Yup. Something that is part of the contingency planning. Especially for situations like “Oh no, we need to abort launching our hydrogen powered stack at the last second and will have to evacuate the crew. Do we have leaks? Is something burning?”
IIRC, one of the Shuttle launches came close to having to make that call. Not that the Shuttle ever carried any brooms. Just a huge flyswatter, and only once.
They did have a leak in a hydrogen pipeline leading to one of the launch pads in the early 1980, but it blew up when absolutely nobody happened to be anywhere near it.
Not that an oxygen leak is that much fun. Everything burns with pure oxygen. But at least you usually can see the flames.
Along with the brooms, issue those “If you see me running, try to keep up!” t-shirts.
Interesting, but I simply must point out a couple of things:
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Kosmos 2576 may well have a nuclear payload. Not a bomb, but a reactor. Some if the weapons sytems the author mentions would need a sizable power source. Depending on which satellites a killer satellite goes after, i.e. where exactly (orbit, inclination, etc.) the target is, the weapon can be inside Earth’s shadow, so solar power might not be feasable. Like attacking optical recon sats in low orbits. GPS sats not so much, those orbit far higher up.
The USSR has flown ~30 reactors in space, partly to power low orbiting recon sats. Since that was quite a while ago, flight testing a new reactor design would make sense. From a technical standpoint. -
Starfish Prime fried (as in damaged and cutting down their lifetime substantially) several satellites that were launched after its detonation.
Which brings me to -
Argus, Starfish etc. looked into several things. Amongst them were the idea to blind early warning radars and to create a radiation field strong enough to countermand incoming missiles or warheads either by frying their guidance systems or damaging the actual vehicles.
The idea was to use a nuclear explosion to inject highly energetic charged particles at specific points along Earth’s magnetic field lines to create effects thousands of kilometres away.
That part works. It basically creates some sort of artificiak van Allen belt with lots of charged particles happily bouncing back and forth along the field lines for weeks or even months.
This was not strong enough to melt warheads, but strong enough to seriously impair Telstar 1.
The point here is that depending on what the goal is it may not matter whether a nuke is detonated over enemy territory or not.
The US and the USSR stopped their high altitude test at the height of the cold war - in fact, a lot if this took place almost during the Cuban missile crisis - because they thought to keep on doing this was a bad idea. At a time where “anything goes, no matter how bonkers” was rather the norm than the exeption in eyerthing to do with nuclear power.
(Okay, they were also increasingly worried about possible implications for their crewed space flights. )
They were sane enough not to cross certain lines then, they should be sane enough not to do it now.
Kruschev vs Putin, I sure wouldn’t put money on that.
I see your Kruschev vs Putin, and raise you one Kennedy vs Trump.
NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures the Sombrero Galaxy in Breathtaking Detail
In the article there’s an image comparing Webb vs Hubble. So cool!
which means there’s just no knowing quite how far the famed gold disc strapped to each probe will make it into the cosmos.
Momentum should keep Voyager 1 & 2 going for millennia.
At least until one of them runs into that alien probe.