Space has been an important source of military capabilities for the last 60 years, and it is only growing more critical. I've touched on several aspects of military spaceflight in the my writing where they've interacted with other subjects, but it seems worth taking a look more specifically at the history and development of military spaceflight, and the various systems in use, both in the past and today.
SPACE!
But we need to start with a very brief introduction to spaceflight and orbits. Getting into space itself isn't that hard. It's 100 km straight up, which means that, neglecting air resistance, you need to be going about 1,400 m/s to get there, or about Mach 4. But you'll barely brush space, then come straight back down, which generally isn't what you want. And that brings us to orbits. The basic insight behind an orbit is that if you go sideways at the right speed, the Earth's surface will fall away below you at the same rate you're falling, allowing you to fall around it forever. If you're in Low Earth Orbit (LEO, altitude below 2,000 km or so) then this is around 7.5 km/s, and you can expect to go around Earth every 90 minutes-2 hours. At higher altitudes, gravity is lower, and you don't need to go as fast. For instance, at an altitude of 35,786 km, you only need to go about 3 km/s, and the orbital period is exactly one day. This is called Geostationary Orbit, because a satellite in this orbit stays stationary relative to the Earth's surface, an extremely useful property we will come back to later.
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