Sealand and Experimental Rocketry

[Ken Brown]

Jim Choate wrote 2 postings:

[one of them]

> Sealand is an independent principality with no treaties related to
> rocketry with any of them. What are they going to do, attack an
> independent nation because a hobbyist fired off an amateur rocket?

Yes, if they wanted to. For values of "attack" that start with the local
river police boat and go up to maybe a fishery protection vessel or the
UK equivalent of your US coastguard cutters, perhaps a  helicopter or
two. I'm afraid that there isn't much evidence that the British
government is reluctant to attack independent nations when they feel it
in their interests to do so, nor that they consider Sealand to be in
independent nation.

I took the opportunity of looking over some of Ryan's interviews from
last year (it's all gone quiet recently) and he's pretty clear that they
are more or less relying on UK policing & protection and would be likely
to co-operate if anything happens. To be honest I find myself wondering
if the whole Sealand thing is a bit of a publicity stunt & HavenCo's
real servers will be somewhere else - maybe not very far away -
facilities in England & the Netherlands with perhaps some backup on the
tower would be secure enough - these are also ideas that were discussed
last year. If you are prepared to trash your computers when the local
authorities move in (which was their stated intention) then you don't
need a defensible fortress, still less an independent nation, just
somewhere with a good view all round that is hard to sneak up on. 
(Anyone fancy co-location in a disused grain silo in Nebraska?)
 
> Yep, that's how WWIII will start, you bet.

No, not WW3, more likely just a "diplomatic incident". When the
Norwegians forgot to tell the Russians about a weather rocket a few
years ago it didn't start WW3. In fact when the Russian EWS failed a few
years before that & for a few minutes they thought there was a serious
attack it didn't start WW3 - it is now pretty clear that at least a
significant proportion of the command if the Russian missile forces
never actually intended to obey orders. There seem to be few Russian
equivalents of Dr. Strangelove, or even of Teller. (But then there are
few US equivalents of Stalin or Beria, so it mostly doesn't go their way
- just being sane didn't stop them being evil - whoops, I mustn't start
that thread again).

> Hell, by the time the radar  op's figure out what's going on you're so high you're off their scopes.

Quite a lot of this stuff is in orbit these days...

However small a rocket is, if it is going up hard enough to reach LEO it
is going to worry any meaningful EWS. And telling how fast something is
going is a lot easier from a few hundred miles away than telling how
large it is, especially if you have 2 minutes to decide whether to phone
the President. 

So when you are going to launch a small, harmless, rocket you tell any
nearby governments. And when you are going to launch a small, harmless,
rocket into LEO - so that it can potentially come down anywhere - you
tell everybody who might have an interest. That's what those treaties
are mostly about. Not mainly an evil statist plot to stop nice
free-market capitalists from getting into space, more the equivalent of
the rules of the road. If I turned up in your town determined to
exercise my God-given right to drive on the left like a true Brit, I
doubt if you would complain when the police tried to stop me.

[...another one...]

> The Gulf is deeper than the North Sea and I'd bet the rigs we got out here
> are just as big.

The North Sea ones are (mostly) built tougher, mainly because the
weather is worse. We don't get hurricanes but we get continuous bad
weather. So while a Gulf platform may have decent weather be OK for 360
days & then shut down and maybe evacuate for a storm warning, a North
Sea platform might carry on working through weeks of 50 mph winds,
drizzle, and 30-foot waves. 
 
> No, you need a boat. Sealand is more than sufficient for putting a Amateur
> rocket up. Hell, I could fire one from my back yard as far as that goes.
> Though I think the launch tower might give somebody a clue.

Yes, but you'd probably tell your neighbours first, and if you didn't
you wouldn't be surprised to get a visit from men in uniform a few
minutes later - if only the fire brigade, after next door gave them a
call.

> While the rest of you folks sit around telling yourself the same old
> matra, "It can't be done. It can't be done. It can't be done." We're going
> to do it.

It can be done. I think it will be done. But why not do it from
somewhere warm and tropical and equatorial? There a places in Africa &
S. America you could launch from and no-one would notice. Tell the
locals it is a firework show. Put on a real firework show to keep them
happy (or celebrate) and make the launch the climax.

You honestly wouldn't like the weather in the North Sea.

Ken