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Comment by jand | Hacker News Reader

This article presents some thoughts on how, if and when the US should or could strike (back) in space after summarizing the alleged current space combat capability developments of other nations.

You can easily replace "US" with other nations and the target audience with their citizens and allies.

By this logic, every nation needs to ramp up space combat capabilities, because their perceived or real enemies could also do so. This train of thought leads to a cold war 'space edition'.

In the long run it will boil down to disaster only preventable by some courageous individuals doing 'the right thing at the right time'. We should better begin stockpiling characters like Stanislav Petrov [1] to make sure we haven't run out of those by then.

Good luck to all of us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

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> By this logic, every nation needs to ramp up space combat capabilities, because their perceived or real enemies could also do so.

It is a typical arm race. It going on for other types of warfare at the moment, now there is another dimension.

Regarding Petrov, I think there were more than one such cases. I remember reading about a similar case on the US side, afaik the operator that decided against pulling the trigger was disciplined for not following protocol or disobeying orders.

This seems benign compared to nuclear though, as mutual strikes don’t lead to mutual destruction.

> This seems benign compared to nuclear though, as mutual strikes don’t lead to mutual destruction.

Not necessarily. A core component of the nuclear deterrent is the satellites that detect launches from Russia/China/etc. If someone took a bunch of those out, the fingers on the nuclear button would be significantly twitchier than usual.

Any skirmish in space will give us kessler syndrome, destroy all satellustes and render nost orbits inaccessible for hundreds of years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

As the article notes, blowing things up isn't the only option.

Blinding / hacking / deorbiting / etc. a bunch of early warning satellites of one of the major nuclear powers would be a majorly destabilizing move.

But it only takes one losing side to decide - Fuck it, we're losing so 'fire all your guns and explode all in space' to destroy everything in orbit with a massive amount of debris that'll last for years.

Russia's little test a few weeks ago showed how that might be.

So hopefully that's the MAD scenario that will keep peace in orbital space for a while yet.

It bears repeating that the US wanted Russia to have earlier warning of launches so that there was a longer time buffer built in before they'd have to decide whether or not a blip was real or not. They still only have five of the six satellites up they'd need to get full coverage.

There is no tactical advantage gained by your enemy having less time to react (we're talking minutes-hours right?) unless you are actually attacking, in which case civilization is "dramatically changing" very soon. If nukes are flying, people need to be on the red phone ASAP!!!

Can't say we promote that anywhere though.

Did he rise to a high rank? Became a thought leader? He was reprimanded, and he considered according to him that he just did his job and nothing really (that is to his credit perhaps). I didn't see him getting a Nobel peace prize either, and it seemed it was the west that celebrated this years after he was retired his heroic decision.

We didn't really celebrate him, after all he could have been given a noble peace prize, that a western organisation. Average Joe in the street never heard of him, he is unrewarded and forgotten

This train of thought leads to a cold war 'space edition'.

We already did that with the Mercury and Apollo missions. The space race was all about who had the high ground.

And it never ends. So now we're shifting to hypersonic weapon offense and defense.

I'm also picturing something like selling anti-anti-satellite defense systems to US military allies to keep money flowing to military contractors.

Perhaps preferable to participating in an arms race, would be figuring out how to live without satellites. It occurs to me that the cell phone system can locate me without GPS, though I don't know how accurate it is.

> cold war 'space edition'

The Cold War was already a 'space edition'.

but will the next Petrov 'candidate' grow up on a diet of tiktok videos?

I don’t see why not. There’s a lot of good content on TikTok.

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