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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34513 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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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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