Bojangles Birthday Club. Road to Tokyo. Latest Newscasts. About Us. Investigate TV. Gray DC Bureau. International Space Station astronauts have access to a gun. Published: Feb. Share on Facebook. Email This Link. Share on Twitter. Share on Pinterest.
Share on LinkedIn. Some are asking, could it be dangerous to the crew? It is basically a double barreled 40 Gauge shotgun on top of a single shot pistol. Very tiny shot shells. Maybe good for grouse? The single shot 5.
There are much better options for protection from wolves. The Makarov magazine held up to twelve 9 mm rounds, which would give a wolf pause for thought. Fired inside the ISS, the shotgun's effect would depend on the size and composition of the pellets.
The 5. Fired from a rifle, it will go through several car doors. Even with a short pistol barrel, it would certainly pierce the ISS hull, but leave a small "exit wound" inn the hull. Used on a Cosmonaut, however The Soviet explanation that the weapon was intended as a survival weapon is a bit lame. Was it planned to be used in orbit against a berserk crewmember? If the shotgun pellets and powder load were chosen carefully, they could do serious harm to crew but maybe not the hull.
Its crazy to think you are actually safer with a gun than without one in a spacecraft, but many people feel that way about their homes.
Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Are there any weapons in space?
Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 8 months ago. Active 16 days ago. Viewed 11k times. For global security purposes, are there any orbiting weapons that we know of? Obviously governments launch lots of top-secret payloads, so ignoring those for now. Improve this question. Stu Stu 5, 7 7 gold badges 31 31 silver badges 78 78 bronze badges.
I thought it might be, but for the better of me I can't find any matching questions. The closest one seems to be Is the Nudelman-Rikhter gun installed on Zvezda module? Also related: What types of items are prohibited on space missions? As soon as I posted it I thought to check for related questions. If hacking computers is "cyber war" then such satellites would pretty much be the entire weapons system. Paul D. The second element of the 5G.
MIL vision involves connecting these local mesh networks to the global Internet. Such a connection between a local network and the wider Internet is known as a backhaul. In our case, the connection might be on the ground or in space, between civilian and military satellites.
The resulting globe-spanning backhaul networks, composed of civilian infrastructure, military assets, or a mixture of both, would in effect create a software-defined virtual global defense network. The software-defined aspect is important because it would allow the networks to be reconfigured—automatically—on the fly.
That's a huge challenge right now, but it's critical because it would provide the flexibility needed to deal with the exigencies of war. At one moment, you might need an enormous video bandwidth in a certain area; in the next, you might need to convey a huge amount of targeting data.
Alternatively, different streams of data might need different levels of encryption. Automatically reconfigurable software-defined networks would make all of this possible. The military advantage would be that software running on the network could use data sourced from anywhere in the world to pinpoint location, identify friends or foes, and to target hostile forces.
Any authorized user in the field with a smartphone could see on a Web browser, with data from this network, the entire battlefield, no matter where it was on the planet. We partnered recently with the U. Armed Services to demonstrate key aspects of this 5G. MIL vision. In March , Lockheed Martin's Project Hydra demonstrated bidirectional communication between the Lockheed F and F stealth fighters and a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane in flight, and then down to ground artillery systems.
This latest experiment, part of a series that began in , is an example of connecting systems with communications protocols that are unique to their mission requirements. All three planes are made by Lockheed Martin, but their different chronologies and battlefield roles resulted in different custom communications links that aren't readily compatible. Project Hydra enabled the platforms to communicate directly via an open-system gateway that translates data between native communications links and other weapons systems.
Emerging technologies will fundamentally change the character and speed of war and will require an omnipresent communications backbone to manage capabilities across the entire battlefield. It was a promising outcome, but reconnaissance and fighter aircraft represent only a tiny fraction of the nodes in a future battle space. Lockheed Martin has continued to build off Project Hydra, introducing additional platforms in the network architecture. Extending the distributed-gateway approach to all platforms can make the resulting network resilient to the loss of individual nodes by ensuring that critical data gets through without having to spend money to replace existing platform radios with a new, common radio.
Another series of projects with a software platform called HiveStar showed that a fully functional 5G network could be assembled using base stations about the size of a cereal box. What's more, those base stations could be installed on modestly sized multicopters and flown around a theater of operations—this network was literally "on the fly.
The HiveStar team carried out a series of trials this year culminating in a joint demonstration with the U. Army's Ground Vehicle Systems Center. The objective was to support a real-world Army need: using autonomous vehicles to deliver supplies in war zones. The team started simply, setting up a 5G base station and establishing a connection to a smartphone.
A white 3-D printed box housed processors for distributed-computing and communications software, called HiveStar. The housings were mounted on unpiloted aerial vehicles for a demonstration of a fully airborne 5G network. The team then tested the compact system in an area without existing infrastructure, as might very well be true of a war zone or disaster area.
The system passed the test: It established 5G connectivity between this roving cell tower in the sky with a tablet on the ground. Next, the team set about wirelessly connecting a group of base stations together into a flying, roving heterogeneous 5G military network that could perform useful missions.
