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The space armament treaty says: no nuclear, biological or laser weapons in space. but kinetics...
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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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That’s their point, how do you get such a heavy thing to orbital speed without spending all that energy? You can’t unless you build it from materials harvested in space.
Oh, I apologise, I suffered some curse of knowledge there, the answer is time.
A blast is a release of energy over a short time, the whole point of building weapons is to store and handle energy in safe amounts over time.
Global electric energy consumption is about 200 PJ a day, approximately the same as the Tsar Bomba, but there's no risk for a huge explosion neither when you incinerate trash or turn off the AC.
Because time.
Although we could explode a nuke and propel things ballistically, it turns out it's a lot easier to use rockets. A rocket, although carrying frightening amounts of fuel and exploding spectacularly when it fires wrong, has several safeguards to not expend all that fuel at once. And also gives the opportunity to correct course along the way.
Now imagine that the same amount of energy has been expended many many many times over the course of the space era, and almost any mass in orbit has serious potential for damage.
For example, the MIR was 130 tons, orbiting at about 7,8 km/s, for a kinetic energy of 4 TJ, and another 235 GJ of potential energy. Totalling about a tenth of Little Boy that levelled Hiroshima.
Edit: Specifying and correcting the global energy consumption.
Still you need that much energy. And it all needs to be on that rocket. So if anything goes wrong with that rocket, it will burn and release the energy of a nuclear explosion. It will be less devastating than a nuke, because it is burning fuel as opposed to a huge shockwave and temperature, but still it would insanely dangerous.
And i've yet to come across a space program that didn't include catastrophic failure rocket launches.
Isn’t this system a rather normal payload? We had really large rockets with the Apollo program.