Doing my usual search through a few space-related web sites to try to find something interesting to pass on, I found two things that made me ask, "what?" One's a story ready to read, the other is an invitation to a conference (read "invitation to" as "advertisement for") which led to another topic. To be fair, at least one is about something that makes sense. I'll leave it to you to decide if any of it makes sense.
The story is headlined, "Space pirates already have their sights set on the 'high seas' of Earth orbit. Can we stop them?" Space Pirates? Like Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean series except in orbit? Is Depp going to be there? What about Keira Knightly and Orlando Bloom? ISTRC Keith Richards was in one of those movies.
WTF are they talking about? They're saying, "there's gold in them thar hills!" Or in that thar vacuum. The growth of space as a commercial resource opens it as a prospect for misdeeds, corruption, piracy, and war. There are vehicles up there, satellites, telescopes, all sorts of valuable stuff.
The Center for the Study of Space Crime, Policy, and Governance (CSCPG) is looking into the risks of piracy in space and solutions to this potentially devastating economic and legal problem.
"Now is the time to start thinking and talking about mitigating the threat of piracy in space," said Marc Feldman, executive director of the CSCPG. "As we like to say, and please forgive me, Leon Trotsky, but you may not be interested in space piracy, but space pirates are interested in you …"
As you might suspect, a book has been written. Director Marc Feldman of the CSCPG teamed up with a specialist in cybersecurity, technology, and compliance named Hugh Taylor to produce "Space Piracy: Preparing for a Criminal Crisis in Orbit." "We are arguing that it's already started, in very early stages, with attempts to hack satellites," Taylor told Space.com. "However, we think that the increasingly commercial nature of space will result in attacks, physical and digital, on space assets, probably starting with disruptions of Earth-based space assets like launch facilities or ground stations," he said.
Once you start thinking of it in his directions, it becomes easier to see
Feldman's thoughts. What if a hostile force could take over a TV
satellite, in a Geosynchronous orbit? It wouldn't have to be a pirate
out in Geo orbit, if they could hijack the satellite over its uplink.
Imagine something big like the World Cup of soccer or the Super Bowl of
American football is getting ready to happen, it's going to be sent live
around the world via satellite, and the satellite(s) get hijacked. The
real satellite owner gets a message saying something like, "if you don't
transfer BFP (Big Pile) of money to this account, the link goes away.
And we can do this to anything on your satellites."
Hey... wasn't there a James Bond movie villain who scooped satellites out of orbit, and stole a Gemini capsule out of orbit? Killed an astronaut doing a spacewalk? I wonder if Feldman watched that movie recently.
Image credit: I have no idea. I got it here and it wasn't credited. I'm pretty sure it was a mid-'60s Bond movie, but I don't recall which one.
The other one is just a phrase that I've never heard and had to question the heck out of what it could mean. The phrase is Space Sustainability.
Sustainability is a buzzword you see in lots of places, but I couldn't understand what it means in context. Ordinarily, it seems to be used for things like some animal we depend on, like beef cattle, chickens or pigs, or it could mean things like environmental features, things like fresh water that we depend on, or just simply love having.
But space isn't a thing. I think of space as being empty. It's the nothing between things not the things themselves. It turns out, the idea is keep it empty; keep it from filling up. They want to preserve the empty. OK, that makes some sense.
This session will explore critical topics such as active debris removal, on-orbit servicing, space traffic coordination, and data collection, as well as the policy roadblocks. What can governments do today? How can industry step up? And what international cooperation is needed to keep space open for business?
It turns out that NASA started a Space Sustainability Division last September to put all of their sustainability operations into one group.
Mankind has the propensity to bring all its prejudices, its envy, and rivalry and hate, never mind criminal enterprise into space. Its just a larger space. It must be stated no doubt power such as it exists, the deep kind of entity, follows, and thats kind if the rub right there, as it exists now there be those and their organizations who can not nor do they tolerate the free man, for if outerspace represents anything on the human level, space is kind of the ultimate Liberty waiting to happen, and you can pretty much bet there are those who will do what it takes to make sure that never happens. Humanity breaks free, you mean freebooters loving free, making lives, existing free of the bonds of tyranny say out in the asteroid belt? Oh yeah, you can almost smell the tyranny. TPTB are gonna put a chokehold on freebooters if the got to die to do it.
