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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking in to nano satellite and while they are intriguing, I haven’t seen any useful tasks that you can do. You also have options to subscribing/renting bigger satellite data. In less than 1.33kg form factor, sensors gets very limited and life in LEO orbit pretty short. It seems like they would be good for some school projects but are there any compelling applications?

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In a hypothetical future war between major powers they would likely knock out each others' large satellites. So the combatants would have to make do with nano satellites for low resolution overhead imagery and low bandwidth communications. Nano satellites are small enough to be somewhat survivable, and losses can be easily replaced.

Do you mean knock out by kinetic weapons? So would some sort of EMP get them all instead, get past any shielding?

Could be kinetic weapons, directed energy, persistent jamming, maybe something else. It's hard to predict. EMP seems unlikely because emitting enough power to destroy satellites requires nuclear weapons and that would be a last resort, but anything is possible.

It’s posaible to take out satellites with ground based high powered lasers or ballistic missile interceptors like the SM3

Companies that are deploying lots of them are doing things like photographing the Earth (lots of cheap satellites means you can get frequent coverage), listening to various from Earth signals and selling that data (like AIS or ADS-B transponders), weather sensors (space and/or Earth weather), things like that. I think the normally accepted definition of a nano sat goes up to 10kg, which gives you a bit more to work with.

you mean all these Chinese company are actually firing some TOY sat to orbit, which can only last a very short time?

That's weird, this sounds like throw the money to ocean and hope you can get it back with some profit.....

"Short" in this case may mean a few years. Compare with SpaceX's test communications satellites, with a lifetime of six months: https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/microsat-2.htm

Lower orbits are cheaper to reach, and just like cellphones the high turnover of technology means that they will become obsolete quickly too. Today you might want a ""5G"" base station in space (+), in a few years time you'll want a ""6G"" one.

(+) this is an analogy

maybe someone should invest a company of cleaning space trash / iRobot in space or something like that to deal with these wreckage we shoot up in space.

Although space is quite big / endless, but the surface area of our earth in space isn't that big enough.

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