On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, An Metet wrote:

[Sorry about the name. "Pirate" satellites don't sound 'dangerous' enough to need shooting down.]

I liked it :)

Suppose can-sats WERE launched illegally, and then started broadcasting <time synchronisation signals/OTP/other cypherpunk related> signals, along with a spoken commentary by Radio Free North America (so Joe Sixpack has an excuse when those nice detector van gentlemen knock on his door and ask why he's listening to 128.0 FM)

Ok, we get the technology down to say $10k per bird. That would at least be within the budget of most 'hobbyist' to come up with in a year. Technology wise, I'm real keen on the Hydrogen Peroxide Catalyst engines, especially Platinum catalyst. Platinum is problematic, rare & expensive. Say 1 out of 1,000 potential hobbyist can afford it. Hydrogen Peroxide can at least theoretically be done in a garage lab, so we'll leave this 1-1 for now. Miniaturize everything, since we've got chemical heat we can use Peltier's to make power. Venting expanded gas is going to be problematic unless we're symmetric. We could also use this same system for small orbital corrections. Whole thing will fit in 6in. OD pipe.

What could a the US Government do about the satellite, other than make an example out of the miscreants who launched it?

Simply outlaw any amateur rocketry, crack down on (like guns but w/o 2nd Amendment protection) non-commercial industrial sales of machine tools, etc.

Would they be able to physically shoot at it, jam its signal or burn out its electronics from the ground or aircraft altitude?

All of the above, as well as things like Brilliant Pebbles or laser/maser/micro-wave assaults. The USAF has had at least one successful launch from a high altitude interceptor via missile, it was back in the early/mid 80's (?: F-15).

Could someone put up enough disposable 'bandit-sats' (expecting to make less orbits than Sputnik) over time to make it uneconomical to keep shooting them out of the sky?

Brilliant Pebbles. All the 'Brilliant' class weapons are space based (sort of like 'Prarie' has to do with submarine ASW technology - eg Prarie Masker, a bubble diffuser.) There's also one that is like a giant shotgun, I don't remember it's designator :(

How easy would it be for the launch crew to stay ahead of ground based forces?

Who has the technology lead? Is the 'movement' organized or a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off? I'd think the chickens would be very hard to stop. The communications could be used to identify the others. The reality is that an army of 10,000 well armed individuals acting upon a common belief and with common goals, but acting completely independently and unknown to each other, would be next to impossible to stop. Even if the other army were 10 or more the size.

I'm guessing they could mount rockets one to two months ahead of launch date and abandon the site, assuming the rockets don't need constant attention.

Yes, this sort of requirement pretty much limits it to either solids or hybrids, and the occassional exotic (ie H2O2/Pt). Note that storage of H2O2 reliably for more than a few weeks is probably prohibitive.

Would directional transmissions from ground to satellite be traceable (and would this depend on whether there are other birds in the part of the sky I want to send to)?

It depends on the 'splatter' of the entenna you were transmitting with. If it has a lot of side lobes then probably. It would help to make it digital, spread sprectrum, encrypted, and burst. You'll need lots of power because the Can-Sat antenna can't be that big (it could be a long wire of course).

Would retrieval of a returned film capsule be possible before Air Force helicopters descended on the landing site?

How fast will it come down? What sort of warning window for the boys in blue? How far are they from the recovery site? Is this a new event or something they've seen before? ____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, An Metet wrote:

Suppose can-sats WERE launched illegally, and then started broadcasting <time synchronisation signals/OTP/other cypherpunk related> signals, along with a spoken commentary by Radio Free North America (so Joe Sixpack has an excuse when those nice detector van gentlemen knock on his door and ask why he's listening to 128.0 FM)

Would they be able to physically shoot at it, jam its signal or burn out its electronics from the ground or aircraft altitude?

Assuming the can-sat were in low earth orbit, yes, they could easily shoot it down. The air force has a few extreme high-altitude craft that can launch long-range missiles. These can actually reach the same altitude or nearly, as low-earth-orbit satellites. (They cannot reach low earth orbit; that would require them to be at that altitude but going much much faster.) They can't launch a missile fast enough to get low earth orbit, either -- but in the final analysis, it doesn't really matter whether the satellite hits the missile or the missile hits the satellite.

Could someone put up enough disposable 'bandit-sats' (expecting to make less orbits than Sputnik) over time to make it uneconomical to keep shooting them out of the sky?

if you're getting one bandit-sat per launch, then the answer is plainly no. Because the missiles or planes don't have to reach orbital velocity at all, they are much cheaper to shoot down than to put up. However, if you get a thousand bandit-sats per launch, and they scatter all over the sky once they're up there, it becomes much more viable. It could take weeks or months to shoot them all down, and since they wouldn't be clumped together you'd have to fly a separate mission for every one of them. In that scenario they are cheaper to launch than to shoot down. But still, the launch costs would be a substantial fraction of the shootdown costs, and unless you can spend a substantial fraction of what the US government would be willing to spend on it, I think that's cold comfort at best. If you go for higher orbits, we might get to see some of the stuff the "star wars" research paid for... At the very least, I'm betting on a satellite with a laser which, given a few minutes at a hundred-kilometer range, could probably burn through a can-sat. Probably something faster than that. Possibly a bunch of can-sats with "intercept and collide" or "get close and explode" missions.

Would directional transmissions from ground to satellite be traceable (and would this depend on whether there are other birds in the part of the sky I want to send to)?

depends on how tightly focused. If you're using radio, you cannot focus that tightly, and yes your signal to the satellite can be traced. If you're using laser, it would require them to have a satellite with some appropriate directional sensor within a few degrees of the satellite. Hmm, as I think about it, unless your laser doesn't illuminate dust in the atmosphere, it might not require that much to detect it after all.

Would retrieval of a returned film capsule be possible before Air Force helicopters descended on the landing site?

Interesting question. If the film capsule is tiny, nonmetallic, and contains no radio equipment, it might be possible for it not to show up on radar, in which case it's much less detectable than radio etc. Bear