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Originally Posted by R Leo
It was very crude but, the Rooskies had lots of it and a thousand miles of taiga to retreat into.
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I'm not trying to lead cheers for Soviet, uh... er, Russian military prowess. Just to point out that the Nazis were overconfident regarding them and lived, or not, to regret it.
One of the main problems with SDI is rarely mentioned. One war or even part of one in space, and we can kiss most any further exploration of space goodbye. This is no secret to former astronauts and physicists but you don't hear much about it.
While warheads are hard to hit, our global positioning satellites that are a big part of our military prowess now are not. They move slowly, in highly predictable orbits. Not sure to what extent SDI is dependent on satellite info, but it must be to some extent.
A few satellites get blown up and God knows what other explosions -- SDI missiles perhaps hitting something, and suddenly the earth is surrounded by a haze of space junk that dwarfs what we have now. Millions of particles from fractions of a gram on up, traveling at 10 to 20 thousand mph, many in weird, shortened comet-like orbits, would destroy most spacecraft after a few days in orbit. I understand nothing orbits in an exact circle. It's always an ellipse, often resembling a circle. Then there's the average comet's orbit: a long, narrow ellipse. Exploding particles would fly out from all directions -- some down to earth, perhaps some would escape earth's gravity all together, but I have a feeling much of it would settle into some kind of orbit.
We're playing a dangerous game with this militarization of space.