Sounds like in most cases the satellites don't have any propulsion of their own, and are "ejected" onto their orbit from the ISS. Put simply, they get thrown out.
I'm sure some checks are done of the orbital mechanics to avoid any risk of a later collission, but keep in mind that the ISS makes frequent course corrections to stay in orbit, and at this low of an orbit drag is also a factor, so simply being a smaller craft will cause different forces to push you onto a different path.
Obviously this means you have very little choice in your orbit, but for many small satellites this isn't a concern.
EDIT: To answer your "use it as a garage" point, the answer is that it's way too impractical. In orbital mechanics, drifting apart from something is far easier than getting closer to it, and space is really, really big. Plus keep in mind that you need to not only be in the same place at the same time, but you also need to be moving at the same speed (relative velocities in LEO can quickly reach the order of kilometers per second).
Yea a few Kerbal Space Program sessions were enough to convince me that it's totally impractical to have a "collector" spacecraft that just goes around collecting old satellites and space trash in different orbits.
KSP gave me the exact same impression, but there's one thing I wonder about: with sufficiently smart global optimization algorithm, maybe a collector craft could approach and collect several targets on a low Δv budget? It's not something you could do manually, but space has also this nice property that you can predict trajectories accurately far in advance, so it may be amendable to optimization.
Wonder if there's a paper somewhere that computed possible Δv requirements for a collector if you squeeze your flight plan very tight.
(Also in-orbit refueling will change this equation a lot. You could keep a bunch of such collectors continuously in space, and wait for the trash to align right. There's no hurry.)
Another thing some KSP mods gave an impression to me was how seemingly magical ideal encounters and transfer windows they could make.
Even though I couldn't make it myself by the usual orbit tools I also wouldn't be too surprised if it was possible to gather bunch of stuff with like < 100m/s delta v or whatnot.
KSP taught me that flying a rocket is "easy". But calculating the stuff is hard (well, computationally intensive. So it can be easy, but hard for humans in their head).
I thought so too at first, but after a couple of (dozen) hours, I came to appreciate it. The rocket building leaves for incredible variety, it means as a beginner you can strap a few engines to a cockpit and get to the Mun, without having an understanding of why, while at the same time needing to actually plan and calculate delta for longer missions. Similarly the docking is fiddly and hard at first, but once you've done it a few times, it's a (mostly) rote exercise.
Agreed. It's good to learn and do it a few times, because it teaches you a lot about how objects in orbit behave in relation to each other.
Docking itself has always been my favorite part, though I "cheat" by using a mod[0] that gives me a display[1] of relative velocities and orientations. My brain isn't designed to eyeball relative velocities from an outside-ship camera. But that's just the final part, applicable when you can literally see the target out of your window.
Approach, now that's another story. Took me a while to learn how to match orbits without carefully planning a series of maneuvers. My new way is slightly less Δv-efficient, but much faster in terms of both in-game and wall clock time. I plot a "good enough" intercept (say within 5-50km separation, relative velocity doesn't matter, as long as it's less than my remaining Δv), and then as my ship is a couple dozen to couple hundreds kilometers from the target, I start doing small adjustment burns to minimize distance at flyby and relative speed. The goal is to eventually reduce flyby separation and relative speed at intercept to something reasonable (say, flyby at 100 m, 10 m/s relative speed). From there, I can just dock easily.
It's not the way real docking happens today (though it's how it might in the future!), but I can execute a full intercept and docking in less than one orbit, which is more fun. Doubly fun to do this with transfers between celestial body - docking straight out of a transfer orbit, without first establishing a proper orbit around a moon/planet.
EDIT: Triply fun with planetary landers, if you don't have enough Δv to reach orbit, much less to transfer to a station/orbiter module. You launch the lander into ballistic trajectory that intersects your target's orbit at its peak, and pray you time it right, so that the orbiter/station can decelerate and do a suborbital docking, and then boost back to safety. One mistake here, and you can lose both ships. God, I love this game.
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[0] - Docking Port Alignment Indicator.
[1] - https://i.imgur.com/J69AYEw.png. It looks trivial, but it packs enough information that you can easily dock looking only at that display. And something like this is what real astronauts would use, so it's actually making things more realistic :).
> , maybe a collector craft could approach and collect several targets on a low Δv budget? It's not something you could do manually, but space has also this nice property that you can predict trajectories accurately far in advance,
So, the issue is, in the low orbit environment there's no kinds of slingshot or other maneuvers available. You need to match height of the orbit at a point, and need to at least coarsely match velocity at that point, which means you're basically in the same orbit as the object. Sure, you can play games with slowly matching phase, etc, but the delta-v requirements are simply inherently high.
Assuming you manage to grab a hold of debris without ripping off even tiny parts, how would you dispose of it? You'd need to deorbit it and you need a working engine for that. So a reusable collector doesn't seem like a plausible concept to me.
> Assuming you manage to grab a hold of debris without ripping off even tiny parts, how would you dispose of it? You'd need to deorbit it and you need a working engine for that.
meet up with the debris, reorient yourself and the debris such that the debris is closer to the earth (reaction wheels, magnetic torquer bar and patience is all that's required), and then just mechanically kick it down (store up energy from the sun and then trigger a solenoid). the debris itself becomes your propulsion. you get a tiny boost up, perhaps towards your next target, and it gets a (admittedly!) tiny boost down.
obviously it doesn't instantly dispose of everything, but progressively pushing material further down the gravity well is the next best thing.
> then just mechanically kick it down (store up energy from the sun and then trigger a solenoid). the debris itself becomes your propulsion. you get a tiny boost up, perhaps towards your next target, and it gets a (admittedly!) tiny boost down
This doesn't actually work. If you push something down in orbit, you just make its orbit elliptical. After half an orbit it will be at the same altitude as you again, and after a full orbit it will hit you from the top. If you want to lower its orbit, you need to push it back.
> This doesn't actually work. If you push something down in orbit, you just make its orbit elliptical.
Came here to say this as well! The only caveat to that I can think of is if you're already low enough in orbit, the push making the satellite's orbit elliptical could put it in a drag zone, and then air would do the slowing down for you.
Also, thank you Neal Stephenson for introducing me to the wonderful would of orbital mechanics via Seveneves!
For me, accidentally losing contact with the space ship during a Kerbal space walk taught me exactly how tricky manual orbital piloting is and inspired me to learn more.
The Kerbal never got back to his ship before running out of propellant.
But you could just kick it in the retrograde direction and to de-orbit it. In fact you could use centrifugal force and a cable to generate a significant amount of acceleration using reaction wheels powered by solar panels which would not consume any propellant.
> If you want to lower its orbit, you need to push it back.
if you want to lower its orbit, you probably need to take a lot of complicated stuff in to account which doesn't fit into a comment. i won't charge the orbital dynamacists implementing my idea more if they replace "down" with "the optimal direction for this target, at the optimal moment".
mass of the target, cross sectional area of the target, any out gassing it might be doing, where we're trying to maneuver to next, etc, etc.
if the optimal direction ends up being exactly "down" or "back", i'll buy you a beer.
As a general rule of thumb, the only way to decrease the energy of an orbit (what most people would consider to be "lowering the orbit"), is to apply acceleration in the opposite direction that the object is traveling.
