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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

define what value and relevance a license has for such?

How easy will it be to shootdown starlink devices?

I am sure it will be easy for someone to build an app that tracks your current GPS and the Starlink cause-ways and provide the telemetry data to shoot these things down with ease...

Does Starlink have a ChaosMonkey for such scenarios built in?

Imagine a world war - or even a war btwn 2 supers... killing starlink is going to be A#1 target.

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Shooting down thousands of satellites would extremely expensive and piss off every other space faring country

Could be a piece of cake disabling mini sats with laser or microwave weapons, which I understand is rapidly seeing the light of the day.

lol "tracks your current GPS"

Starlink is not going to be A#1 target in space in a new world war. Reconnaissance and Mil Comms satellites will be.

> and Mil Comms satellites will be.

Like Starlink in the future, then? Possibly? https://spacenews.com/u-s-army-signs-deal-with-spacex-to-ass...

Next to impossible to kill a starlink satellite and there are thousands of them, I don't think any country has the capability to to take starlink satellites down en masse by force. The US, russia and china could probably take down a few, but I doubt the stockpiles of anti satellite missiles of all three combined equal the size of the constellation. Guessing about that though.

You could probably blow up a nuke on orbit to EMP a bunch of them at once but that would have a lot of collateral damage.

India is one of the 4 with ASAT capability, in addition to the 3 you mentioned. But it doesn't make sense to destroy even a single satellite (due to Kessler syndrome), if it is just to stop starlink service. The signal can just be jammed. Or even simpler - just monitor the uplink transmission and punish those who break the order.

It would be easier to attack/sabotage/JAM/DOS the ground stations.

Doesn't hitting one of them be good enough for chainlink reaction due to space debris? They are all on the same height and pretty close to each other.

The debris field would move generally with its original momentum, meaning I wouldn’t expect hitting one to take out the others in the same string.

If you're hitting it with a rocket the explosion should considerably change the momentum, no?

But not that it's really relevant anyway, these things are not close to each other at all in this context.

Hitting it with anything at those speeds causes and explosion. At low earth orbit (LEO) most vectors cause the debris to rapidly deorbit, but a few can cause a slightly raised orbit that could hit things behind it. The problem is, if such a chain reaction does start, it's not likely limited to a single orbital plane like starling, but to destroy every single LEO satellite and make LEO unusable for tens of not hundreds of years.

I'm not sure I would call 1600 objects scattered over an area about as large as the surface of earth "pretty close together". There's plenty of empty space between them

Couldn't you fly up a satellite with a small gun and a propulsion engine? You don't have to be much faster than the starlink satellites to eventually shoot down all of them, and it shouldn't take a big gun to make a satellite stop working. At least it should be way cheaper to destroy it than to build the network.

Orbital mechanics being what they are, you can't simply speed up to intercept something in orbit. Very roughly speaking, as you increase speed you increase the distance the opposite side of the orbit is from the orbited body. This means if you're trying to catch a bunch of satellites on a single orbital path you'll miss most since your orbit is different now. There are ways to do what you say but I dont know if any countries have managed to make a reusable orbital satellite killer like this.

Since you're talking about a "satellite train", so as to speak, I'm not sure you need to "speed up to intercept". If for example the orbital period is 90 minutes and the time between two consecutive satellites passing through the same point is 5 minutes, just make sure that your orbital period at the time of intercept is 95 minutes and then you can shoot down one satellite per orbital period. There's not a lot of maneuvering that the electrically propelled satellites could do on quick notice.

Not hard to kill one, but probably hard to put up enough stuff to kill many of them with a single launch.

On the other hand, it would be much easier to take out the Starlink launch vehicles before they deploy the satellites and then wait a couple of years (given their 5-year lifetime) for the service to degrade.

>define what value and relevance a license has for such

Government compliance? India is a democracy. Tech may move faster, but that doesn't mean it's right. Voters decide what's right, ultimately.

The Amish are wise in this: wait for the community to approve technology, and only then apply it to their lives. The Government of India doesn't need to be held hostage by cybermancers, they can decide tech usefulness on their own time.

> India is a democracy. Tech may move faster, but that doesn't mean it's right. Voters decide what's right, ultimately. ... The Amish are wise in this: wait for the community to approve technology, and only then apply it to their lives.

You mention democracy and then give an example of religious authoritarianism? What is the connection between the two?

The Amish vote on how their community moves. People regularly leave. It's the same thing.

> People regularly leave

People regularly fled from behind the Iron Curtain, too.

It isn't about protecting the interest of the voters but about having power to shut down and censor internet at will that the Indian government doesn't want to lose.

satellite internet is not a new technology.

come on now, you've been a superpower for over a year. get with the times.

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