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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.

According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.

My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.

I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3

$11.3 million.

Also, the culture war will probably be kept out of space development due to how important it is. Space is the ultimate high ground and it is easy to command. You can't really block off thousands of kilometres of shoreline very easily, even with aircraft carriers. There's the horizon to worry about, land-based missiles, aircraft, ships can stay in protected harbors. (you really need satellites to watch for blockade-runners)

But with space, you can watch everything that happens. There is no stealth in space and almost no stealth from space. I suppose you could hide mobile missile launchers in warehouses or armored trains, play shell games like we do with ICBMs.

But you're certainly not going to be able to hide or defend your grounded spaceships. These things are huge, obvious and vulnerable. Even if you put in a lot of effort, someone will spot them hours before they launch, while they're all vulnerable on the launchpad or getting ready to launch. Then down comes a laser or kinetic shell and you've lost a billion dollar spaceship to $30 worth of electricity or a $50,000 chunk of processed moon-rock. Imagine if the Royal Navy could just charge into French ports during the Napoleonic War, or if both sides knew precisely where eachother's ships were? It would be a massive stomp for the British, for the stronger navy.

Control of space means control of nuclear weapons. Powerful lasers in space counter nuclear missiles flying on a high arc. Even if they fly low, they are still fairly visible from space and could be targeting by patrolling aircraft with less-powerful lasers, or ground based missiles. Controlling space means you could deny the enemy reconnaissance satellites, so they wouldn't have time to see your first-strike until it came across the horizon, weakening their ability to launch a second strike. Or you could launch rods from god style attacks, which are even faster than ICBMs.

It's much easier to build spaceships in low-gravity than in high-gravity conditions like Earth. Flying from Earth imposes immense design costs, you need a very sturdy ship with very high thrust-weight ratios capable of leaving our atmosphere. It's much more efficient to have low thrust engines that burn for a long time. Controlling space means controlling the best places to build spaceships, in the asteroid belt. There is a ludicrous amount of construction materials there.

Controlling space means total world domination.

There is no stealth in space.

Just FYI, and also this. Obviously the programmes are super classified so we don't know how stealthy the satellites are, but hiding stuff in space isn't impossible.

Good point, I was referencing the old hard sci-fi idiom that there is no stealth in space. This really applies most towards things that move (especially if there are crew), satellites are a partial exception I suppose. Gigantic plumes of fire are pretty obvious.

But how do you launch something covertly? If there are rockets involved, there's huge plumes of fire. I suppose once it's up a satellite could be made out of radar-absorbent material - but our sensors are very very good. You can't really have your satellite be optimally radar-absorbent from all angles, some shapes have to be there to accomplish the purpose of the satellite, solar panels or whatever.

Heat or light signatures don't just disappear into the atmosphere like with aircraft. And spy satellites have to transmit information, which means they're sending a signal out. I suppose they could use some kind of point-to-point communication to hide. But there's going to be some heat created when you send a signal, heat that needs to radiate away. The background temperature of space is very low! They could also pretend to be civilian satellites I guess. But that would make it harder to put weapons on them.

I suspect that for the near future some combination of masquerading as or hiding on civilian launch vehicles, blinding enemy sensors via on-the-ground or on-the-web sabotage, or massed launches of decoys will enable some weak form of stealth or at least maskirovka when it comes to space warfare. There are also some crazier ideas out there involving active cooling with liquid hydrogen that I don't put too much stock in but would make for a good Tom Clancy novel.

Since Tom Clancy is dead, I already planned to add that as a plot point to my own hard scifi novel. Funny that I see the hydrogen steamer referenced here of all places!

I thought this place could do with a little good old fashioned space talk. ;)

but the satellite was seen and tracked later that year and in the mid-1990s by amateur observers.

Yeah, not sure how well that's working out for them.

The classic "no stealth in space" does refer to propelled craft, starting from torchships and working its way down. You can avoid most of the objections by a fully passive orbit without a crew demanding life support. But you're still left with an object that's warmer than the 2.7 Kelvin background, at least when it's on the sunny side of the planet. Or microburning to adjust orbit. Or maybe even powering up to communicate.

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