Engineering_throwaway
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User ID: 3507
Engineering_throwaway
5mo ago
Mods, this is my 2nd post in thread, please let me know if this topic isn’t suitable for CW Roundup.
Relevant to the aerospace and defense industry is an executive order (or action?) signed on the 27th by Trump ‘The Iron Dome for America’. We should know far more soon as the order asks the Sec of Def to submit a reference architecture within 60 days. I won’t do an exhaustive run through of each of its key points but Sec. 3 Implementation holds some interesting demands.
a(ii) Acceleration of the deployment of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor layer; My guess is that if this is a space based layer they will go with a standard ground observation LEO shell.
a(iii) Development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept; Space-based boost-phase interceptors? What does that even look like? These are again likely based on a platform deployed in LEO, which upon detection de-orbits in a manner which can intercept a missile in its boost phase. I will not beat around the bush this is a very hard problem to solve. And at the same time you likely need tens if not hundreds of the platforms to get good ground coverage.
aaa(viii) Development and deployment of non-kinetic capabilities to augment the kinetic defeat of ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks; Keywords ‘non-kinetic capabilities’, now this could mean EM (read jamming) but I seriously would not be surprised if a directed energy weapon was considered. It is not as far fetched as one may think. Note here this would also full-fill the boost-stage intercept requirement, however the a satellite with such a laser would likely have a huge power requirement.
This is my first real go round for following in-depth a defense project from the very beginning of implementation, where it goes from here I can’t say, but if 1/10 of the requested assets go into production there is going a huge market boost for contract winners and industry as a whole. And both the hard and soft geopolitical implications of such a program will be interesting to see shake out.
TLDR: The White House wants project Star Wars 2.0, kinetic fires and possibly lasers in space. If successful the true age of militarisation of space will have begun.
So far the latest from the space-side of the internet is that Elon Musk made an X post about bringing home Boe-CFT astronauts Butch and Sunny “as soon as possible”. Trump later followed up with a Truthsocial post confirming that he asked Elon to do so.
For context there is no new information here (see here for additional information w/ added opinions), as far as we can tell at this point SpaceX will likely send up a half manned Crew-9 flight in march and they will return home then. To me this is pretty much just an obvious “spin currents to dunk on the Biden Admin” post, that doesn’t really explicitly lie but it definitely distorts or conflates the truth. Now though people are in my spheres of the net are throwing a conniption, and saying that this is blatant lying. Yet I fail to see how this should be the straw that breaks the camels back especially after a rather muted response to Elon’s choice of hand gestures last week. Perhaps EDS really has infected all previous sane minds, or I simply can’t see something obviously different here?
If we had wireless power transmission it would make the need of dense fuel irrelevant- the tyranny of the rocket equation prefers keeping the power source off craft. Even Tsiolkovsky knew this when he proposed microwave thermal rockets back in the day.
To the point on wireless power transmission, we do know waves of doing it effectively in vacuum and at reasonably distances (on the order of hundreds of km) in the form of Masers and Lasers. End to end efficiency is low but can be improved since there little loss in the transmission, most loss is in the beam forming and conversion back to electricity at the target. I think the main problem at this point is pointing accuracy but if we manage to build optical phased arrays that should come in time.
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