomacy it's leaves no option but to demonstrate show of force. India cannot afford to become Another Ukraine, Tibet or Taiwan becomes some other nation can abuse it's power.
Edit:Will provide citation in 2 hours currently in Mobile.
That's no excuse to support dictatorships, though. That kind of thinking is what lead the US and UK to overthrow the democratic government of Iran in 1953, setting up a dictatorship, and eventually leading to the current situation there.
Better to support democracies, even if you don't entirely agree with them on everything.
> I still don't understand why US decided to support horrible unstable dictatorship in Pakistan instead of biggest democracy in the world in the past.
Current India was born as the Socialist democratic Republic of India and had closer relations to the former USSR than the US, so naturally, the US aligned itself with Pakistan.
> Unless I am mistaken India was always a victim in aggression of its neighbors
You are mistaken. India has been an aggressor as much as a victim. Of course that's not to say the scale of aggression was like colonial powers but India is definitely not doodh-ka-dhula.
> If India put their sht (economy) together, toughened/equipped up their military I think this behavior would stop.
No. India needs to get its basics right -- Food, health care, education. The problem is /not/ the economy. If the so called 'educated' population of India actually made use of their education to participate in their democracy they would realize that economically speaking, India is not in a terribly bad state, however, the standard of life is sht as you put it, because very less focus has been put on the basics.
In the history of the world there hasn't been any single successful empire or country which got to where it was while ignoring the health, nutrition and education of its people.
> Current India was born as the Socialist democratic Republic of India and had closer relations to the former USSR than the US, so naturally, the US aligned itself with Pakistan.
Not true. In-fact just the opposite. India started non-aligned movement and tried to remain non-aligned to the extent possible. Pakistan joined SEATO in 1954[1], India-Russia relations started a year later in 1955[2]
Also, India was not born Socialist, although it may have socialist policies - much like any other country. First mention of socialism was in 1976 [3]
> You are mistaken. India has been an aggressor as much as a victim.
I think you could easily have add examples to support your claim rather than making statements
> Also, India was not born Socialist, although it may have socialist policies - much like any other country. First mention of socialism was in 1976
OK, I grant you that the words Socialist made it into the constitution later, but Nehru (and the post independence polity in general) had socialist leanings since well before Independence[1]
In the context of my assertion about Indo-US relationship, it is only semantics of whether India was born Socialist or not.
> I think you could easily have add examples to support your claim rather than making statements
None of these examples are of aggression. Goa and 'Dadar and Nagar Haveli' were Portuguese occupied territories (much like rest of India was a British territory before independence). India got independence from Britain, but the Portuguese territories remained occupied.
It's in part going to be a demonstration of power, but these tests are largely just that - testing. Shooting down a satellite is incredibly difficult. You don't want to start testing it when you actually need to be able to do it.
I've no idea their internal decision on metrics for the test, but they did shoot down something in a pretty low orbit. It was at about 300km. The ISS orbits at 400km. "Space" begins at around 100km. Shooting low is exactly what you want to do to minimize risk since it means the pieces will enter the atmosphere more rapidly and harmlessly burn up. Like the article mentions only 24 pieces of trackable debris ended up in an orbit sufficiently high to possibly intercept the ISS. This is among the 23,000 other trackable pieces of debris including 3,000 from a Chinese satellite destruction test done with somewhat less regard, and about a million smaller pieces of various debris.
The article mentions the risk of any impact increased by 44% without giving the baseline. No idea what that is, but it's going to be some extremely low figure remaining an extremely low figure -- e.g. 0.001% becoming 0.00144%. And an "imminent" collision isn't imminent. The ISS has maneuvering thrusters, and in fact would gradually fall out of orbit without them! This [1] page shows the height of the ISS over time which is a convenient way of seeing how often it fires its maneuvering thrusters. Suffice to say, it's a very regular thing.
I think the bigger reason we're upset is because of the technology itself. As nations become more capable of independently defending themselves it chips away at America's martial dominance, which is a major source of our political clout.
Obviously the US should try to stop other countries that want to drop bombs; it makes sense from every perspective in a moral and realpolitik sense.
However, the issue we face in your counter is that the US dropped 2 bombs, the world didn't end, and obviously they were happy enough with the results that they've kept a rather large nuclear arsenal in prime condition, ready to be used. I'm not even sure if the US apologised for dropping those nukes.
From a high-functioning-sociopath perspective, which is what large agglomerations of humans do frequently degenerate to, why shouldn't a given country not strive to emulate something that clearly worked? For the US to decry such mimicry is meaningless at best, hypocritical at worst:
1) If they think an act is against some great universal principle they should not have done it in the first place.
2) If individual politicians would almost certainly seek power by any means if roles were reversed, that is just the sort of people who become politicians.
It is fine if they want to boss countries around to support their own interests; that is sort of expected. To do more is to invite eye rolls.
Just because countries tend to act like sociopaths doesn’t make that sort of behaviour acceptable.
And if we leave behind the bomb analogy, this was an action with global consequences. Not only potentially harming the ISS but risking escalating an arms race that could jeopardise all future satellites and space missions.
>The US dropped nuclear bombs on populated areas during WW2. Should it not try to stop countries that may want to drop such bombs in 2019?
It's tone deaf for nations that already have nuclear protection to tell other countries not to develop the capability. It's like Bloomberg or Fienstien, or some other politician who lives somewhere safe and has a security detail telling a town hall meeting in the 48205 (a zipcode in Detroit that would make a lot of people here uncomfortable) that they'd all be safer if they turned in their guns.
1) Whataboutism doesn't help anyone. Two wrongs don't make a right.
2) India has the hindsight of history that the US and earlier Space programs didn't. Humanity did not consider these kinds of things earlier. Space was treated as essentially infinite. We now know better and know that this debree can cause a real threat to future space missions, even in the worst case dooming humanity to Earth as a prison[1].
By the way, the same applies to carbon emissions. Yes, the West got to industrialize by rampantly polluting the world. No, that doesn't mean China and India get a free pass for it.
Also, to the exploitation of countries/economies/people below you on the totem pole. Again, no free pass for what China is doing in Africa just because Europe did it for hundreds of years.
3) This is a slightly different point from (2), but back when Russia and US were rampantly launching rockets into space and exploding satellites, there wasn't a permanently occupied space station in orbit, crewed continuously by human beings from an international peaceful cooperating collective.
Who is giving China and India a free pass? It seems to me that the opposite is happening, where they're behind and very far behind the per capita emissions of Western countries respectively yet we're giving them shit instead of getting our own house in order.
Well, this was a political move, nothing more (or less). I presume you know about recent bombings in Kashmir, sovereign part of Indian territory since its creation of 1947. Done by terrorists most probably trained and equipped in Pakistan. Their secret service is very happy to do these kind of activities, not caring much who is current Pakistani president du jour. Kind of state within the state.
Where was/is US? Still supporting Pakistan, it really doesn't matter much what they do. Together with China. In light of these facts it doesn't seem so shocking, they had to do something. It doesn't make it right either obviously for all the reasons stated here, but I blame US and its stupid foreign policies for these kind of senseless escalations.
The movie “Gravity“ was based on such a scenario, although there it were the Russians that shot down a satellite, resulting in the debris to hit a space shuttle and destroy it.
Not happy to see reality catch on so fast with science fiction to be honest.
The premise is entirely unrealistic since the difference in orbit parameters. We aren't talking about some slight misconceptions; reality completely walks out of the window in Gravity:
* Most satellites and all crewed spaceships orbit Earth from west to east. Why would they hit each other?
* There is no way to travel between the Hubble and space stations like the way it happened in the movie. Especially not with that EMU with 25 m/s delta-v. That's like taking a cup of kerosene, pouring it into a Boeing 747, and traveling 9000 km. Hubble and the ISS have completely different orbits with different inclination.
* Overall, writers of Gravity have no understanding of orbital mechanics whatsoever.
* ISS orbit height is something like 400 km, for Hubble it's about 550 km. Most communication satellites are orbiting the Earth thousands of kilometers above the sea level. A circular geosynchronous orbit is 35 786 km above Earth's equator.
As for the ISS, the majority of debris created by recent India's incident are 300 km above the sea level. ISS is about 100 km higher.
> As for the ISS, the majority of debris created by recent India's incident are 300 km above the sea level. ISS is about 100 km higher.
Please read the article.
24 pieces are (so far) known to have gone higher than the ISS. These are objects "10cm (six inches) or bigger". There are other pieces "which are dangerously large but too small to track".
> reality completely walks out of the window in Gravity
A bit of an overstatement. Gravity got orbital mechanics very wrong, but it got orbital mechanics relevant in the first place. Most movies dealing with space are far less realistic than Gravity.
At the risk of sounding like useless - "But, what about"....
As long as we are stating facts and blaming and shaming China and India on their activities, can we please get a full picture on the REST of the contributors to this debris of quoted total 10,000 pieces of space debris?
If China contributed nearly 3000, and India recently contributed 400, who did contribute to the rest of approximately 6600?
Not advocating that all countries should shoot down waste satellite and turn them into dangerous debris. Just wondering what standing does NASA have on this issue...?
According to a source for the Wikipedia article on the collision between Kosmos-2251 and Iridium 33 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision), ~1000 of these would be from Kosmos-2251 (Russia) and ~300 from Iridium 33 (USA). Looking at the graph on that source (http://www.spacenewsmag.com/feature/10-breakups-account-for-...) there are several more from other failed satellites from the USA and Russia (which makes sense, given the amount of satellites these two countries have launched).
A visualization of what happened is here [0]. The problem when you explode an object in LE orbit is that you decelerate some bits of it -- which causes those bits to fall lower and reenter the atmosphere -- but you accelerate other bits, which causes them to move into a higher orbit.
After the entirely justified public shaming of China when they did this I though, hey at least this disaster will serve as an example and no one will be so stupid as to do it again.
Then India proves they are so stupid as to do it again.
I can't imagine the decision process that leads to the go-ahead on something like this. The only scenario that enters my head is some Dr. Stangelove-grade military lunatics getting the hands on the launch keys.
The roadster (I assume you mean Tesla's roadster) is in orbit of the sun (ie. It has escaped the earth gravitational pull). Unlike the space debris which orbits the earth. Therefore the debris is a threat and the roadster is not.
It's around Mars. Is not a threat, but surely is trash... thereis any reason to do it unless a wierd marketing for people that didn't care about throwing trash for no purpose around.
It was necessary to test the rocket with a payload. The usual test payload is a concrete block or something comparable. They wanted to do something more fun. The major debris problem is all the stuff we have put in orbit around Earth, not stuff farther out.
A garbage car is a single object, and it's large enough that earth-based radar can track its orbit, so it poses much less risk (since its orbit is known, the ISS and other satellites can move out of the way whenever a potential collision is predicted). Missile tests like this one generate debris that's too small to be tracked, but large enough to cause significant damage in case of a collision.
Also, to prove a rocket you need to have a dummy payload of some kind. Whatever you think about the stunt of using a Tesla as that dummy payload, there was going to be a payload of some kind however that decision went. The fact it was a car doesn't change the collision risk or debris amount compared to using a mass simulator.
The biggest risk from space garbage is that the small stuff is not trackable, so at any point it could slam into satellites or, god forbid, people or space stations. It's going fast enough that despite being small this would have dreadful consequences.
Larger items can be tracked, and therefore can be avoided, so they don't pose a risk any more than non-junk large items like other satellites and so on. There's quite a lot of room so if you know where things are it's not hard to avoid them.
Some amount of garbage is sadly unavoidable at this point in our development of space travel. For example many rockets are multi stage and jettison those stages, farings to protect satellites are jettisoned, and so on. That all falls into the "large and trackable" category so it's not a terrible problem, at least not yet. So the main current strategy for avoiding creating problems is to avoid creating small garbage, and people work very hard at that - being careful not to lose tools or even a single nut or bolt.
And yes, before you mention it, "lots of room" is a relative statement and this is not an infinitely sustainable strategy. But people are working on methods to capture and clean up garbage, and as those get more feasible we'll be able to go and clean up all this large garbage that we are tracking. So even with a long-term perspective, the large stuff is less of a problem.
Except the "starman" tesla was beyond Mars' orbit back in November.
But its coming back by 2091.
The Roadster and Starman will come within a few hundred thousand kilometers of our planet in 2091, according to an orbit-modeling study. The authors of that study determined that the car will slam into either Venus or Earth, likely within the next few tens of millions of years.
