The Air Force is asking President Bush to authorize work designed to help the U.S. get defensive and offensive weapons into space. Woo-Hoo!
This sentence appeared in today’s (5/18/05) New York Times, apparently with no irony intended (italics mine):
“Any deployment of space weapons would face financial, technological, political and diplomatic hurdles, although no treaty or law bans Washington from putting weapons in space, barring weapons of mass destruction.”
You have to find the weapons of mass destruction before you put them in space. Space at present is hopelessly under-militarized. Ike would be pleased.
Vigilance is the price of freedom, JJuggle. If we are going to keep ourselves from being enslaved by Marvin the Martian and his evil horde, we better get some weapons in space. And we better be damn quick about it too.
I personally cant wait till we mount cannons on the moon, you know big ones that we can see from earth with signs that say dont mess with texas, and USA RULZ!
You mean the Alan Parsons Project? 
Loose.
Weapons or not, we’re no match for the Vogon fleets.
Let’s make the liberals and the conservatives happy at the same time… let’s launch Dubya into a low earth orbit! We’re talking about putting something offensive into space, right? 
What about Project Bananoramma?
The capitalist in me has to side with RAH…we’ll have a Coca Cola logo on the moon before we have weapons.
And once the weapons are there, it won’t be cannons. It will be slingshots.
The worrying thing is of course that these weapons won’t need to be overtly offensive, any fairly massive (in the strictest sense) object that can be controlled in space can be brought down in the right place with tremendous energy, have you ever seen a asteroid crater? Ok sure you’ve got to do something to prevent burn up, but otherwise you can slingshot any lump of material around the moon a few times and then fire it at the Earth at several thousand miles an hour. The US military are already using a ground-to-ground missle which has no explosives, it’s just a very heavy lump which travels at 4000 miles an hour from it’s launcher, you should see what it can do to a tank.
Dave
Bunker busters work on a very similar principle. If you get a missile running at a high enough speed with a strong enough casing (so it doesn’t break up) it acts like a bullet, penetrating rather than exploding. Then you set the trigger to detonate when it hits air again, it’ll punch through solid concrete and when it reaches a room in the bunker below annihilates it.
Video Here
Loose.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. “We can throw rocks at them.” In this story, the people of the Moon, fighting for their independence from Earth, lob many-ton lumps of rock at lunar escape veloctiy toward Earth. They hit with a force that makes them look like nuclear weapons.
I am working on a web site for a company that makes high-speed penetration weapons. Speed=kinetic energy. Enough of that and your depeleted-uranium shell will penetrate tank armor or other well-protected structures, with no need of explosives other than their own speed.
You should see what this company has developed for testing some of their high-speed products!
Are these weapons for the US military? Surely they have enough ways to kill people.
surely u jest sir?
Ads in space
Slightly off topic, but I just read in yesterdays NYTimes that corporations will be launching large satelites with Ads which can be seen around the world from space. And that there doesn’t seem to be any agency to monitor or control this.
I’m afraid the night sky will really change, filled with blinking NIKON satelites and such.
Billy
I think somebody got the wrong end of the stick, probably the journalist who wrote the article. Whatever the interviewee may have said about advertising satellites (possibly advertising to space tourists on Virgin Galactic) there is no way anything placed in a geostationary orbit can be seen from the earth.
The orbital height of a geostationary satellite is 22,300 miles. At that distance an advertisement hundreds of miles wide would be impossible to read, and would have to be illuminated with such powerful lighting you would need a form of nuclear power generation to make it visible even at night.
Even in low earth orbit (531 miles) something miles and miles across would be difficult to make out and would for all intents and purposes be useless, since it would need to be rotated to keep it upright in relation to the majority of observers and even then it would look upside down to some. This is also not taking into account atmospheric distortion (which effects telescope observations of the moon in bad areas), or cloud cover.
Loose.
like this…
matt