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Kill Sat: Difference between revisions
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* [[Older Than They Think]]: Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, freaked a lot of people out when it went up, although they were afraid of the possibility of the launch vehicles the Russians now had being used to launch nuclear warheads rather than the satellite itself.
* [[Older Than They Think|Even Older Than They Think]]: The [[Those Wacky Nazis|Nazi's]] called theirs the Sonnengewehr or "Sun Gun", which in turn was based on a 1929 design. A giant space-borne parabolic mirror, it would have been used to burn down cities from space. Let me repeat: [[Stupid Jetpack Hitler|The Nazis]] were planning a giant space-borne sun laser. [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-third-reichs-diabolical-orbiting-superweapon More info here.]
* The ultimate proposed kill-sat is the Nicoll-Dyson Laser. Using a shell of satellites in orbit around the sun (the original proposal for a Dyson Sphere, not a solid shell) which collect solar energy and convert it into a laser beam, [[James Nicoll]] calculated that one could use the satellites to create a phased array laser which would have an initial beam width equal to the size of the satellites' orbits and an effective range of ''millions of light years''. [[Awesome but Impractical|Talk about "leading your target".]] However, it should be pointed out that the guy who 'designed' it is a SF blogger and fan-writer, not a scientist or engineer. It's technically ''feasible'', maybe, but in the end, just a plot point idea.
* The inversion is more common: [[wikipedia:Anti-satellite weapon|Anti-satellite weapon]], or ASAT. These ranges between contemporary missiles, to nuclear explosions [[Recycled in Space|(IN SPACE!).]] In this age of information, these have incredible destructive potential to the infrastructures (compare: 2006 internet slowdown when some undersea cables was destroyed by Taiwan earthquake). It's not entirely ominous though, as there are few ways to safely<ref>hey, it's either this or risk flaming debris falling on your head</ref> and economically dispose of unused old satellites.
** So far, the US and China have successfully demonstrated ASAT weapons. (The US in 1985, China in 2007, and the US again in 2008, probably to remind China they could do it, too.) The Chinese gained some negative international reputation because they destroyed their satellite in high orbit, leaving over 2,000 potentially-dangerous chunks of debris out there. (The International Space Station is often moved to avoid orbital debris; at least two moves since the Chinese test have been done specifically to avoid its debris.)
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