You may be to do this with atospheric drag if you add enough ellipticity but they would only be lowering the orbit indirectly.
you know, in the wildly hypothetical world where this was implemented, i don't think the folks cutting the check would mind if you deorbited things directly, or indirectly.
> Assuming you manage to grab a hold of debris without ripping off even tiny parts
There are some ideas that could be repurposed from asteroid mining concepts. Many asteroids are more like pile of gravel loosely bound by gravity than solid rocks, and either way, trying to extract anything risk launching lots of tiny pebbles in a random directions. One idea I saw floating around NASA website was to wrap such an asteroid in a net or sheet of material, to keep it from shaking itself apart. I could imagine similar lightweight net being used to wrap a satellite.
Once wrapped, you can do two things with it. You can try to deorbit captured trash - for instance, with a light net and a solar sail attached (which would be used to increase atmospheric drag). Such trash would not only deorbit faster, but a sail would make it easier to track. Nets and sails would have to be light and disposable, they could be shipped to orbit in bulk, or (later) manufactured in space.
Alternatively, you can try to recycle the trash. If you have in-orbit refueling using propellant sourced from space, you probably already have - or are about to have - some facility in orbit that could reprocess parts of dead satellites. So you can move the trash to some designated recycling orbit.
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Now that I think of it, you could probably make a recycling collector work without all the infrastructure in space. In orbit, you have time, you can take things slow. I can imagine a collector chasing light trash using ion thrusters, or whatever is most promising in high-Isp department these days (how small can a VASIMR get anyway?), grabbing it and parking at the recycling orbit. Might take weeks per piece of trash, but if you launch a bunch of such collectors and feed them trajectories from the ground, they'll eventually clean the orbit out of light trash. It might require some actual developments in the beamed power department, and perhaps launching a power satellite to microwave some electricity to the collectors, but think it would work in (sufficiently modded) KSP :). Anyway, the biggest problem isn't mission design, but figuring out who will actually pay for this.
Not sure what to do about the most dangerous space trash - the tiny bits that can't be reliably tracked. Track them better and vaporize with lasers?
'Laser brooms' are one idea. I think you still have to be able to resolve the debris, but the idea is to end up causing assymetric light-induced thrust on the debris, deorbiting it faster (by heating the prograde side).
Another very 'interesting' idea is deploying a large amount of fine dust on an appropriate polar orbit. Everything intersecting that orbit will be sandblasted, increasing drag; this will have the greatest effect on the smallest debris, and hopefully anything operational in that orbit will be well enough armored or able to dodge the cloud. The dust deorbits quickly for the same reason as the tiny debris (greater surface area/volume). One of the more metal ideas for space debros handling I've heard.
Thankfully GEO is still a bit self cleaning as Sun and Moon influence makes it unstable - you can clearly see it in orbital debris models, there is a blurry plane shifted ring around the primary GEO stripe.
Still that will only prevent a dead sat in sitting in a valuable spot for ever, it migh still drift the wrong way and require active sats to do avoidance maneuvers, not to mention the chance of two inactive sats colliding.
Self-disposing satellites are a good idea, but it's not perfect. If the control unit or the engines of the satelite fail too early during the satellite's life span, the thing will simply stick around.
There's also the problem of retaining propellants over long periods without experiencing some negative consequence (detonation, unintended firing, volatilisation, etc).
But in general, minimising the special-handling cases would be an improvement.
Long-term propellant issue could probably be solved by using a cold-gas thruster with a non-reactive propellant - basically a pressurized gas tank welded to a valve and a nozzle. It should have enough Δv to push you into a graveyard orbit, or even deorbit straight from GEO (though that's probably dangerous, and I imagine you could see spectacular fireworks from the ground, as the satellite would be hitting the atmosphere with a couple km/s more velocity than it's typical).
You could attach a simple lightweight drag sail or a Echo style very low pressure balloon. That can increase drag of the thing by orders of magnitude and get it down fast while you tug goes for the next target or returns for refueling or restocking.
Could an astronaut grab a smaller satellite and simply chuck it towards the sun? Would it have enough velocity break out of earth orbit or would it just get stuck in some really large, wide, graveyard orbit?
To fall into the sun you would have to negate most of Earth's orbital speed which is about 29.8 kilometers per second. To escape the solar system you need about 42.1 km/s of speed. It actually takes less energy to yeet yourself out of the solar system from Earth than to fall down into the sun. If you threw an object from Earth's orbit along Earth's orbital path an extra 12.3km/s that object would be going 42.1 km/s and eventually but barely leave our solar system.
Unfortunately throwing things at kilometers per second by hand is not possible, 1 km/s is just under 2237 mph.
Of course with atmospheric drag for most low orbit satellites things will come down eventually, in which case throwing something the right way could add or subtract from the time it will stay in orbit, but that would be highly dependent on where you started. And LEO is already like 7.2 km/s or about 16,000 mph. Standing on a massive enough satellite using a large stick or like a sling staff would certainly help you get more speed in your throw though. A 100 mph baseball throw really wouldn't be that significant though.
It takes a "huge" amount of energy to get something to the sun.
Something in earth orbit is also orbiting the Sun. The Earth is traveling ~30km/second around the Sun. If you want to fall into the sun, you have to cancel out all that sideways speed.
Another fun thing I didn't really understand all that clearly until I spent time playing KSP: Why it's theoretically easier to get to the Sun from Pluto than it is to do so from here.
Related: my mind was blown when I realize how easy it is to fall down to Earth (well, Kerbin) if you're in high enough orbit. I've had cases where my orbital velocity was on the order of 200 m/s, which means that at apoapsis you can just fart, and have the satellite crash into the ground a day later.
(I've also had my fair share of high-orbit missions where in the middle of the launch I realized I'm aiming for a prograde orbit, where the contract specified retrograde. Instead of reloading game from launchpad, I just carried on, put my apoapsis at target altitude, and once reaching it, burned off couple hundred m/s of Δv to reverse the orbit's direction.)
If I chuck a baseball out of an airplane I don't have to worry about accelerating the baseball to the airplane's speed, as I am also traveling at that speed.
Similarly, if a satellite is light enough in low-G to grab and manipulate from a craft that has straddled up along side it, would a single astronaut have enough strength to use his arms to put a satellite on a path that is effectively out of the way? Or could they just chuck it back at the earth so it can burn up on reentry?
> If I chuck a baseball out of an airplane I don't have to worry about accelerating the baseball to the airplane's speed, as I am also traveling at that speed.
But the speed of the baseball you just thrown out will be (ignoring air friction) that of the airplane +/- 40 m/s, assuming you're some super strong thrower.
> if a satellite is light enough in low-G
Microgravity doesn't mean the satellite is light now. It still has the same mass, it's just that you're both in free fall, so it doesn't pull away from you. For the purpose of throwing it, the satellite is just as hard to throw as it would be on the surface of Earth.
But even assuming it weighs as much as a fastball, when you throw it super hard, you'll change its velocity by... 40 m/s at best. Compare that with the orbital speed, which is many kilometers per second (e.g. about 7.6 km/s if you're on ISS). So e.g. instead of going 7.6 km/s, the thrown satellite now goes... 7.56 km/s. Which translates to one end of the orbit dropping by a couple hundred meters. So instead of 408km, it'll now go as low as... 407.5km, or something in that ballpark.
That's the limit of what you can achieve by just tossing things with muscle power.
