SDI garage satellites

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Temistocle

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During the early phases of SDI, the armed satellites were big, "garage" satellite with a plenty of missiles onboard. Later they were replaced by the well known Brilliant Pebbles.
I tried to find a drawing of the "garage" satellites and of the missiles they were armed, but without success.
Anyone can help?
 
Did you tried "smart rocks" and "Daniel O. Graham" ? That's how the BP were called before Teller and Woods shamelessly stole the idea from Graham in 1986. When Excalibur proved unworkable. And lasers, more generally.
 
Hi Archibald, thank you for your reply, and sorry for the delay of mine.
Thank you also for your input, I have know some other new things, but still I did not find an image of the "garage satellite". Maybe they are buried inside a redacted document...
 
blackstar said:
Go to about the 14-minute mark of this video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGupZ5oHSTk
Click to expand...

Thank you Blackstar, very interesting!
When I watched your video, at first I had some doubts that the SBI interceptors had that "simple" form (i.e. no solar cells, no antennas), but a couple of days later I found this image in a 1988 document:

SDI weapons.jpg

The SBI is almost at the center of the image; it is a "barrel" with some cylinders around, with the missiles inside them, plus a couple of antennas. So it seems that the SBI in the video is a simplified sketch of the "real" SBI.
The image is taken from the 1988 document "SDI : technology, survivability, and software", page 74, easily available online in pdf format, but some pages were ruined during OCR-ing (I think). A good version is here

SDI: technology, survivability, and software

BTW1, there are three versions of that document in the Hathi Trust Library, in my opnion this is the better scanned.
BTW2, I downloaded that (OCR-ed) version, it is 89 MB. If someone is interested, PM me.
 
Temistocle said:

Thank you Blackstar, very interesting!
When I watched your video, at first I had some doubts that the SBI interceptors had that "simple" form (i.e. no solar cells, no antennas), but a couple of days later I found this image in a 1988 document:


The SBI is almost at the center of the image; it is a "barrel" with some cylinders around, with the missiles inside them, plus a couple of antennas. So it seems that the SBI in the video is a simplified sketch of the "real" SBI.
The image is taken from the 1988 document "SDI : technology, survivability, and software", page 74, easily available online in pdf format, but some pages were ruined during OCR-ing (I think). A good version is here
Click to expand...

Keep in mind this was only notional. It's like drawing a stick figure to represent a person. Any actual vehicle would have looked different.
 
Thank you for your warning, Blackstar.
I already took the images in that with a grain of salt; this is why I put "real" within quotation marks. ;)
 
Temistocle said:
During the early phases of SDI, the armed satellites were big, "garage" satellite with a plenty of missiles onboard. Later they were replaced by the well known Brilliant Pebbles.
I tried to find a drawing of the "garage" satellites and of the missiles they were armed, but without success.
Anyone can help?
Click to expand...
Now we have a more advanced kind of satellites that is called microsatellites. These satellites are so capable as ordinary satellites, but some of the microsatellites are only 45 kg and less than a meter in length. In some time this kind of satellite will replace completely ordinary sats in all spheres.
 
Temistocle said:
During the early phases of SDI, the armed satellites were big, "garage" satellite with a plenty of missiles onboard. Later they were replaced by the well known Brilliant Pebbles.
I tried to find a drawing of the "garage" satellites and of the missiles they were armed, but without success.
Anyone can help?
Click to expand...
I found the website of the company that manufactures that kind of satellites I had mentioned before.
https://dragonflyaerospace.com/
Those microsats are going to substitute ordinary sats in some time. It`s just a question of time.
 
Back to topic, please ! And the explicit question was about those big satellites,
not about their diminutive successors !
 
Archibald said:
That's how the BP were called before Teller and Woods shamelessly stole the idea from Graham in 1986
Click to expand...
Brilliant Pebbles was not Smart Rocks. That's why the chose the name, to make fun of Graham.

BP did not have stations. That was the whole idea.
 

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