From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Jun 23 2003 - 20:00:07 MDT
I actually thought of this a year or so prior to the
Iraq war, and I decided not to say anything about it,
but, since then, other people have publicly discussed
this idea....
Yes, I assumed that sat mirrors would be an option for
lasers - of course! However, sats are quite
vulnerable to some fairly low tech attacks. Even now
sats are being taken out regularly, I understand, by
the debris from all the junk and collisions between
junk and other junk, which keeps accumulating. Now
one good military idea that Saddam had at least ten
years ago was to simply build huge cannons into the
sides of hills, as tunnels, aimed at Israel.
Potentially, however, the size of the projected
cannons and the velocity they could achieve could just
as well put heavy artillary shells into orbit, or
deliver them anywhere on a ballistic trajectory. Such
cannons could deliver shells designed to explode in
space, as secondary guns, huge shotguns blasting
hundreds of pounds of the hardest sand-sized material
available into paths that would take out billions of
dollars of sats. The relative velocities could
easilly be high enough - especially if the orbits were
in the opposite direction, or separated by a
considerable angle - to vaporize a tunnel right thru a
substantial mass, taking out the electronic brains
that keep those mirrors aligned.
And there are a lot of other similar options by which
a terrorist nation could cheaply wipe out virtually
the entire existing sat industry - and make it almost
impossible to rebuild for months or years to follow,
as all that stuff gradually slowed down and burned up
in the high atmosphere.
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