I think the goal would be to first accelerate the astronaut to that level of velocity and then relatively adjusting its trajectory isn't so difficult. But, that is just my understanding that speed is relative (especially in space with no drag)
The ∆v to escape Earth orbit is generally quite large, and it's far, far greater still to collide with the Sun (though this wouldn't normally be considered necessary).
In comparison, a deorbit burn is usually relatively inexpensive.
From low Earth orbit, delta-v to Earth and to escape the solar system are about the same. Delta-v to fall into the sun is two orders of magnitude bigger.
Directly. Not if you take it the long way - near escape to reduce orbital speed, a little push to cancel the rest, and you will fall directly into the Sun (with a high velocity).
There are at least some proposals that use ionised particles in the earth's upper atmosphere as a conductive elements, meaning you don't need a loop as such- just a wire pointing towards the earth with a big metal ball on the end. Lorentz force means you can accelerate prograde or retrograde.
I find it fascinating to use the natural things you have available as a motive force, and it's really cool to think all you might need is a few bits of conductor and the earth's own relatively static magnetic field to move a satellite around.
I wish humans were less interested in the noisy, explosive things like engines and rockets, and more into subtlety.
Space Infrastructure Servicing (SIS) is a spacecraft being developed by Canadian aerospace firm MDA to operate as a small-scale in-space refueling depot for communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
OSAM-1 (short for On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1), a robotic spacecraft equipped with the tools, technologies and techniques needed to extend satellites' lifespans - even if they were not designed to be serviced on orbit.
During its mission, the OSAM-1 servicer will rendezvous with, grasp, refuel and relocate a government-owned satellite to extend its life. But OSAM-1's effect will not end there.
The benefits are many. OSAM-1’s capabilities can give satellite operators new ways to manage their fleets more efficiently, and derive more value from their initial investment. These capabilities could even help mitigate the looming problem of orbital debris.
Yeah, I'm not at all convinced of the garbage man satellite idea. The Delta-V calculations only make sense if the craft is very big. And all the very big ones are in GEO, not LEO, where it's even harder to achieve.
Lasers that act as a long term external pressure for small stuff, maybe. But the laser strength, object tracking and object targeting tech still has a long long way to go before that is viable.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order. We need to start applying it to space too. The most viable path to reducing space debris right now is not creating it in the first place. Through reusable rockets, miniaturization, and removing mechanisms that give off less debris during operation like stopping the use of explosive bolts or reducing the need for protective coverings. Lowering the regulated maximum 25 year lifespan of a satellite further would also be an option.
The issue isn't launching to intercept a body in orbit, though—in those missions, the shuttle was launched at the Hubble. Just that wandering between orbits to "collect" debris and satellites en masse is not really feasible with rockets as we know and build them.
Depends if you cann make the economic (material reuse in orbit) or safety case (eliminate collision risk) there a couple thing that can be done for an Earth-like planet (lots of sunlight + atmosphere) to make itbwork:
- setup orbital refueling of your tug
- if you have enough time, let the tug drift by gravity anomaly and sun influence as optimal
- use electric engines as much as possible to reduce fuel mass needed
- make the thing aerodynamic enough to enable aerobraking or even orbit plane changes
- add tethers for even more momentum transfer magic
These tricks could make the proposition of capturing and reusing dead satellite much more viable when applied. :)
De-orbiting satellites -- while necessary for well-discussed reasons -- seems wasteful. You spent umpteen million dollars getting that mass into orbit, and you're just going to drop it?
It's kind of like the plans to throw nuclear waste into the Sun, or more realistically into a deep ocean subduction zone -- isotopes that heavy or unstable are rare, do you know how much work it is to find them?
Rifle bullet speed is a relatively small delta for orbiting craft, it goes up quite a few orders of magnitude from that. Pretty much anything you encounter that you didn't specifically try very hard to match orbits with is going to blast right through a net.
There were studies on using the Shuttle to repair satellites, but aside from the maintenance mission on Hubble those plans were shelved. The cost of a new satellite was generally a lot less than the cost of a shuttle mission dedicated to repairing it, and it would often need to be dedicated due to the requirement to match orbits.
Even if the ISS released a smallsat, which it does from time to time, that doesn't help you. By the time you need to do maintenance on it, the cubesat will have dropped into a much lower orbit due to upper atmosphere effects.
The safest, and practically perhaps the only viable way for the ISS to do maintenance on orbital instruments is if they stay attached to the ISS.
> it goes up quite a few orders of magnitude from that
Sorry to be pedantic, but modern rifle muzzle velocities are in the 1.2km/s range. Escape velocity in LEO is 11.2km/s, so your maximal closing speed is ~22.4kms. Which is maybe 1.3 orders of magnitude difference, not "quite a few". Orders of magnitude are big.
For the rest, you are right of course: we're talking closing speeds that can easily be one order of magnitude higher than rifle bullets (or armor-piercing tank projectiles, for that matter; those are at 1.7km/s or so).
What matters in a collision isn't velocity, it's momentum. Momentum is ½mv². There's a lot of orders of magnitude just in the mass, but the velocities add up a lot faster than you'd think too. I'd say there's around 10 orders of magnitude between the momentum of a rifle bullet and the momentum of a communications satellite at escape velocity.
> I'd say there's around 10 orders of magnitude between the momentum of a rifle bullet and the momentum of a communications satellite at escape velocity.
That's quite an overestimation.
Let's be generous and say a rifle bullet is 50 gram (0.05 kg) and fires at 1.1 km/s, and a communication satellite weighs 5 metric tonne (5000 kg) and escape velocity is 11 km/s. We have 5 orders of magnitude difference in mass and 1 in velocity. As momentum is m*v, total difference is 6 orders of magnitude. Kinetic energy is 1/2*m*v^2, so that gives 7 orders of magnitude difference.*
The mass of a bullet is more like 5 grams, and the mass of a satellite could be around 500,000 kg (the ISS). A quick search shows the the largest commercial communications satellite is Telstar 19V, with a mass of 7,076kg; in my first estimate I guessed 50,000kg. Finally, the closing velocity of two objects in orbit could be up to 22.4 km/s.
rifle bullet: 3×10³ J
Telstar 19V, geostationary orbit: 3.3×10¹⁰ J
Telstar 19V, geostationary transfer orbit: 3.5×10¹¹ J
ISS, LEO: 1.2×10¹³ J
hypothetical fast ISS: 1.1×10¹⁴ J
14−3 gives 11 orders of magnitude, but good luck making the ISS go that fast. Also, don’t forget to add in the kinetic energy of the net; it’s not going to be zero.
Still, even 7 orders of magnitude qualifies as ”quite a few”. You don’t need very many orders of magnitude before you have too many.
Forgive me for contradicting you, but I didn’t change anything; I just typed momentum when I meant energy. I first thought of the formula, not the name, and then typed the wrong name. I'm not sure how I made such a mistake, but mea culpa. Also my old friend bzbarsky mentioned closing velocity, and I stuck with it when I made my estimate.
I do agree that the ISS is not usually considered to be a communications satellite (though it does have plenty of communications gear on board, including a ham radio repeater if I recall correctly). But it is a thing that we might want to deorbit one day. Since we were considering the ridiculous closing velocity of two objects that are both on escape trajectories, I figure using the ridiculous mass of the ISS was fair game too. But like I said, I originally guessed 50t, not 400t. I was thinking more about the payload capacities of launch vehicles than the satellites themselves.
