perfidy

In the comments to Robert Prather's post China In Space (which he originally posted as a result of a comment I made on The Spoons Experience ain't the blogosphere grand?) Robert asked about space based kinetic energy weapons:

I saw a story last year about space-based missiles that used kinetic energy -- no warhead -- and hit the earth with all the destructive force of a nuclear weapon, minus the radiation.

Seeing as the post was a bit old, I decided to email him, but here's what I thought:

Robert,

The system you're looking for is THOR. It was featured in the novel Footfall, by Niven and Pournelle. Pornelle came up with the idea in the sixties, and advocated it when he became a member of the Citizen's Advisory Council on Space back in the early eighties. (The council included several sf writers, including Niven, Pournelle and Heinlein; as well as scientific and military types.) Here's a link to Jerry's description on his site, here's another article that references Pournelle and THOR, and here's a RAND corporation study, rather long and technical but juicy, nevertheless.

We've actually seen precursors of this concept in operation in Iraq - the concrete bomb is essentially the same concept, just airdropped instead of from space. With sufficient accuracy, and GPS gives us that, we don't always need explosives. When you have orbital weapons, the speed of reentry gives the weapon enormous power. However, it's not quite on the nuclear level. You'd need a very large projectile to approach Hiroshima grade impact events, or else accelerate the projectile to much higher speeds.

I was thinking some more about the militarization of space, and in one sense it has been militarized almost from the start - reconnaissance satellites are certainly performing a military function. But for the last forty years we've been frozen at the equivalent of 1914 for aircraft. What we're really thinking of is turning space systems from intelligence gathering and communications platforms into weapons platforms. While to the best of my knowledge we have never done it, it would be very easy to design a small manned, armed space capsule. We have invested substantial effort in developing unmanned ASAT weapons, they are still very limited in capability. With the advances in UAVs, this may change, but despite the weight penalties of carrying a pilot and his life support, the advantages of having intelligent direction are substantial.

When you think about potential Chinese moves into space, it becomes clear, I think that this is where it's going. For the Chinese to have any serious ASAT capability, which they would need to degrade our overall capabilities in any potential conflict, they would have to go with a space warship, however simple. Their technology would not enable them to develop the automated weaponry necessary. But, once they have made the space warship, their space capabilities could very well be greater than any collection of unmanned weapons platforms we have at the time. We would need manned space platforms to face the threat. (That assumes that they develop a reliable launch capability in addition to whatever space hardware they come up with.)

I posted a link to an article about the imminent arrival of serious battlefield lasers recently, and when you combine that concept with all the ideas for space to space and space to ground weaponry, you have some incredibly kick ass potential. We are already years if not decades ahead of any potential peer competitor militarily. Once this stuff comes on line, (and no one else is spending the money to develop it) we might be talking Nineteenth Century British v. Zulus or US Army v. Indians types of lethality differentials. Of course, just having the weapons doesn't guarantee victory - Custer left his Gatlings at base, and the British commander at Isandalwanda was a complete idiot. But with even moderately good military leadership, these weapons will give us enormous power.