Hacker News Reader

Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

The odds that a country (with the right tech) gets pissed off at SpaceX is approximately zero because Elon seems to be fine playing along with the Russian/Chinese governments to prevent it. The odds that Starlink and other satellite constellations are destroyed in the beginning of a global war seems to be about 100%, even if there are no nukes used terrestrially.

View on HN

There're fables about USSR satellite which is basically bucket with nails and explosive charge. In case of war it'll be blown up and nails will destroy everything in the orbit.

Should be in retrograde orbit to work better in that orbital plane.

This bucket of nails isn't related to a USSR satellite, but was theorised by Arthur C. Clarke.

>2 For the origins of Clarke’s “bucket of nails” argument; Clarke gave the speech “Where is Mankind Headed?” on May 25 1983 for the Reader’s Digest Worldwide Editorial Conference. In the conference’s summary “Memories of Monaco,” Clarke’s speech was described as follows: “After dinner, Arthur Clarke, the noted British science-fiction writer, spoke on ‘The Militarization of Space.’ To put nuclear war into perspective, he quoted a chilling statement from Carl Sagan: ‘A full-scale thermonuclear exchange would be the equivalent of World War II, once a second, for the length of a lazy summer afternoon.’ Clarke went on to demonstrate that there’s no security in technology, concluding that the only defense is to prevent weapons from being used. Thus, the problem is political, not military. At one point, he described how a sophisticated, multi-billion-dollar laser weapon system could be destroyed by a bucket of nails,” see “Memories of Monaco from Reader’s Digest Worldwide Editorial Conference,” May 21-28, 1983, Folder 4, Box 144, Arthur C. Clarke Collection (Acc. 2015-0010), Air and Space Archives, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 14-15.

From: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/398410/Th... [PDF]

Wouldn't attacks on Starlink be so asymmetrical that we'd want the enemy to try and shoot them down? They'd go bankrupt trying. We launch 60 satellites per Falcon, and who knows how many per Starship. Meanwhile the bad guys have to use a whole launch to take out one/few Starlink satellites.

Unless a few multi-megaton nukes can take out ALL of the LEO satellites at once.

I kind of don't think Starlink would be a big target at least until they have satellite to satellite comunication; if they get multiple hops in space communications working and especially it can be used from end-user to end-user without spaceX ground stations, then satellites become a target. Otherwise if you want to disrupt communications, the SpaceX ground stations are in known (or knowable) locations and easy to target.

But, if you did attack the satellites, I suspect you'd do something MIRVish, so assume 10ish strikes per launch, and there's some number of strikes less than the fleet that ruins the orbits for everyone for a few years.

All that’s needed is a debris field to render the orbit unusable for decades.

Surface based missiles would suffice.

Not at all. The easiest way to take down Starlink is with ground-based lasers. Superpowers already possess this capability.

You’ve commented this twice. I’ve never read about any technology approaching this. Lasers are in tests to defeat small, slow, low altitude drones.

If anyone could shoot down an entire satellite constellation with lasers then that would mean all air defense is solved. Planes and missiles are much slower, closer, and larger than Starlink satellites.

In fairness, Starlink satellites are vulnerable to space based lasers, in ways that planes and missiles are not.

Also, unlike planes/missiles the last doesn't have to destroy the satellite. Frying the receiver or damaging the solar cells would be sufficient.

Here's the DIA publication[0] that briefly goes over space and ground based laser threats on pages 9 and 10. Here's the non-proliferation association also warning about ground based ASAT from RU and CN[1]. If they're doing it it's safe to assume US is also doing it.

I think you're probably thinking of the lasers on ships and planes, which would have limited power. Stationary ground based systems don't have the same constraints and are more of a threat for asat.

[0] https://www.dia.mil/Portals/27/Documents/News/Military%20Pow...

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/l...

I'm sure there's a lot of things the military has done once or twice at immense cost in controlled settings. They (or you?) said a superpower can currently take down Starlink with lasers. That's just not true, and the fact that technology demonstrations have happened doesn't make it true.

This comment struck me as hilariously American. "We". "The bad guys".

How do you guys overseas refer to hypothetical wartime adversaries? "The good guys"?

Yes, I'm being a little facetious :P

If it's one-missile per satellite, that could be true. Even at that rate, without the need to orbit, I believe a plane mounted missile could reach up to a Starlink satellite. However, there are a lot more effective ways. A cloud of debris it could take out whole orbits. An EMP could take out giant swaths of satellites within a certain radius. A software based attack could knock out the whole constellation.

NK could maybe. Maybe has a carrier vehicle. Wouldn't need to withstand reentry. Up&Boom!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com