Whatever mass and closing velocity you consider, 7 or 10 or 11 orders of magnitude all qualify as “quite a few” even if the velocity itself only has 1.3 orders of magnitude of difference.
Good point. The source I was looking at was talking about .22 caliber rounds. I looked around some more, and that seems to be the general range in which you can achieve those velocities, though that can include discarding sabot versions of 7.62x51mm ammunition (with the projectile ending up 5.56mm or smaller).
Yes but then instead of one trackable, piece of junk you have many small pieces some too small to track.
In fact the Chinese satellite destruction test in 2007 was a very good example of this:
“ Anti-satellite missile tests, especially ones involving kinetic kill vehicles as in this case, contribute to the formation of orbital space debris which can remain in orbit for many years and could interfere with future space activity (Kessler syndrome).[7] This event was the second largest creation of space debris in history after Project West Ford, with more than 2,000 pieces of trackable size (golf ball size and larger) officially catalogued in the immediate aftermath, and an estimated 150,000 debris particles.[24][25] As of October 2016, a total of 3,438 pieces of debris had been detected, with 571 decayed and 2,867 still in orbit nine years after the incident.[26]
More than half of the tracked debris orbits the Earth with a mean altitude above 850 kilometres (530 mi), so they would likely remain in orbit for decades or centuries.[27] Based on 2009 and 2013 calculations of solar flux, the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office estimated that around 30% of the larger-than-10-centimeter (3.9 in) debris would still be in orbit in 2035.[28]
In April 2011, debris from the Chinese test passed 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) away from the International Space Station.[29]
As of April 2019, 3000 of the 10,000 pieces of space debris routinely tracked by the US Military as a threat to the International Space Station were known to have originated from the 2007 satellite shoot down.[30]”
I see. What about a huge orbiting ball of butter* with thrusters that just slowly changes its orbit and sweeps all the trash by getting the trash embedded in itself?
* not actual butter, but you get the idea, some polymer, or maybe aerogel?
Relative velocities are just a huge problem. Unless the object and the catching item are moving near the same speed, chances are the debris will just punch through the item meant to catch it and keep trucking (and maybe make more debris in the process)
If the zombie sat in question is in a _very_ low orbit, this can be a reasonable approach, because the atmospheric drag can pull the pieces down faster than would've occurred on an intact satellite.
Otherwise, you risk just creating more high-v debris. At the extreme end of this, you could trigger the Kessler Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome) and make orbit practically unusable.
The ISS orbits at 400km altitude and 27000km/h, while many small satellites will orbit lower - I suppose this is what makes it possible to “drop” a non-propulsive satellite from the ISS like the one in the article.
As their orbit decays, they would actually need tons of fuel to accelerate and raise their orbit to reach the station, it’s totally impractical.
Geostationary orbits are much higher altitude to achieve lower orbit speeds. Gravity is stronger closer to the surface. But they'd still need a lot of fuel to slow down, to drop lower to the ISS' orbit, and then they'd be on an elliptical, and need even more to circularize and rendezvous.
edit: I'm the third one to say this in a span of a minute, sorry.
That doesn't make any sense. If you want to orbit at a lower speed, you need to increase your altitude. Geostationary orbit is at 35,000+ km, while the ISS orbits at ~400 km.
Instead of geostationary, I think you mean low earth orbit (LEO). There is a link to the Wikipedia article on LEO in an adjacent comment. A circular geostationary orbit is at an altitude of 22,236 miles/35,786 kilometers.
This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit.
It's a commercial service, from Nanoracks.[1] They load cubesats into a container, have them shipped to the ISS, and the satellites are "launched" with a spring. So they're in roughly the same orbit as the ISS.
The price just went way up. NASA raised their price on transport to the Space Station from $3,000 per kilogram to $20,000 per kilogram. They also raised the astronaut labor rate to $130,000/hour. NASA was subsidizing the ISS launch scheme. So future cubesats will probably be launched from a Falcon 9 using one of Space-X's resellers.
Interesting article. As you mentioned, NASA is justifying the >6x price increase with:
>In announcing the policy change, NASA said it had previously subsidized transportation to and from the station in order to foster the development of commercial space applications.
>“Since making these opportunities available, there has been a growing demand for commercial and marketing activities from both traditional aerospace companies and from novel industries, demonstrating the benefits of the space station to help catalyze and expand space exploration markets and the low-Earth orbit economy,” the space agency said. “As a result, NASA has updated its pricing policy for commercial activities conducted on the station to reflect full reimbursement for the value of NASA resources.”
While I don't have any reason not to take this explanation at face value, I am curious about the timing. Did they just have too many potential customers to justify subsidizing the cost?
I was also surprised to see a "trash disposal" line item in the price catalog. It doesn't sound like ISS-generated waste. Does anyone know if this is literally people paying thousands of dollars per kg to transport cargo to space in order to dispose it by burning it up on re-entry? What could justify such a cost? Are there examples? What kind of restrictions on items are there?
While I don't have any reason not to take this explanation at face value, I am curious about the timing. Did they just have too many potential customers to justify subsidizing the cost?
That, or from a different perspective, as commercial launch capabilities increase, they don't want to kill competition by subsidizing a service that other companies want to be able to offer (at a non-subsidized cost).
All trash (food wrappers, paper, packaging, some medical waste I presume, old experiment gear, etc), and dehydrated sewage, currently only leaves the space station via visiting vessels. It requires an astronaut's time to pack trash, disconnect and seal dehydrated sewage containers, and load them into a visiting spacecraft prior to departure.
Imagine having trash and sewage picked up only twice a month or once a month. That's about how often new vehicles visit the space station.
Some uncrewed vehicles (Russia's Roscosmos Progress vehicle, Japan's JAXA HTV, USA's Northrop Grumman Cygnus) are designed to burn up on reentry. SpaceX Dragon is designed to make it to the ground and thus would need to be unpacked after splashdown.
Nanoracks' Bishop airlock is supposed to offer trash disposal-to-orbit, but has not been used in orbit yet.
Nanoracks does commercial things on the ISS other than cubesat launches. IIRC the Doubletree thing was they sent up an oven and had an astronaut bake cookies using their recipe
Part of me is impressed by the economics of it (I had no idea such things were so affordable), and the rest of me is embarrassed by the almost flippant use of space tech...
Probably the cheapest way to launch things. However, SpaceX has no interest in dealing with everybody that wants to launch a cubsat so you have to go to an integrator.
> This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit.
Sometimes CubeSats will launch as ride-alongs on the rocket itself (it's more common on rockets not already going to the ISS) and others are designed to be launched from the ISS itself depending on how they're being paid for. In either case they'll wind up in the roughly 51 degree inclination of the ISS.
> Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
They can't really capture satellites because very few actually orbit at that level it's mostly the kind of short term cube sats that they launch out not larger satellites. Those live in higher orbits so getting to them to fix is not a small task. Another big hurdle is the orbital inclination changing that is extremely expensive to do, basically everything is placed into it's final orbital inclination at launch because of the fuel requirements to change it once you're in orbit. It's why the ISS is at such a high inclination to begin with, so that it's easier to get to from Baikonur where Russia launches it's vehicles from.
