Trump's Space Force Is a Horrendously Bad Idea

Donald Trump is an enormously ignorant man, and his idea for a "space force" is a perfect example of why this is so. He thinks we need a separate military department to plan for a war in space.

The problem is, you can't win a war in space: waging even a small-scale war in earth orbit will render space completely unusable to everyone. Blowing up several satellites in low-earth orbit (LEO, up to 1,200 miles altitude) will create a cloud of shrapnel that will eventually destroy everything at that altitude.

Most satellites are powered by solar panels, and because weight is at such a premium, satellites have paper-thin walls: they are extremely fragile.

Objects in LEO orbit at speeds of 17,000 miles per hour. At that speed, even the tiniest pieces of debris can destroy a satellite. A paint chip could blow out the space shuttle window. The kinetic energy of an object is equal to one half its mass times the velocity squared: at that speed, a one-ounce piece of metal has the explosive force of four or five sticks of dynamite.

In an attack on a satellite, the debris from the primary target's destruction will cause more collisions, destroying more satellites, making more debris, causing more collisions, until a chain reaction destroys everything in LEO.

In LEO atmospheric friction will eventually clear out the debris, but it will take years, if not decades, to clean up near-earth space.

Spy satellites and certain kinds of communications and weather satellites orbit in LEO, as do the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station (ISS). That would have to be evacuated and abandoned, wasting billions of dollars and decades of work.

A war in space would render us blind and deaf, unable to monitor Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapon sites.

Worse, it would severely hinder our ability to predict the weather. Now, as storms are becoming more and more powerful because the earth's atmosphere is heating up and holding more water, we would lose the ability to track and predict hurricane tracks.

GPS Satellite

Because the United States military depends so heavily on GPS technology, GPS satellites would be a prime target for destruction. They are in medium earth orbit, about 12,500 miles up.

These satellites are delicate, two-ton machines made of computers, spidery antennas, glass panels, paper-thin aluminum and gold foil.

A war in medium earth orbit would destroy our constellation of GPS satellites. Americans dependent on Google Maps to get them where they're going would have to resort once again to paper maps. Younger generations, who have never learned to read a map, would be totally lost. Self-driving cars would become a pipedream.

A war in high earth orbit would destroy our geosynchronous satellites, including communications, TV and weather satellites. At an orbital radius of 26,192 miles, the debris field would be less dense since there's so much more volume, but it would never clear out because there's no atmospheric drag. Shrapnel from destroyed geosynchronous satellites would also have wildly eccentric orbits, colliding with satellites at any altitude.

A war in space would render space too dangerous for human space travel. With that much debris in orbit, sending people into space would be a total crap shoot.

There are currently 40,000 man-made objects in earth orbit, and the DoD's Joint Space Operations Center is tracking over 15,000. Blowing up even a few satellites would create a huge cloud of junk in orbit that would be very difficult to track and predict: with that much debris, there will be repeated collisions and orbits will change constantly.

Finally, weaponizing space would be the most catastrophically stupid idea conceived of by mankind because it is so immensely destructive. That's why the world banned nuclear weapons in space in 1963.

But you don't even need nuclear weapons. Objects traveling at orbital speeds have so much kinetic energy that any heavy object is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Most satellites and meteors burn up in the atmosphere because they are not aerodynamic.

But with the proper construction any piece or rock or metal in orbit properly nudged could survive the descent to the surface and destroy a city as thoroughly as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- with the added bonus of no radioactive fallout. (Read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [1966] for an idea of what tossing rocks at Earth can do.)

This is also why intentionally bringing an asteroid to earth for purposes of mining is a spectacularly bad idea. One crazy dude could plop it right on earth and all humanity could be exterminated like the dinosaurs.

There are billions of stars in the universe, which means there are probably billions of earth-like planets out there. But we have seen no definitive signs of extraterrestrial life. This is the Fermi Paradox: where is everybody?

The most likely reason that we have detected no intelligent life out there is that by the time a civilization is technologically advanced enough to venture into space, the enabling technology is powerful enough for one moron to destroy that civilization, either through genetically engineered plagues, nuclear weapons, or orbital bombardment with dumb rocks.

In our case, that one moron may be Donald Trump.