Wednesday, May 7, 2014

LONG FALL TO EARTH

A little known conundrum of space is that gravity works. It always works. When I watched this commercial I remembered the fancy maneuvering of two sides as one sought to shed and the other sought to avoid responsibility for tracking near earth orbit. The Air Force so did not want to go on with their version of Space Fence. I can kind of see why. They viewed it as trash disposal and who wants to pay the garbage men? A branch next to me at SPAWAR lost the toss and gained the job. They wanted it. At the point they were at, they'd have stripped naked and danced on tables for money.

On the other hand, the Navy totally lost out on space launched NSA spy satellites to NRO.  It's a lesson we all learned when we were young. Let those who care, look after the things that matter to them. The Navy has demonstrated that it can kill satellites at will in NEO. GEO is beyond the reach of all but 3 countries. We'll know who did it when they launch.


There is only one power that can kill things in NEO and falling. We call it ABM . It used to be against the rules.

The very first principle of fire control is target acquisition. Try to imagine how long aircraft last in a domain that has the means to search things out in orbit and destroy them.

Except for us and those like us.

4 comments:

HMS Defiant said...

I din't mention that the coolest thing was to have cameras to watch in real time.

Buck said...

In re: Space Fence. I think AF got it back, if I read this entry from the AFA Daily Report accurately:

Fifth Generation Space Begins with Situational Awareness

There are more than 500,000 objects measuring one centimeter or greater on orbit that could pose a danger to US space assets, but the Air Force can only track about 23,000 of them, said Gen. William Shelton, Air Force Space Command boss, on Thursday at AFA's Pacific Air & Space Symposium in Los Angeles. Unlike in the air domain, he said, the Air Force does not accommodate for attrition with its space assets, which range from satellite-based missile warning to navigation to protected communications. Shelton pushed back against a view that the way around space vulnerability is to scale back dependence, making the analogy to the development of aircraft. When air defense systems became more sophisticated, the Air Force pushed forward the development of stealth technology. In space, the Air Force similarly needs "fifth generation thinking," said Shelton. "That starts with space situational awareness," he said. Shelton said AFSPC received the go-ahead from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to move forward with the production contract for the Space Fence program next spring. While the program will experience a one-year delay, Shelton said the Space Fence would be enormously beneficial to SSA.


Did I read that right?

Buck said...

Fergot: that entry is from 11/22/2013.

HMS Defiant said...

What I recall of those days back at Y2K was that the Space Fence was kind of like delivering the mail or internet services over the last 5 miles. Nobody really wanted to do it. It was some other guys number one problem entity that they weren't going to fund out of hide and everybody looked at each other and then said, "let Mikey do it." Our guys definitely felt that they'd been played when they ended up with it. I think they thought it was NORADs job or maybe NRO's and nobody wanted to go to the Navy Resource Sponsor and ask for a line item to do a joint job that obviously didn't matter to us.
Things were still different back then.