Relativity. At the moments before launch, the ISS and satellite are moving at the same speed. The launch gives extra velocity (positive delta-v??) which ever so slightly due to mass differences gives a tiny push against the ISS. So the satellite continues to pull away with its increase in velocity. See Newton's first law of motion.
However, after launch, the small satellite usually has no ability to course correct, and its orbit slowly decays to friction with the thin atmosphere. Meanwhile, ISS continues to course correct.
A minor nitpick but it's not relativity (as in Einstein's relativity,) it's just relative velocity.
The launch imparts velocity on the satellite but that velocity difference doesn't mean it flies in formation with the ISS a few hundred meters or a few kilometers apart. If they were launched in the direction the ISS is going (positive delta-v), that extra velocity means a higher orbit; if they're launched backwards (negative delta-v), it'll be a lower orbit. If it's launched sideways, it's either higher, lower, or same depending on delta-v but a different inclination (angle to the equator.) I couldn't quickly find where exactly the deployer is located but I'm guessing it's aft because it's the same module the ISS launches it's trash out of now (the Bishop airlock,) and I'm guessing they wouldn't launch anything in a fast decaying slightly higher orbit just to get hit by it a few cycles later.
The whole thing it's pretty cool, and it's quite new, it was installed only 3 months ago.
Are we assuming that the satellite is going to stay in the same orbit? The atmo drag will constantly be applying pressure on the cubesat so that its orbit will always being decaying.
I don't think atmospheric drag at 400km is large enough to decay the orbit by half the vertical height of the ISS in half a cycle, though. The ISS itself with it's comparatively huge surface area does orbital reboosts only about once a month or so.[1] Also, my original comment was quite simplistic - a launch with a negative delta-v with no other course correction would result in an elliptic orbit with the same apogee but a lower perigee (and the other way around with a positive delta-v.) Orbits are tricky that way.
I assume the two confounding factors are (a) the satellite should be moving relative to the ISS at the speed it was launched, so it is going to take a while to come back around and (b) when it does come back around, it should only be going as fast as you launched it, so it shouldn't be nearly as dangerous as the typical orbital collision.
[Huh, if the cubesats are launched at 90 mph from the ISS (the speed of a fastball), it only takes ~12 days for them to come back around; that's quite a bit faster than I would have guessed, but still probably long enough for orbital decay and ISS adjustments to put them out of line.]
My understanding is that a transfer orbit requires two thrusts and otherwise, with only one push, all you've done is make for an eccentric orbit that still intersects your original one.
Again, I'm ignorant of these things but it seems like depending on atmospheric drag to provide for the additional correction is risking a lot.
It is, but the intersection point doesn't track the station. When you push an object retrograde (i.e. throw it out the back), two important things happen. One, you make it spend more time closer to Earth than it was spending before, meaning extra drag, which lowers that orbit's closest point to your orbit, ever so slightly. Two, objects in lower orbits move faster, contributing to drag, but more importantly, meaning that once you do one full orbit, the object will be somewhere else. It may still roughly intersect your orbit, but you won't be there when it does. Combining these two factors, you can give your object enough of a push that the two orbits stop intersecting before there's any risk of collision.
> What I haven't figured out is how they get the sats far enough away from the ISS orbit with only one push.
What I don't understand here is how do they avoid the satellite hitting back the ISS? Once they are separated and non-propulsed, both orbits are elliptical with at least one point of intersection, and stay like that forever. If they have different period, it seems that the ISS and the cubesat might become arbitrarily closer in the future.
Great, so they're essentially littering. I hope the Space Force Police pull them over to issue a citation. At least, this will burn up in the atmo rather than in a water system, or do they turn themselves into microparticles ultimately landing in the oceans? They really are litter
And the Earth picks up about 40,000 tons of space dust per year.
We've got a lot of work to do before our space "littering" can even dream of matching that level... and that's just a coincidental level that nature happens to have, not some sort of threshold for "real harm", which I'd guess to be multiple orders of magnitude higher.
This really only works if your satellite is very small and you are okay with being in roughly the same orbit as the ISS.
It is certainly not the norm for satellite launches, but if your mission meets the parameters and there is available space on a cargo supply that's already going to the ISS, you can potentially get a cheaper ride by going that route.
As far as I know the ISS doesn't have any facilities for "bringing in" a larger satellite or repairing it. NASA is pretty protective of the ISS and objects approaching it have to follow very particular procedures and be certified for the process (Dragon, Cygnus, etc.).
Also most satellites aren't in an orbit similar to the ISS. Things usually either get launched equitorially (east), polar (north/south), or are are much higher altitude in geostationary orbit. The ISS has a peculiar orbital inclination to make it more accessible to both US and Russian launch sites.
They have to be 'roughly' in the same orbit as the ISS. You can go up or down. You would't really do any inclination changes (if you, say, wanted an equatorial orbit) as there's no way a microsat would have enough fuel. Better to launch in the correct inclination.
> Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
Moving the whole station doesn't really make sense. Even a vehicle would burn a lot of fuel, and would only really work, once again, in the same (or close to the same) inclination.
Inclination changes are so expensive that there was at least one case where an operator sent a satellite all the way to the Moon and back, because it cost less fuel that way.
> Inclination changes are so expensive that there was at least one case where an operator sent a satellite all the way to the Moon and back, because it cost less fuel that way.
To get a good rule-of-thumb for this in your brain, you can think of it in terms of vector mathematics.
Consider a circular orbit. Now consider two vectors: one in the direction of that orbit, one perpendicular to it. A naive inclination change from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, with no other change to the orbit's dynamics (i.e. same eccentricity, same periapsis / apoapsis), require the velocity to change from parallel to the first vector to parallel to the second, at the same magnitude. That's a total change of SQRT(2 * starting_velocity^2) ~= 1.4 * starting velocity. If we consider a velocity that is LEO (about 7.8 km/s), our total velocity change would have to be about 10.92 km/s.
Putting a satellite into LEO from Earth's surface only costs between 9 and 10 km/s from gravity loss, steering, and wind resistance. Earth is a deceptively expensive gravity well to be doing inclination change maneuvers in.
The politics around a decision like this are fascinating. I assume they've already paid in part or in full for the launch, and regardless, they did R&D on a satellite which is itself an asset that is now difficult to return to the owner!
You used "they" a couple times in that comment and it is important to question who "they" is given the political environment in Myanmar. Is the "they" that paid for the satellite and did the R&D the same "they" that who would be controlling the satellite? If not, would the new "they" use the capabilities of this satellite in a nefarious way?
In context of this satellite, they is the MAEU (Myanmar Aerospace Engineering University) and the reason the satellite is being held is because apparently JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) can't reach the rector of the MAEU to make sure what the satellite would be used for.
So, all in all, Japan is being careful and the situation in Myanmar is "undetermined". I think it is questionable where the "spying concern" is coming from, aside from being clickbait.
>Officials at JAXA could not be reached for comment. MAEU did not respond to calls seeking comment, nor did a spokesman for Myanmar’s junta.
It could be used for spying, because it's a satellite with cameras. If it has the capabilities to be used for spying is unclear, all the data would go through Japan anyway. Japan does not want to comment on it, persons responsible at MAEU are in prison or in hiding and the junta would probably lie anyway.
Maybe I am underestimating them, but I feel like the more likely scenario is a government and it's agencies in disarray. Would the new governing entity even know or care about that particular project right now?
