The article on business insider by Blake Stilwell tells us biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons are prohibited from being placed in or used from Earth's orbit but treaty writers didn't anticipate the most simple weapon ever; a tungsten rod that can hit a city with the explosive power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Simple if you discount getting them to near space, holding them there, targeting, and and launching them.
There is history of US using such weapons dropped from airplanes in the Viet Nam war. These were pencil stub size rods with fins dropped from 3,000 feet that reached speeds up to 500 mph.
That lead to Thor, an idea of using telephone pole size tungsten rods, 20 feet long, 1 foot in diameter, shot from orbit to reach speed 10x the speed of sound.
Wait a minute.
How fast is that?
It depends on the temperature.
And atmosphere.
Let's say they mean regular speed of sound down here on Earth at regular temperature. Gawl! Scientist always have to complicate everything.
(Sound travels faster through water and even faster through iron.)
Speed of sound at sea level at 59℉ = 761.2 mph.
So 10 x that is -- what? -- 7, 612 mph.
Wow. That hardly gives you any time to get out of the way.
Oh!
Such a weapon could destroy a target with 15 minutes' notice.
It could take that long to decide where to go.
It would take that long for me to get my pants on, and shoes, and get down to the truck BLAM! All over before I can get out of the building.
Cost.
$10,000 per pound at 24,000 pounds each. Government math concludes $230 million for each rod.
A core takeaway from the concept of weapons like Project Thor's is that hypersonic weapons pack a significant punch and may be the future of global warfare.
I wonder how a rod with fins shot from a satellite doesn't push away the satellite from the rod. Imagine the rod staying put in space and the satellite that shot the rod being pushed away from it.
Gyroscopes probably.
[do gyroscopes work in space?] Yes, they do.
One time I saw a really cool Tom Baker Dr Who in which Dr was floating in space between two space ships. No spacesuit. No oxygen. He reached into his pocket and produced a baseball. Why not? And threw it hard at the opposing space ship. It bounced off and returned directly and Dr Who caught it and the momentum that Who caused by throwing the ball then carried him to the ship he wanted to enter. Probably his Tardis, but I'm not recalling that part.
Related. This is cool.
2 comments:
Supposedly, they're what destroyed the Nork and Iranian nucular programs.
They aren't shot, merely dropped.
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