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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

China will just confiscate any satellite dishes. SpaceX will comply if they want the market, or someone else will.

I think the "if Amazon/Google/FB don't comply, someone else will take their place" argument is weaker when replacement requires a constellation of thousands of satellites.

I wonder if the USG would consider the shooting down of Starlink Satellites as an act of war after SpaceX refuses to comply with chinese regulations.

It's probably all moot as China would probably simply halt Tesla Sales, as they are not bound by the logics of legality.

I don't think anyone has the ability to shoot down enough Starlink satellites to make a difference.

Musk's biggest risk in China is the CCP confiscating the Tesla factory in Shanghai.

This is why the Space Force is unironically a great idea.

> I don't think anyone has the ability to shoot down enough Starlink satellites to make a difference.

Not with rockets, but maybe with lasers? What damage can a single one do? Could a country deploy them at specific orbits to have enough coverage to destroy a sufficient amount?

China most probably have the resources for that if they want to

Turning one satellite into a cloud of debris would suffice, Kessler syndrome would do the rest.

We are very very far from that happening. Even with most satellites being in the same torus around earth, if every single one in orbit right now were to instantly shatter, each piece would have something like a 1000sqkm volume to roam in.

*area

I meant km3 :)

Debris would deorbit rapidly, starlink satellites are relatively low-altitude.

Shooting down any satellites is extremely dangerous due to the orbital debris this would create. The US would take that act very seriously.

There is no “airspace” controlled by countries in space, and the satellites are not geostationary, so they would have to shoot down everyone’s fleet.

SpaceX will deploy a low orbit ion cannon and DoS the Chinese censors.

Seems like there's an opportunity to produce an open-source SpaceX compatible antenna that someone could build themselves. I wonder if at some point SpaceX could allow this on their network?

I’m not an electrical engineer, but (both) family members who got electronics qualifications have told me RF phase matching circuits are a PITA to build right, and this antenna is a many-element phased array.

They told me this about 20 years ago and I don’t know what’s changed since then. Presumably someone here knows if it’s still hard or if it became easy since 2001?

> Seems like there's an opportunity to produce an open-source SpaceX compatible antenna that someone could build themselves.

you'd need at least $400 of test equipment to check that the >$100 of parts were working right, and to diagnose any problems. not cost effective.

That's certainly not prohibitive in the US. Starlink already charge $500 for hardware and $100/month.

I'd be amazed if it's that little in test equipment.

indeed. i'm leaning on that "at least" pretty hard. i figured establishing that you'd have to spend as much as the prefab'd hardware cost in order to get something that isn't warrantied, and would be the first thing starlink customer service would blame your problems on, would be enough to make this completely unreasonable.

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