“Spying” looks like editorial click bait. It isn’t even mentioned in the article. The concern I think is domestic use to commit genocide against their own people.
> “We won’t get involved in anything that has to do with the military. The satellite was not designed for that,” one of the officials, a manager of the project, told Reuters, asking not to be identified.
I dare you to find a quote by anyone familiar with the satellite citing military use.
He said it right there. If it has no possible military use, why did he even mention the military?
Nice bit of goal post rearrangement there, given an explicit direct quote in the article stating the satellite could have military applications. On what basis do you assert that Human Rights Watch are not capable of assessing the satellites capabilities and possible uses?
>He said it right there. If it has no possible military use, why did he even mention the military?
How do you get "the satellite could have military applications" from "The satellite was not designed for that"?
>On what basis do you assert that Human Rights Watch are not capable of assessing the satellites capabilities and possible uses?
You mean aside from "We won’t get involved in anything that has to do with the military. The satellite was not designed for that"? Why do you think the HRW has any capability to assess the possible applications of a satellite? Nothing on the HRW website either...
Yes, use by the military to continue committing genocide against their own people. “Spying” in geopolitical context usually means use against other countries.
Something similar happened with the US and Iran. The Shah paid for military fighter jets, but then the Islamist theocracy took over. So the US froze the money and obviously wasn't going to deliver the jets to a USSR supported regime. The question of property legitimacy after a revolution is a recurring one throughout history.
Concepts like legality have much less meaning between countries. It's not like there is a court where Myanmar can sue if it wants their satellite back. At this level, the ultimate recourse is declaring war and reclaiming it by force but we all know how that would turn out.
Diplomacy is a critical function of any government due to what you're saying, and IMO this could be a consequence of Myanmar neglecting that reality (for a myriad of valid and invalid reasons, I don't know enough about the current situation to speak with any intelligence about it).
Not all international disagreements are disagreements between sovereign nations themselves. It's possible that MAEU could sue JAXA or Hokkaido University in a Japanese court if they think they're violating Japanese law.
If that's not the case, or if the Diet passes a new law that protects their countrymen in this dispute, then yeah it becomes the type of conflict you describe.
The WTO has been effectively out of order these past years as the US has blocked the appointment of new judges to the appeals court.
It's supposed to have seven judges, a minimum of three judges are required to issue rulings, but since 2019 there are only two judges left [0]
So any ruling the WTO main body makes, like for example declaring US tariffs on China illegal [1], only needs to be appealed to be stuck in procedural limbo, which is exactly what ended up happening with the WTO ruling on US tariffs [2]
Also, the Japanese government and individual national universities, including Hokkaido University [1, in Japanese], have regulations on the export of technology that can be used for military purposes. I work at another national university in Japan, and there has been a lot of internal debate, with political overtones, about how strictly those regulations should be enforced and how to deal with technology that has both military and civilian applications. I can easily imagine the researchers at Hokkaido University deciding that the military coup in Myanmar meant that deploying the satellite would run the risk of violating the rules of either their own university or the Japanese government.
Mistral class helicopter carrier, payed by Russia, built in France, delivered to Egypt instead due to the War in Donbass. France had to compensate Russia.
Can anybody tell me the resolution of the cameras on this satellite? Would it be better than the resolution of the images available from Google Maps? How much resolution is needed "to monitor agriculture and fisheries"?
No idea, but it's not necessarily "regular" cameras. For monitoring agriculture, infrared imagery is often used due to the difference reflective properties of vegetation (and other stuff) at different wavelengths; having multiple type of pictures, at different wavelengths, is useful to get better estimates of what you're looking at than what you would achieve with just visible light.
Well, what's the point of holding on to one satellite if anyone can basically buy imagery from a dozen satellite companies right now?
Are any of those players restricting anyone from buying imagery of Myanmar? If no, then this is pretty much a pointless thought exercise for them to engage in?
As interesting as this situation is it also looks inconsequential. No one from burmese side has voiced anything (yet). Considering the political situation on the ground and how japan can't contact the burmese liaison it seems like this is just an (expensive) limbo situation.
I don't know, but I feel like a satellite worth only $15 million and released from the space station wouldn't do much, but I might be pleasantly surprised tech has advanced enough.
I don't get how on such a low orbit if would be useful to one country? I think it's called the MMSATS-1 (Lawkanat-1)
The concern is probably that satellite images could be used to identify and keep track of Rohingya and other ethnic minority settlements in jungle areas, and target them for attacks like the ones the military have been carrying out since 2017.
Diwata-1/Diwata-2 have a High Precision Telescope (HPT) which I see no mention of on the MMSATS-1, only a super multi-color imager (SMI). But I can't see the exact specs.
If you can find a photo of the underside of the MMSATS-1 you could see if it has a HTP by comparing it to this -
One of the express purposes of the satellite is to track agricultural activity, which by definition means it must be able to identify remote agricultural communities through e.g. forest clearance. That could be used to target ethnic minority settlements.
The rate of photos of the MMSATS-1 is low (if it has a HPT, I've seen no confirmation of this), and you can see from the photos you can't see a car. You can see the boats.
If Google maps and paper maps are good enough to track agriculture patters, why do they need a satellite at all? For a start Google maps images typically only update every 2 to 3 years. You’re making no sense.
If your not going to read the links nothing more I can do.
How is MMSATS-1 going to magically give you better than "Google maps images typically only update every 2 to 3 years" ?
What orbit do you think MMSATS-1 would be in?
You have yet to show it has a HPT. Can you link with the specs?
> to track agriculture patters
I've given you a link showing it can't.
You seem like you just don't want Burma to have satellites. That's fine, but just say it. It's just a shitty cube sat to give it's youth something to be proud of and to train it's current scientists. The end plan is to have many of them in the consortium to help the region. Obviously this one will fall out of orbit before then, it's just a step.
It's up to you but I suggest you go on a holiday to Thailand for a few weeks, it's easy for tourists, cheap and it's a culture change. Next holiday spend a few weeks in Myanmar. I don't think you have to know a culture personally to be a Hawk on them, but why not. If nothing else it makes you a better Hawk.
Not hundreds of floating around ... I only concern in the past how it affects by astro photo. But if it goes back to this low orbit floating how these ideas come around and how to choose one from others.
More important how it work across national boundary.
I am not a lawyer; but the saying is something like... "possession is nine tenths of the law". This is much easier right now since currently JAXA possesses the un-deployed satellite.
I checked the article to reach that conclusion too, I was actually hoping it was more like space piracy where they captured the satellite and took it onboard. that would have been really fascinating!
there are no juridictions outside (most) lands. these kind of issues are generally setteled by international treaties if possible, or else arbitration courts
It's a diplomatic situation. The countries will have to negotiate the use of the equipment. I can completely understand the Japanese University not wanting the equipment to be used to further a genocide.
We spent moeny to send a lawn dart to Mars because feet/meters were confused by some very smart people with lots and lots of oversight. Mistakes happen. Some are more expensive to learn and more embarassing than others. Malice is not required.
Yup, and do you think that the persecution has stopped?
The genocide which started in 2017 began with the military. That military has just overthrown their government (which itself denied the genocide).
The Myanmar military could pretty much do what it wanted in terms of military activities, but while Myanmar had an elected civilian government it was arguably reasonable to accept assurances that a civilian education institution was free of military interference. However now that this institution is controlled and run by a military government that is clearly not a reasonable assumption.
