> To contaminate NEO, you have to be IN NEO,

Only at NEO altitude. Getting there is a much much simpler rocketry task
than getting into orbit.

> which is "hard."  The
> simplification was to kill something in NEO with a merely sub-orbital
> ballistic carrier, which only moves the "hardness" from "achieving NEO"
> to "guidance",

the word "only" there is potentially misleading. The two hardnesses are
quite different. Neither is easy but there are people who have got extremely
competent at the latter who would have trouble with the former. (Mattra,
Bofors, Hagglund?, Saab, ....). Guidance is not a trivial task but is much
more amenable to intelligent solution than getting to even LEO which takes
considerable brute force. The hard part about LEO is the very considerable
speed required. Once you can achieve LEO ALTITUDE you can achieve a degree
of "loiter" and positioning with relatively minimal effort. I know of at
least one nominally amateur group (no names please) who could do justice to
this task. Presumably many governments have the ability to fund an
equivalent degree of development.

> since your payload is no longer going to stay in the NEO
> satellite's path for very long...

IF you can intersect the orbital plane then you can make life very very
uncomfortable in that plane for a considerable peiod by dropping the
equivalent of "submunitions" - in this case small dense particles will work
very nicely.

An essentially stationary 1 gram mass intersecting a satellite in LEO will
have the same energy input as an everyday encounter with eg a largish
bowling ball doing 360 kph or a 1 kg mass at 900 kph. This is liable to
produce "interesting" results -  especially as a 1 gram mass (probably made
of something like uranium for density) will have a very point impact.

If the anti-satellite device has a 50 kg payload it can deliver around
50,000 1 gram masses. Something like a shotgun with a controlled expansion
shape which is fired horizontally along the orbit as the rising craft hangs
for as long as possible at target apogee. Fan shape is narrow across orbital
plane and tall to allow for timing. Target spaciing is say 0.5 metre between
pellets at impact time. About 200 m^2 of essentially impenetrable pellets to
wade through. Still not a trivial task but it simplifies the "hitting a
bullet with a bullet" analogy (which, incidentally, is an ability which is
still called into question in currently proposed ABM systems. In the LEO
case there is the advantage of a very well defined and captive target.)


        Russell McMahon

--
http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us!
email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body