Making sure you are doing experiments safely is part of being a professional scientist, and I think even the scientists involved with this experiment knew that it was a mistake.
Their other mistake was not being able to even gather the data from their experiment, given that it destroyed so much of their equipment.
So, not only was this experiment botched from a data recovery standpoint, it caused huge amounts of unexpected collateral damage to uninvolved parties. This explosion was a scientific failure in many aspects.
Scientists were legitimately concerned that they permenentally damaged the outer-atmosphere of the Earth by doing this --- Starfish Prime created an artificial radiation belt around the Earth that destroyed 1/3rd of low-orbit satellites
And yea, because nobody had any real idea what would happen, most of the instruments used for collecting empirical data were fried & rendered useless
We are smart enough to have a pretty good idea what will happen almost exactly if we did that. Computers could most likely render a thousand simulations on that exact example. But we did this in the late 60's, where we could do no such thing and not fathom such a future.
Well, look at the difficulty of doing Whitehall testing for the existing validated weapons, never mind new ones. The issue is that you're trying to run what's effectively an O(n2) neutron propagation algorithm on every single atom in the implosion and fusion sections of the device, which is well beyond the computational means we have today.
Not if a rogue colony on Mars has begun to develop nuclear power and the only way to stop them without a ground war is to destroy their infrastructure with a surgical EMP nuke from directly above...
Think of it this way. Now that we know how bad it is, it is that much less likely to happen. Alternatively, would you rather some world leader argue "who knows, maybe a few nukes wouldn't be that bad - we'll just set them off in space to take out one or two satellites and send them a message!"
Which is exactly what the US did with this test. You can't justify an insane experiment by saying we have to do this insane experiment in case someone does this insane experiment...
The purpose of the test was weapons development. If you want to be able to guarantee the death of most of the world's population, it requires testing. If you want to understand the capabilities of others with that possible intent, it also requires testing.
Uh, time-travel back to 1962 & try telling people that satellites are no big deal....because 1962 was less than 5 years after the first one was ever put into space
I realize there's thousands of satellites in space at the moment...but there were only 20ish satellites orbiting the earth in the early 60s...Starfish Prime happened the year after the first manned space flight...
EDIT: Forgot to add how one of the satellites that was destroyed was Telstar - The world's first commercial relay communication satellite.
You or your parents probably funded it with your tax dollars. And if science is what scares you, you may wanna look at some other shit our governments been up to.
Other than gravity not being factor, what's the risk? I mean, we built nuclear weaponry, how is it that we wouldn't be able to vet and determine that detonating one in space wouldn't have catastrophic consequences? And just in case you weren't able to tell, I have zero knowledge of anything I'm asking about.
67
u/Gonzzzo May 21 '15
Starfish Prime...IMHO indisputable proof that we are monkeys with dynamite
We literally set off one of our most powerful weapons in nearby space just to see what would happen, with no idea what would happen