The name alone suggests militarization of space which is a horrible idea. The only thing that kept us alive through the 20th century was mutually assured destruction, and more importantly, the capability to detect ICBM launches and retaliate within the 30 minutes before your continent is glassed. Space launched nukes don't give you any warning, you get at most 30 seconds to detect the shock heating in the high atmosphere before it's game over. It's an actual slippery slope, the very first payload containing weapons in orbit is a direct path towards space launched nuclear weapons.
Space to ground weapons are not really militarily practical. At any given moment only a tiny fraction of your weapons would be over a given target ready to strike. You have to wait for the other satellite to happen to over-fly the target area, which would generally only occur every few days at most due to orbital precession and earths rotation.
It's not like you drop nukes from above when you're above the target, like from an airplane, orbits don't work that way. You could fire the nukes on many missiles planned so that they would re-enter the atmosphere all at the same time for a surprise attack.
Sure, but you could only do so for a pre-planned attack at least several days in advance. That's not a very situationally flexible option, and if manoeuvring of the barrage to prepare the attack is detected, you're in big trouble. Their subs will pepper you with nukes long before your attack strikes home, and quite possibly well before you've completed the orbital adjustments of all your warheads.
Another factor is that sub based missiles can launch from relatively close to their target and just skim out of the atmosphere, well below the orbits of even fairly short lifetime low orbiting satellites. That makes for quick trajectories. A satellite based weapon up there for extended periods would need to be in a relatively high altitude to avoid orbital decay. It turns out you don't actually get much advantage in terms of strike time even for a target that happens to be at an optimal position relative to your orbit.
Finally, what do you do when the weapons reach the end of their service life? With terrestrial weapons they can be refurbished, upgraded or the expensive nuclear material recovered for remanufacturing. I know space weapons are sexy and cool, and I love me some Goldeneye style James Bond super-weapons, but they're not actually all that useful.
It's one of the reasons the Star Wars missile defence project wasn't really viable as well. At any given time at least nine tenths of your defence satellites are over Australia, Africa, the Pacific, the Antarctic, or somewhere else peripheral rather than the Russia - USA theatre.
Pretty much everyone in the space industry is in agreement that Space Force is a good idea. We have been in agreement on this for decades, and it was a bipartisan project that started under Obama. Not our problem that Trump took the existing plan and lazily stamped his brand on it...
It would seem from the language of Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide, pp2) that the military (current group in power) bears chief responsibility--one thing I do know is that the military long existed as an independent power structure in the country. So it seems like they would only have driven the genocide its leaders had wanted to (given that this has been a deliberate, years-long operation). Perhaps someone with deeper knowledge could say more.
on the first page of your link: The Burmese government dismissed these as "exaggerations"
It doesn't look like the government cared too much about the well-being of the genocided population. This is a hallmark in most genocides in history. The government doesn't have to order a massacre, most of the times it's just doing nothing.
I'm not an expert on this but from what I've heard it sounds like the "government" (which, remember, had 1/4th of it's seats and cabinet-type positions apportioned to the military, by the military) might not have had a "good" option on how to respond to this. It appears they stayed silent on it for fear the military would just stage a coup if they spoke out. As it turns out the military did in fact stage a coup as soon as they saw their hold on the government weakening (right after the recent election and when the newly elected people were coming to be sworn in is when they executed the coup).
On one hand I want to say the "government" didn't care and should be held accountable for not speaking up about the genocide.
On the other hand I see how they might have been too scared to call it out for fear of a coup. Fears that seems to have been well founded...
>>On the other hand I see how they might have been too scared to call it out for fear of a coup. Fears that seems to have been well founded...
Not a good reason. Whenever I hear or read something about a group allowing, being silent in face of an event like that, I remember Srebrenica massacre [1]
I clearly remember how Aung San Suu Kyi defends Myanmar from accusations of genocide in UN [2]. She and her government are as much party to the genocide as those who pulled the triggers. I hope I live long enough to see the day they are brought to justice.
But when you have to choose between the genocide of one ethnic communities AND the genocide but by a non-accountable government, you may risk choosing the former.
Even when Myanmar had a democratically elected government the military still had huge political power because the constitution had a clause that let them retake power whenever they wanted. The legitimate leader was always afraid of this happening, so it's quite hard to separate the two governments.
The one that lost power in the coup. They were in office since 2016. The genocide started in 2016. This seems to be a complicated situation, just like it was in Syria, and anyone who tries to simplify it and show a single sided story is trying to sell you.
It was done by the military, without reference to or oversight by any civilian government of the time, which had no say in it. The military in Myanmar was autonomous.
It is complicated. Long decades Myanmar was a military dictatorship. A few years back the dictatorship allowed democratic elections under the condition that it will conserve key positions in the government and there was this brief period when the country was semi-democratic. The military part of the government initiated the genocide, but the democratic part was accused for not opposing in any visible way.
After the last elections, the military were supposed to loose some more of their positions and hence the coup.
> but the democratic part was accused for not opposing in any visible way.
I definitely found that strange at the time, especially since said democratic part had previously gotten a peace nobel prize, but considering she was imprisoned by the military before and after this whole semi-democratic experiment, is it well accepted now that she was mostly under the control of the military and had very little choice in any of the matter? Or do people still think she was mostly complicit for not speaking up, at the risk of compromising the little bit of democracy they had.
My understanding is she feared exactly what happened, a coup, if she spoke out. I'm not saying that is wrong or right but that's the position she was in and the choice she made with, now proven, fears of coup. Did she have a choice? Of course she had a choice but it would appear she saw it as "be morally correct" or "maintain democracy" and decided to go with the latter. I hate to say it but I'm not sure if I would have picked a different course of action given the same choices.
> I'm not saying that is wrong or right but that's the position she was in and the choice she made with, now proven, fears of a coup.
I am - it was wrong.
Her position went beyond making a hard choice, she defended the genocide and the generals. Describing the generals involved as ‘sweet’ and the victims as ‘terrorists’, she is part of the problem.
Yeah, I'm not well versed enough to talk about the morality of it either, but I would assume that if she had come out against it, the military would've kicked her out, so they would've ended up with both a genocide and a coup. So it seems that it may have been a lose-lose situation anyways.
and from my understanding, the military's unilateral action is also in line with their constitution, at least according to the military.
so where does that leave us to form an opinion and activism about it? just because we have a democracy-boner doesn't mean we can ignore a country's constitution, even if it is flawed, does it?
and if our democracy fervor is really so strong for us to actually do something about it, then its hypocritical because we don't do anything meaningful about it in country's that are more relevant, and it makes us picking on the little country.
It's entirely possible for there to be no such authority in place, without requiring "external intervention". In that case the people who live there might create such an authority, or they might not.
Eventually we might realize how all humans are harmed by subjugation to authority.
"So is there a court that can take the arguments from the scholar on behalf of the people, and the arguments from the military, and make a ruling?"
NO.
They wouldn't be in the current situation if they had strong functioning independent institutions.
FVEY. The Five Eyes. Five English-speaking countries that share military strength and intelligence. Somehow the world simply tolerates all the blatant espionage they perpetrate with zero diplomatic repercussions. The USA alone probably has more espionage satellites in space than every other nation combined.