No country becomes a superpower courtesy of nuclear bombs.
Ask North Korea and Pakistan, both of which are feeble in terms of economy and military. India is still extraordinarily poor today and in 1974 it was that much worse. They have zero global superpower reach either economically or militarily. Both economically and militarily they're still very much a regional power. The largest economies do not fear India's economic power, yet. The US is the sole superpower today and it most certainly doesn't fear India's economic power. The US is only just becoming concerned with China's economic might in the last six or seven years. China's currency has only a small amount of global reach and influence, India's currency wields almost none. Their GDP per capita is #139 in the world, below East Timor.
Given 30 years they should become a middle income country (assuming some setbacks along the way). In 50 or 60, if everything goes right, they could be a superpower.
It doesn't always work even then. Just look at the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. We could have crisped half the population of Argentina in theory, but it really wasn't even a point of political discussion. The Taliban was complicit in the murder of ~3,000 US citizens but again nukes were not on the table.
Having said that, we can't automatically assume that would never provoke Britain or the US to a nuclear response, wouldn't provoke a more extreme reaction in another country in different circumstances. Britain and the US were never existentially threatened.
To be fair, "just nuke afghanistan" was a phrase I heard several times in 2001. Maybe 10% of the US population would have welcomed use of nukes. More, if it had been packaged as part of with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.
You are wrong here [1], Thatcher threatened Mitterrand to nuke Buenos Aires if he doesn't give her codes to Exocet missiles sold by French to Argentinians earlier. Just to be clear - she was stating she happily kills hundreds of thousands of civilians in a horrible way just because 20 Navy sailors died during war (personally I think its pretty clear she was bluffing, but maybe Mitterrand knew something on her that made him bulge). Calling her 'Iron lady' is insult to all proper ladies of this world
I'd recommend not simply uncritically believing everything you read. As far as I can tell this is a complete fiction invented by a dodgy French psychoanalyst to spice up his me-too biography of Mitterrand. French support for us during the conflict was immediate, extensive and un-stinting, far beyond what you could coerce with such a transparently ridiculous threat.
Furthermore the account in his book doesn't even match the actual sequence of events. French co-operation with us began immediately, not after the destruction of the Sheffield many months into the conflict. Furthermore missiles like the Exocet don't have 'codes' you can use to remotely disable them. Why would they? There's also no evidence the UK ever had or used anything like that. The whole thing is poppycock from start to finish.
They would have a remote disable ability because the advanced nation making them is hesitant to fully trust the less-advanced nation buying them.
You should assume that every weapons system that is on the international market has such codes. The F-22 wasn't sold on the international market, so it wouldn't have them, but the F-35 is being sold internationally. Every weapons supplier will do this. Buying surface-to-air missiles from Russia means that the buyer can shoot down all non-Russian planes.
I'm not aware of a single case of this being true. In any case, this guy's biography is so full of verifiable factual inaccuracies it can't be trusted.
So if Exocet had such codes, and given that the French gave the UK full and thorough support and assistance throughout the conflict including secret intelligence information, how come so many British ships were damaged and sunk by Exocet missiles?
Either the French had such codes and deliberately did not give them to us, stabbing us in the back in a way in which we would know for a fact they had done it to us, or the missiles never had such codes in the first place.
Nukes work great against other nations that have them. Just because they're never used doesn't mean they don't work. If they didn't then the Cuban missile crisis would have just been "the start of WW3". The ability of any nation with nukes to have a good enough shot at inflicting catastrophic damage on any nation that attacks them acts as a great equalizer. Every nuclear nation is a nation that nobody else is going to pick a serious fight with with the possible exception of massive deficits in military power (nukes or not if NK levels Seoul for whatever reason the US and China will probably send in troops to calm things down). Uncomfortable peace is still better than war.
Having nuclear weapons isn’t the sole factor in becoming a superpower. Britain has had nukes almost as long as there have been nukes, but I wouldn’t describe us as a superpower, or France, or Israel.
Sure it shows you've got capabilities for shooting down really low satelites, but it also shows you don't have consideration for the effect this will have. If we don't cooperate globally and stop so much space debris being created some orbital ranges could become impractical to use and manned space flight becomes even more dangerous.