🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <93003.144037SAUNDRSG@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> Graydon <SAUNDRSG@QUCDN.QueensU.CA> writes:
>If you want a 'hard' satellite, you can do three things - stealth it...
>... give it defenses (a hard problem), or armor it ...
>...  The Moon has a real advantage when
>it comes to shipping inert mass to an Earth orbit, in terms of energy.

I'm sure the Moon colony would be the main supplier of armor for armored
military satellites.  That doesn't mean they'd own them, or that they
would have a monopoly on them.  Sure, it's more expensive to launch the
mass needed for armor from Earth, but it *can be done* -- the cost is
not prohibitive under the assumptions necessary for a lunar colony to
exist at all.  And the lunar colony is not going to be able to afford
Earth-sized military budgets for a very long time.  Their advantage,
while noticeable, is nowhere near enough to put them in a commanding
position over a much bigger and richer neighbor.

>Taking out a radiation hard satellite with a nuclear weapon, particularly
>one that is behind several meters of lunar regolith, isn't all that
>easy...

Direct hits are already-demonstrated technology.  You don't really need
nuclear weapons for this kind of thing; a direct hit from a ton of sand
will punch through that regolith layer pretty easily.  Knocking out
satellites is *easy* -- they can't maneuver very much (especially if
they're hauling many tons of armor around), reaching orbital altitude
is much easier than reaching orbital velocity (a Scud with suitable
guidance and course-correction systems would be a workable antisatellite
weapon), and their own orbital velocity makes warheads almost superfluous.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry