Triggering Kessler syndrome as a war tactic

OliverSedlacek

OliverSedlacek

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The Kessler syndrome is the exponential growth of space junk where each collision with space junk generates more junk and more collisions, eventually rendering an orbit as unusable. As Russia now has a massive deficit in satellite launch capacity, if satellite capacity becomes militarily decisive would it be possible to trigger the Kessler syndrome to regain parity? It sounds like an insane plan, but that doesn't stop everyone.
 
Filling orbits with gravel was proposed as an ABM method during the early 80s.
 
OliverSedlacek said:
The Kessler syndrome is the exponential growth of space junk where each collision with space junk generates more junk and more collisions, eventually rendering an orbit as unusable. As Russia now has a massive deficit in satellite launch capacity, if satellite capacity becomes militarily decisive would it be possible to trigger the Kessler syndrome to regain parity? It sounds like an insane plan, but that doesn't stop everyone.
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OliverSedlacek said:
The Kessler syndrome is the exponential growth of space junk where each collision with space junk generates more junk and more collisions, eventually rendering an orbit as unusable. As Russia now has a massive deficit in satellite launch capacity, if satellite capacity becomes militarily decisive would it be possible to trigger the Kessler syndrome to regain parity? It sounds like an insane plan, but that doesn't stop everyone.
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it's useless. Kessler syndrome isn't about filling whole sphere around Earth with all-destroying even stream of splinters, near Earth space is just too large for that.

It will kill predictable lifecycle of satellites, of course, but that's to a large degree about commercial predictability. Or peacetime gov sat (ab)use.

Militaries were quite fine launching satellites with a few days worth of active life, it's public money after all. For them, Kessler is mostly an (expected, largely predictable) adjustment to the battlefield.

Just as predictable as, don't know, strikes against fixed launch sites, c&c and so on.

Neither prevents use of space.

nuclear ASAT isn't about Kessler, too. It's about a way to rapidly remove massive constellations, which are simply impractical targets for ground-based intercept.

So you either build a Multi-kill vehicle of some sorts(add some dV and it smells space warship already), or just drop the whole constellation with drag and radiation.
Yes, there will be unlucky bystanders probably - but when nukes flash between Russia and US as war fighting tools - it isn't that big a concern anymore.
 
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During the Cold War, the Soviets used space firsts to impress the world. Much applause.

Putin goes after space again---it won't just be America ticked off about not being able to watch their 'stories during the soap block.

After such a stunt, if China wanted to push north---the rest of the world would sit on its hands.
 
If various orbits are already unusable due to deliberate Kessler cascades, there's no loss for the military to use nukes to blow some holes in the debris fields to make room for critical satellites. "Unrestricted warfare" is already in effect.

You need large nukes to do this, but you won't make a very big hole due to the inverse-square rule. 10kt will only vaporize things within maybe 10m of the blast, and you'd need a 1Mt blast to vaporize everything within 100m. It'll push stuff around outside that distance, but it'll only vaporize stuff within about 100m.

publiusr said:
During the Cold War, the Soviets used space firsts to impress the world. Much applause.

Putin goes after space again---it won't just be America ticked off about not being able to watch their 'stories during the soap block.

After such a stunt, if China wanted to push north---the rest of the world would sit on its hands.
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Crud, just about everyone but India would probably help China in that case, and the Indians simply wouldn't say much.
 
Scott Kenny said:
If various orbits are already unusable due to deliberate Kessler cascades, there's no loss for the military to use nukes to blow some holes in the debris fields to make room for critical satellites. "Unrestricted warfare" is already in effect.
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erm, imagine how much material is to “fill” a single orbit with material.
Kessler is about probability - probability of collision with everything not in your orbit (retrograde is fair game thou ofc), but in all others(of any shape, circular or not), over time(like, as something higher degrades down - it crosses your plane).

You can't do anything to Kessler with nukes other than rearranging the already observed state of chaos into a new, still unpredicted one.
 

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