Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Why Trump’s ‘Iron Dome’ won’t work | Planet America" video.

AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: I did my degree in American in the late 80s when Reagan was spending tons of money. Our department was flush with DARPA funding for Reagan's Star Wars. In my final year we had to do 2 or more advanced option classes which we shared with the post graduate students who also had to present conference level papers. One of my classes was in Spacecraft Dynamics which is the single hardest class I ever had. Its all about how you make spacecraft point in space. It sounded real cool when we signed up and then the math started. In that class was the single most mathematically gifted engineer I've ever met. We were all pretty smart but he made us all feel dumb. He was actually able to simulate a solution to making a laser cannon point accurately in space. The problem is that its not like a satellite or the Hubble space telescope which rotate and point very slowly. Shooting down missiles is more like skeet shooting in that its all very rapid recognition, movement and shooting. What really killed off Star Wars 1.0 and this will still hold true today are 2 basic facts. 1) Lasers reflect off shiny surfaces. So all you need to do is make the surface of your missile a mirror finish and lasers become fairly useless. 2) The basic mechanics of shooting at something that accurately at an object that might be 1,000km away or more moving at hypersonic speeds is absurd. People just don't get how big space actually is. Even the space close to the Earth that we call Low Earth Orbit is a massive amount of territory.
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@aprildawnsunshine4326 Sorry but your mother might have worked on spacecraft but she DID NOT WORK on what I'm talking about. This stuff was only being worked on by 1 person and his professor. As for AI solving the problem the answer is NO and it never will. The real issues with missile defense (as Joe pointed out) are NOT software but the actual mechanics involved with trying hit small objects moving at very high speeds at great distances. I have tried explaining this many times and nobody seems to listen. Its quite frustrating. As for the whole AI thing. Most of it is a giant mirage. Yes LLMs are very impressive and can seem to do some very clever things, but when you look at many of the claims made in recent years there's an awful lot of stuff that's been found to be 100% conjecture with no basis in reality. There's a journalist named Ed Zitron who's actually behaved like a journalist and looked through the hype and looked into the backgrounds of these tech bro billionaires. There's a staggering amount of outright scamming among these guys. They do startups and then hype the crap out of them. Then they sell them off to people who believe the hype and its ended in some pretty bad outcomes. I think we are headed towards the second dot-com bubble burst except this time its going to be worse. A LOT WORSE
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@ that's a comeback Jimmy Carr would be proud of
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@ Yeah that was one of the other outcome scenarios that scared the crud out of everyone. Even a small limited space battle could render low earth orbit unusable for decades. But the biggest killer was the simple fact that eventually something would get through and it only takes a single nuke to EFF-UP your day. Ask the Japanese
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@David-f5u6v OF FARK - You have mistaken DELUSION for vision. Can people like you just stop making idiotic claims and for the record its spelt AI not A1 🤣😅😂 And that's before you realise that there's an international treaty that prohibits ANYONE from putting weapons in space. You can't hide either a laser battery or missile battery in space. EVERYONE WOULD SPOT IT FOR EXACLTLY WHAT IT IS.
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@WilhelmSallsten You're right on the atmospheric issue but anything in space is effectively a satellite. The thing people don't seem to get is that everything in space not only moves but moves incredibly fast. The Space Station goes around 28,000 kmh or about 100 times faster than a Formula 1 car. This is what I keep trying to explain. Its not a matter of AI or satellite tech or weapon types. Its just the basic reality of orbital mechanics. Its even hard for other engineers to understand because the math is so convoluted.
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