For this they relied on Lockheed-Martin developed software called HiveStar, which manages network coverage and distributes tasks among network nodes—in this case, the multicopters cooperating to find and photograph the target. This management is dynamic: if one node is lost to interference or damage, the remaining nodes adjust to cover the loss.
For the team's first trial, they chose a pretty standard military chore: locate and photograph a target using multiple sensor systems, a function called tip and cue. In a war zone such a mission might be carried out by a relatively large UAV outfitted with serious processing power. Here the team used the gNodeB and S-band radio setup as before, but with a slight difference. All 5G networks need a software suite called 5G core services, which is responsible for such basic functions as authenticating a user and managing the handoffs from tower to tower.
In this trial, those core functions were running on a standard Dell PowerEdge R 1U rack-mounted server on the ground. So the network consisted of the gNodeB on the lead copter, which communicated with the ground using 5G and depended on the core services on the ground computers.
The lead copter communicated using S-band radio links, with several camera copters and one search copter with a software-defined radio programmed to detect an RF pulse in the target frequency. The team worked with the HiveStar software, which managed the network's communications and computing, via the 5G tablet. All that was needed was a target for the copters to search for. So the team outfitted a remotely controlled toy jeep, about 1 meter long, with a software-defined radio emitter as a surrogate target.
The team initiated the tip-and-cue mission by entering commands on the 5G tablet. The lead copter acted as a router to the rest of the heterogeneous 5G and S-band network. Messages initiating the mission were then distributed to the other cooperating copters via the S-band radio connection. Once these camera platforms received the messages, their onboard HiveStar mission software cooperated to autonomously distribute tasks among the team to execute search maneuvers.
The multicopters lifted off in search of the target RF emitter. Once the detecting copter located the target jeep's radio signal, the camera copters quickly sped to the area and captured images of the jeep. Then, via the 5G gNodeB, they sent these images, along with precise latitude and longitude information, to the tablet. Mission accomplished. Next the team thought of ways to fly the entire 5G system, freeing it from any dependence on specific locations on the ground.
To do this, they had to put the 5G core services on the lead copter, the one outfitted with the gNodeB. Working with a partner company, they loaded the core services software onto a single board computer, an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX , along with the gNodeB. For the lead copter, which would carry this gear, they chose a robust, industrial-grade quadcopter, the Freefly Alta X.
They equipped it with the Nvidia board, antennas, filters, and the S-band radios. At the Army's behest, the team came up with a plan to use the flying network to demonstrate leader-follower autonomous-vehicle mobility.
It's a convoy : A human drives a lead vehicle, and up to eight autonomous vehicles follow behind, using routing information transmitted to them from the lead vehicle. Just as in the tip-and-cue demonstration, the team established a heterogeneous 5G and S-band network with the upgraded 5G payload and a series of supporting copters that formed a connected S-band mesh network. This mesh connected the convoy to a second, identical convoy several kilometers away, which was also served by a copter-based 5G and S-band base station.
After the commander initiated the mission, the Freefly Alta X flew itself above the lead vehicle at a height of about meters and connected to it via the 5G link. The HiveStar mission-controller software directed the supporting multicopters to launch, form, and maintain the mesh network. The vehicle convoy started its circuit around a test range about 10 km in circumference. During this time, the copter connected via 5G to the lead convoy vehicle would relay position and other telemetric information to the other vehicles in the convoy, while following overhead as the convoy traveled at around 50 km per hour.
Data from the lead vehicle was shared by this relay to following vehicles as well as the second convoy via the distributed multicopter-based S-band mesh network. Current 5G standards do not include connections via satellites or aircraft. But planned revisions, designated Release 17 by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project consortium, are expected next year and will support nonterrestrial networking capabilities for 5G.
Chris Philpot. The team also challenged the system by simulating the loss of one of the data links either 5G or S-band due to jamming or malfunction. If a 5G link was severed, the system immediately switched to the S band, and vice versa, to maintain connectivity. Such a capability would be important in a war zone, where jamming is a constant threat.
Though encouraging, the Hydra and HiveStar trials were but first steps, and many high hurdles will have to be cleared before the scenario that opens this article can become reality. Chief among these is expanding the coverage and range of the 5G-enabled networks to continental or intercontinental range, increasing their security, and managing their myriad connections.
We are looking to the commercial sector to bring big ideas to these challenges. Satellite constellations, for instance, can provide a degree of global coverage, along with cloud-computing services via the internet and the opportunity for mesh networking and distributed computing.
And though today's 5G standards do not include space-based 5G access, the Release 17 standards coming in from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project consortium will natively support nonterrestrial networking capabilities for the 5G ecosystem. So we're working with our commercial partners to integrate their 3GPP-compliant capabilities to enable direct-to-device 5G connectivity from space.
Security will entail many challenges. Cyberattackers can be counted on to attempt to exploit any vulnerabilities in the software-defined networking and network-virtualization capabilities of the 5G architecture. The huge number of vendors and their suppliers will make it hard to perform due diligence on all of them. And yet we must protect against such attacks in a way that works with any vendor's products rather than rely, as in the past, on a limited pool of preapproved solutions with proprietary and incompatible security modifications.
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