ReplyDeleteAnd among those, who read Heinlein's The Moon Is A harsh Mistress?
Its worth a re-read like nobodies business, if anything the implications are more relevant now then ever. Besides being such a classic space opera yarn.
From the 'About Us' on the CSCP&G web page, the center was founded from research for the book. The center fancied itself as a resource and advisors for govt policy makers. There's even an advisory board so you know they're legit.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things, Feldman sees a role for the US Navy in space.
Feldman's Linked-In page - how do I say this - looks weird. I'll say this though, it seems to be about creating a fat plumb of a job for himself.
He's the expert, he says so himself.
Truly, it reminds me of the emperor's new clothes. Feldman is tasked with getting others to believe in what they don't see.
What it reminded me of was this old post, about a space junk company. Same basic problem, really, but this one has Woz working there. Or his name associated with them.
DeleteI believe the Bond photo is from You Only Live Twice, with one of the best Bond film songs of the same name. Same film supposedly introduced the term "ninja" to Wstern audiences for the first time. A fun Cold War movie.
ReplyDeleteThat's it! Thanks! My wife and I were talking about last night and centered around that time period, '67/'68, but never actually went looking for a list of films.
DeleteSeems like these are both areas for US Space Force. I want to believe they are up to the task. I need to find that girl who sells caffeine.
ReplyDeleteI've read two different novels that involved satellite interference, one was hacking and the other was physical taking of a satellite (the first was set in the present, the second in the future).
ReplyDeleteAn interesting discussion, though at this point mostly theoretical - but worth starting to think about at this point (not worth spending lots of money on!).
As far as sustainability.... I get peeved by people claiming it for a situation that meets what ever their current definition is.
We don't know if things are sustainable until they've been around for a while, and history gives us lots of examples of what is and isn't sustainable - which current users of the term almost always ignore.
As far as space goes, I'd consider sustainable to mean equipment lasting longer and not leaving parts behind, though some of that is more being good neighbors.
Jonathan
I suspect that "space sustainability" refers to keeping the level of space debris down to a level that we can still fly through and near. It is possible to completely shut off the ability to get off this planet by filling orbit with a thick cloud of very high speed bullets.
ReplyDeleteWhat's "sustainable"is "access to space", but of course they had to cloak that in the latest environmentally-woke buzzword so that they can trigger all the right people and get funding.
One of my first lessons from the first Earf Day or somewhere back then was "there's no such place as 'away' where you throw things." We've seen several times in the last year that things thrown away to burn up on reentry didn't burn up completely. In some cases they just make pretty shows in the air and in at least one doing real damage (as well as making my list of the most read posts in the last year).
ReplyDeleteGetting junk out of Near Earth Orbit needs to start getting more consideration. SpaceX deorbits Starlink sat.s regularly and they're in a low orbit that makes it relatively easy. The thing I wonder about are the small things that are hard to track by radar; things like nuts, bolts and other hardware, or small pieces of things that blew up. I know companies are looking at ways to do that for hire.
The bigger problem is when they collide and you get huge clouds of broken stuff. You could completely block access to space by intentionally exploding shrapnel bombs to distribute crap in a cloud. The Chinese sort of did that when they demo'ed their ASAT awhile back on a dead stage. Pissed off a lot of folk, tellin' ya.
ReplyDeleteI've read novels where space access to a planet was cut off intentionally this way.
DeleteI've also read novels where this was done accidentally to Earth.
There are already dangerous patches of orbit that are avoided as much as possible for this reason... It's not a coming problem, it's already here.
Jonathan
What you describe has an official name -- Kessler Effect. The Wikipedia write up is not too bad.
Delete> Space Sustainability
ReplyDeleteE. P. A.
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Spaaaaaaaaaaaccccceeeee!