> Somehow the world simply tolerates all the blatant espionage they perpetrate with zero diplomatic repercussions
Because pretty much every other country with a security service is either pursuing similar operations or wants to be. Sure when something becomes public a fuss gets made, but oddly enough no concrete repercussions ever follow.
Because other European countries know they're screwed without the US's backing. In return, those countries don't have to spend nearly as much on defense as they would otherwise. You can see why this would be politically advantageous for the Europeans.
Outside of that, who could do anything diplomatically to the US that wouldn't just be laughed off?
You do realize the EU has a mutual protection clause similar to Nato. Russia can't exactly invade. It's economy is smaller than Italy's. I don't think the EU depends as much on US defence as some Americans would have one believe.
After the Ukrainian state was taken over by fascists in 2014 and started threatening ethnic Russians and Jews in the Donbass, a local referendum was held on whether to ask for help from the Russian Federation. After it was won, the help was provided.
Like most history, it's a bit more complicated than it first appears.
It wasn't taken over by fascists and didn't start "threatening ethnic Russians and jews in Donbass" get that imperialist propaganda bs out of here.
It let some fascist boneheads put themselves forwards as canonfodder when it was invaded which Russia loves to focus on but I can hardly blame them for that.
USA learned it's lesson after being isolationist leading up to mass genocide and world wars. A league of nations didn't work, so things evolved into the USA being the guard dog for the world.
Why is any 1st world government supposed to help other governments spying? If Myanmar want a spy satellite up there, they should do it themselves. Or ask the Chinese. Can't imagine they wouldn't be interested in a launch platform closer to the equator...
You can spy too any time you want, right after you develop a launch platform. Until then, you develop anything you want to deploy to space, but if the launch agency you've contract with changes their mind, well, you've got a nice shiny museum exhibit.
Nobody is forbidding Myanmar to launch their own satellite. After all, the Chinese and the North Koreans pretty much do whatever they want up there as well. But if you cooperate with others to put something up there, it would be very unusual if you wouldn't have to compromise. This includes limits on what purposes the equipment can be used for.
Actually, according to TA, it seems Myanmar's government hasn't quite decided what to do with the thing. It's probably quite low right now on their list of priorities. And the Japanese still have to consider whether to toss it out or not. After all, the thing is up there already (sunk cost fallacy and all that). It seems possible they can work something out.
Why are you discussing the military of Myanmar if you don't at some level agree (with xxpor below) that might solves conflicts even if it doesn't establish right.
If you're so egalitarian as to ask the question, why not go all the way and ask why individual Myanmarese are't negotiating with the USA directly? You inherently privilege the Myanmar military while calling into question the legitimacy of the western democratic governments.
Since we're dealing with geopolitics, genocide, conflict, etc. - what does right have to do with anything? Other than being an entirely hopeless ideal that is discarded immediately in conflict between nations or peoples.
Might dictating outcomes has always been a fact of life. Why would anyone attempt to deny that aspect of living in reality? What good does it do to pretend reality isn't what it is?
Might determining outcomes between nations will never stop being true. Everything else - the UN for example - is merely a very small (often laughable) influence, and at best reduces the brunt of the might factor.
Pick a major country at any point in history. Might is huge part of their equation and there are no exceptions.
The US and China can freely ignore the world, freely ignore the UN, freely ignore all rules, international laws, anything they want to. That's because there is nobody that can do anything about it. That fact of how things actually work merely lessens as you scale downward with nations (as the nation in question gets weaker), it never goes away. Weak countries can pick on weak opponents, see: Armenia vs Azerbaijan. Might always ultimately determines the world, including in defeating Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in WW2. The strongest nations even have the most influence at the UN, so even soft politics is always backed by might.
Um yeah, I've got a gun and I'm not shooting you, but you - who have expressed displeasure with me - cannot get a gun because I believe you will shoot me.
Harm to you: Not having a gun. Harm to me: death.
Smart money is on maintaining a gap.
How do you feel we should update '1st' world? Change '2nd' to refer to allies and vassals of China instead of Russia? Add '4th world' to indicate some other relation other than allies/enemies/unrelated?
It looks like it is more about causing pain to Myanmar than actual spying concerns.
Xiaomi, the Chinese consumer electronics company, which definitely does only consumer products, is restricted from buying microchips. The excuse was an award that was granted by the CCP to the chairman of Xiaomi, a type of award that is given away to 100 people EVERY year.
The US government has designated Xiaomi as affiliated with the Chinese military. I know full well that the situation is complicated and there are multiple things going on.
However it’s got to be a hair splitting exercise in a totalitarian state, as keeping onside with your overlords requires a degree of cooperation.
Xiaomi is very competitive in the consumer electronics and in mobile phones. They are top in sales for mobile phones in many countries. There is an economic war with China that Trump started, and Biden continues.
The ban on Xiaomi is more of an attack as part of the economic war. The supposedly military ties due to a silly award were definitely shoehorned into this.
> The ban on Xiaomi is more of an attack as part of the economic war. The supposedly military ties due to a silly award were definitely shoehorned into this.
Xiaomi's ties to the military are not _only_ expressed in some silly award.
Several of their, and their subsidiaries, have found to have servers operating out of IP ranges generally assigned to China's APT teams and so on. (Several times. Like this one: [0]).
It's worth noting that the reason given for adding them to the list of companies is to prevent the Military/Civilian fusion that is taken as normal when doing business with China. It does not stop them operating in the US - only investment.
Cause Myanmar Pain?--That is not a reasonable take imo. It is a joint project with Japanese Universities involved. The Myanmar coup is very real, and it is prudent to review these things before making decisions anyway. After your unreasonable take, you segue to an unrelated China point; it feels shoehorned in.
Every American consumer buys multiple products manufactured in China every week of her life. If this is the standard, we'll all be suspect. Perhaps that's the point...
There is a substantial difference between buying a product from a company and running one in terms of the relationships the individuals have with government involvement and the impact on directing the company to support said governments agenda.
American tastes aren't totally different from Chinese tastes, but neither are they precisely the same. Very few products could be created in one place and then profitably sold on the other side of the globe without some input from local marketers. If the end consumer is to be spared a McCarthyist show trial, what about the distributor? What about the importer?
Besides, this is silly. Firms operating in China obey Chinese laws for the same reasons that firms operating in USA obey USA laws. If they didn't operate in accordance with local custom, they would not continue to operate. Presumably many manufacturers in China (or USA) could have had a "Are we the baddies?" moment, but if so they are now necessarily no longer manufacturers in China (or USA).
Your fear and distrust of the Chinese government is perfectly rational. Even more rational would be to fear and distrust USA government just as much.
"Resorting to whataboutism"? You replied to me, bub. That TPTB in USA and China are eerily similar in their goals and methods is the point of this thread. You may not be tall enough for this ride.
That seems... High? Does every, or even most people in the US buy non-grocery items every week? AFAIK most food is domestic, and I imagine most if not all the packaging for that is domestic as well.
Sure if you buy semi-durable items: clothes, shoes, electronics, etc.
How do you put the satellite onto its intended orbit, like are only satellites intended with a polar orbit capable of this approach?
Do you need booster rockets to get in the right orbit?
Can we go the other way and use the ISS as like an orbital garage to capture and fix satellites?
This is the first I've heard if the ISS holding onto satellites, I thought satellites are deployed by the launch rocket and just put into orbit.