China wants to clean up orbital debris by blasting them with giant ...

Is China's space laser for real?

Editor: Philip Ragner | Tactical Investor

We cover multiple arrays of topics for one simple reason. The world is interconnected, and it is not only financial factors that drive the markets. Geopolitics is another major driving force behind the markets. Crowd Psychology dictates that if you focus on the tree, you will forget that the tree is part of a forest and in doing so you will miss the bigger picture. For example, George Soros is behind the surge in fake stories, the massive Anti-Trump riots and the funding of plethora of revolutions that seek to change the existing regime. Having the ability to cross analyse multiple factors with an open mind provides you with a much clearer picture of what to expect from the financial markets. On that note, we think you might find the following story of interest:

No one can claim to have mastered the markets fully and anyone that does lay claim to such a title should be avoided like the plague. For example, after QE all the rules changed and many time-tested indicators simply ceased to work because the operating environment had changed forever. The markets were suddenly hit with a force that they had never been hit with before. A fed that was determined to destroy any shred of free market forces left in the market. This surprised everyone, and it even caught us off guard initially. Many so-called experts refuse to accept that they made a mistake or could be wrong. Bull Markets Vs Bear Markets & Arrogance

Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer
Posted with permission from Popular Science
It's not a Death Star super laser. It's a space broom.
It's not this.
China's space broom isn't the Death Star super laser. It's an orbiting satellite with a laser only powerful enough to heat up pieces of space junk, so that they change course burn up in the atmosphere.

Laser-armed satellites, naturally, generate a lot of attention, and so the proposal of Quan Wen and his co-authors has made its way into several splashy headlines. But it's more than hype. The concept addresses a real (and growing) problem: there's something like 17,852 artificial objects orbiting earth (PDF), and an estimated 300,000-plus pieces of space debris larger than a marble. At the fast orbital velocities up in space, even large craft like the International Space Station have to maneuver out of the way of small objects to avoid catastrophic damage.

Quan's research looks at the efficacy of a hypothetical laser operating near the infrared spectrum. It would blast away targeted space debris for a couple minutes, at a rate of twenty bursts of laserfire a second. That amount of energy would be sufficient to vaporize part of the object's mass. Contrary to public imagination, space laser brooms like the one proposed don't actually vaporize space debris, but rather "burn off" a chunk. This would create sufficient kinetic force from the chemical combustion to change the object's orbit. With that change in direction, the debris will quickly reenter the atmosphere and burn up. Because of atmospheric distortion, it's much more effective to zap space debris with a satellite than, say, a ground-based laser.

Of course, for now it's all theory. The laser broom would need to be actually mounted on a satellite and lofted into orbit to test its true efficacy. And even then, it'd still face some legal grey areas (technically speaking, space debris are still the property of owners of the satellites they originated from, which is very, very difficult to track) as well as major suspicion about the idea of implementing a weapon-like technology up in space.

Like many others, China's space program has both civilian and military applications. (The AoLong 1 satellite, for example, has a robotic arm for mechanically de-orbiting space debris that has has potential as an anti-satellite sabotage technology.) And so there's an obvious question: can the space laser broom be an anti-satellite weapon? It's certainly possible, though a cost-effective laser broom would need to be small—just big enough to take care of small debris. To quickly deal serious damage to enemy spacecraft, one would need a much larger space laser weapon; perhaps an orbital battlemoon?

Peter Warren Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He has been named by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues. He was also dubbed an official "Mad Scientist" for the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Jeffrey is a national security professional in the greater D.C. area.

China wants to clean up orbital debris by blasting them with giant lasers

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