What if USSR had successful get the Polyus spacecaft into orbit Cold War

I don't think this would make much difference in the short run. It's a testbed, not a weapon, and Gorbachev forbade them from testing its most important features anyway. By the time operational weapons platforms could be deployed, the USSR is already history. The biggest short-term difference it might make is if the US government figures out what it's for and publicizes it as a way to get more money for SDI and other space weapons.
 
Don't forget that one of the Almaz station did test fire an aircraft machine gun in orbit. Short of deploying an operational system the implications of space weapons testing in and of itself aren't very big.

If we get into a TL where Polyus is actually deployed Star Wars becomes almost a given, and between the two programs things are going to be drastically different, and in unpredictable ways IMO. Most obviously this is going to hurt the Soviet economy in a big way; you either need them to have more resources, make big cuts elsewhere or this is just going to hasten their decline. In terms of the Americans Star Wars will IMO probably retard more conventional military aerospace quite a bit. Things like the F-22, F-35, V-22 etc are going to be very vulnerable given the cost of Star Wars. On the other hand new space probably gets started a lot earlier and there is a very good chance that a space shuttle replacement will come online around the turn of the century and that launch costs are significantly reduced even if the SSTO's never really perform as advertised. Space militarization is going to happen at this point, and you are going to see more and more weapons platforms based on orbit. Anti sat missiles will be a big deal inevitably, and you will probably see a lot more countries working on an indigenous launch capability.

How this all shakes out is a big question. I wonder if it may not prove to be mostly a big expenditure in the 90s and early 2000s that hurts more conventional military readiness. Once the Soviet Union breaks up there is going to be much less obvious need for something like SDI. The end result might just be a boost to space capabilities at the expense of OTL aerospace. Frankly I think the 'destabilizing' potential of missile shields, working or not (and I don't see how any of these systems could have approached fully functional any time before the Soviet collapse) is seriously overblown - nukes are nukes countries are not going to start throwing these things around just because there's some (largely untested) capability to intercept incoming ICBMs.
 
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The Polyus spacecraft experiment space weapon platform armed with laser weapon. In normal timeline it fail to reach orbit however let say did fail how would cold war turn.
You can get information about from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyus_(spacecraft)
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Soviet-Star-Wars.html
Wrong!
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
The laser was merely a sighting device. (Note that even today, laser weapons are only just getting to the point where they could be deployed.)

Possibly Reagan abandons the space-based part of Star Wars even sooner (we hope) or possibly there's a brief flurry of weaponization.

If people actually started TESTING ASAT weapons, then low earth orbit would be even more polluted with debris than it is now. Look at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/01/14/where-did-all-that-space-debris-come-from/

for the result of one single ASAT test. ...
 
Wrong!
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
The laser was merely a sighting device. (Note that even today, laser weapons are only just getting to the point where they could be deployed.)

Possibly Reagan abandons the space-based part of Star Wars even sooner (we hope) or possibly there's a brief flurry of weaponization.

If people actually started TESTING ASAT weapons, then low earth orbit would be even more polluted with debris than it is now. Look at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/01/14/where-did-all-that-space-debris-come-from/

for the result of one single ASAT test. ...

Read the AirSpace magazine article.

It's been a while since I did any reading on this, but my memory is that we don't actually know what was on Polyus. There are a couple of Russian-language magazine articles on the vehicle, which are the source for essentially all of the English-language material, and they disagree about what it was actually carrying. Note that the astronautix article is based entirely on material from before 2000, whereas the AirSpace article is based on more recent reports.
 
Wrong!
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/polyus.htm
The laser was merely a sighting device. (Note that even today, laser weapons are only just getting to the point where they could be deployed.)

Possibly Reagan abandons the space-based part of Star Wars even sooner (we hope) or possibly there's a brief flurry of weaponization.

If people actually started TESTING ASAT weapons, then low earth orbit would be even more polluted with debris than it is now. Look at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/01/14/where-did-all-that-space-debris-come-from/

for the result of one single ASAT test. ...

In extremis you get the Kessler Syndrome, a cascade of impacts that fills LEO with junk and effectively closes it off, probably having far more impact than any alteration to the tail end of the Cold War. By 1987 the USSR is on the ropes, nothing is going to change that.
 
We've actually already hit the Kessler syndrome in the sense that the debris is increasing faster than than it decreases even without additional launches.
 
We've actually already hit the Kessler syndrome in the sense that the debris is increasing faster than than it decreases even without additional launches.


Let's say the size of the Earth makes me more than a little skeptical of it. The radius of the earth is 6,378 KM and if it is only 100 KM up which would degrade the orbit fast the radius would be 6,478 KM, The surface area of a sphere is 4pi r^2 which comes to almost 53 million square KM, if the orbits in the area are within only 10 KM it will have an volume of around a half a billion cubic KM. The chances of any two objects hitting each other from orbit is incredibly small.
 
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Read the AirSpace magazine article.

It's been a while since I did any reading on this, but my memory is that we don't actually know what was on Polyus. There are a couple of Russian-language magazine articles on the vehicle, which are the source for essentially all of the English-language material, and they disagree about what it was actually carrying. Note that the astronautix article is based entirely on material from before 2000, whereas the AirSpace article is based on more recent reports.
I have now, and they clearly state that the only laser on that spacecraft was the sighting laser. They didn't even carry the CO2 needed for a CO2 laser.


So. IF they had launched the demo version, and THEN launched a full up version, THEN, maybe you'd have a viable PoD. The demo version doesn't look like it changes much.
 
I have now, and they clearly state that the only laser on that spacecraft was the sighting laser. They didn't even carry the CO2 needed for a CO2 laser.


So. IF they had launched the demo version, and THEN launched a full up version, THEN, maybe you'd have a viable PoD. The demo version doesn't look like it changes much.

Reading the Wiki page they were planning to test part of the system designed to suppress the 'recoil'. They chose gases that could be used in an atmospheric experiment, Krypton and Xenon, rather than use CO2 and make it obvious what they were working on.
 
Also, never trust Astronautix as a definative source; it's often outdated and occasionally biased (especially on more recent programs).

The larger consequence could have been a chance for the Energia program to survive a bit longer. It wouldn'y help Buran (at least not initially), but it might increase the chance of an Energia-M (the stripped-down 25-tonne version) actually getting some commercial customers. Energia-M would keep open all the critical production lines for a full Energia, allowing its potential use in the ISS program...
 
I have now, and they clearly state that the only laser on that spacecraft was the sighting laser. They didn't even carry the CO2 needed for a CO2 laser.


So. IF they had launched the demo version, and THEN launched a full up version, THEN, maybe you'd have a viable PoD. The demo version doesn't look like it changes much.

Oops. Egg on my face, I'll just scrape it off... :eek:
 

Jason222

Banned
I agree give USA the need for star War program to full funded. USSR wound have fall like normal timeline but have asteroid defense system ready by this time as well much more advance space program.
 
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