Downsides? A new space race by the space-faring powers to do same. Death of existing space treaties (although they are focussed on the deployment of nukes in space), with all of the ramifications of that. The passage of orbitting weapons systems over certain countries is bound to provoke some sort of response. 

Questions. Is it technologically feasible to "recall" or abort a weapon during re-entry? How easy would it be to defend against? 

Non-nuclear, I assume?   

Yes, you can recall. Especially if the RV is some kind of guided hypersonic cruise vehicle. The US would be in the best position to defend itself. For others, very limited options if any.

 

-DA

By recall I mean deorbit into the sea and you lose the weapon.

 

-DA

Down side is orbital decay. Those weapons will come down EVENTUALLY and function EXACTLY as we designed on somebody.

Messy.

Herald

Can't we compensate for that by purposely deorbiting them prior to their departure from controlled flight? We do that with satellites today. Or even put them into a parking orbit for service and recovery? Though that later suggestion would cost more than simply disgarding them IMHO and using a quick launch system to reconstitute expired satellites as needed. Although some quick math suggest that an orbit altitude practical for a quick responsive orbital weapon would decay rather quickly. The conventionally armed SLBM or ICBM would probably do this job better except for the huge political cost and risk associated with BM launches which is what I was hoping to avoid. No treaty prohibits convetional weapons in space.

 

Thinking about this a bit, most nations would never even know they were under attack until...

 

-DA

Theres also the bit where it still costs too much to put even a few hundred kilos up into orbit let alone say constellations of killsats and such into orbit. Good rule of thumb I've found is the kinetic energy equivalent depending on its orbit, wiki has a pretty decent breakdown of this Specific Orbital Energy.

 

At sub-orbital we can see that we're not very effectively converting our mass to energy and we'd probably be better off chucking a standard bomb at someone (unless you impart a LOT of velocity to said object on its down path). LEO gives us a lot more potential energy to work with. roughly 30 odd MJ per kilo, or roughly 6-7 times the equivalant of an objects mass if it were TNT. For example a 250kg vehicle in this case would have rough explosive power of about 1200 to 1500 kg of TNT. Mind you none of this counts momentum or anything else being imparted to the target.

 

And of course the downside is the cost to get it up there in the first place, 250kg to LEO assuming we use something like the Russian Dnepr rocket costs approximately $2200/kg (its significantly higher for US launch systems but we'll ignore that for now), that means for the 250kg package you have just spent $550,000 just to get it up there. Now multiply that package by say 1000, thats $550 million bucks just for LAUNCH. Nothing else. Double or triple those cost numbers if you want US systems to launch the packages. Maintenance costs alone would rapidly cost the equivalent of buying DD(X) every year at least. It would be a hard sell even in the best of times under those kinda conditions.