Physical attacks on the ground stations are more feasible from a physics perspective, but now that the satellites have laser links you'd have to take out ground stations all over the world to completely cut service, not just locally.
The way to attack Starlink would be hacking, either of the command and control system or the user terminals. Failing that, then jamming, and/or anti-radiation missiles targeted at the user terminals. Russia is known to be trying hacking and jamming already (recall that they were already successful in hacking Viasat at the very beginning of the war). I haven't heard about them locating user terminals by their transmissions but I'd be shocked if they aren't trying that too.
But a much more likely response would be equipping local police with direction finding equipment for signals in the 10-12 GHz band and bashing in the skulls of anyone found with a terminal.
Or it might be easier to just pressure Musk's other business interests.
But you'd also need to take out most of the on-orbit satellites before it would be useful to blow up the replacements.
(One may argue that along with that it also exposed how empirically inadequate are a lot of other terms, institutions, conventions, and rules we’ve become accustomed to relying on for maintaining our peace, security, and ensuring that bad guys don’t go unpunished, but i guess that would be a digression for another time).
The meaning behind such terms, absent methods of enforcement when they are violated, exists only for those warring states that choose to respect them - the list that likely does not include any of the realistic opponents we consider today, such as Russia, or North Korea, or Iran, or unfortunately, China.
1. There isn’t a particular part of the constellation that passes over China. There are probably a few launch groups that never or rarely pass over China, but a majority do. An adversary would have to destroy or disable a few thousand satellites.
2. Anti-satellite weapons aren’t nearly plentiful enough and given the ground support required, I’d be surprised if launching more than a few per day is feasible. A counterattack would come too quickly.
3. Precise positions don’t help that much. Even knowing a satellite position to ~2m still requires some active tracking on the interceptor. It’s not much benefit over knowing the position to 1km.
4. The debris created would be catastrophic and likely to damage the ISS even at Starlink’s low altitude.
All of the first three apply to GPS as well even though it’s only ~32 satellites.
Also, the way the orbits are established and the fact that Taiwan is roughly equatorial, I thin every satellite eventually passes over it. Starlink is not geostationary
But there are also other considerations. In your example I doubt China would want to provoke the US by shooting American-owned satellites out of the sky, and I doubt Starlink would be that important anyway.
(In fact, among the things that makes that scenario less likely is the fact they have a space station and would like to keep visiting it without worrying about passing through a Kessler cloud).
Its and its not clear how you standard rockets can easily be used as anti-sat weapons, and if that makes finical sense.
And building and maintaining a Kessler cloud at that altitude seems like it would be… not effective with just a handful of rockets due to the significant atmospheric drag.
Kessler syndrome is a real concern, but only at higher altitudes where atmospheric drag is negligible.
Yes and their "working space station" is also below that orbit. So they'd need to blow up their own station as well. Also the international space station as well.
Given the current situation, USA/SpaceX is in a far better position to quickly repopulate LEO with satellites when the debris has fallen down. In that case, they may send up satellites armed with weapons that can shoot down anything being launched into orbit to create debris again.
I don't think entering into that kind of conflict with USA is a winning proposition for China unless they have their own Falcon 9 or Starship-like rocket.
What happened to the outer space treaty?
The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction in space. It does not ban military activity in space at all.
It's far cheaper to heft tens of thousands of ball bearings into orbit vs a single satellite. You can give them a nice spread so you have a space shotgun that ruin an orbit for years at a time. The decay is a bonus to the attacker[1] because they can a go all out during wartime, without impacting their long-term space-faring program.
1. The decay also allows the same armaments to cover a larger vertical slice of the orbit.
Edit: 1. The perigee and apogee will differ for projectiles fired from port or starboard based on launch vehicle inclination and the resulting relative speeds to earth. It would be a nightmare to track and avoid the resulting mess.
Until china threatens musks other factories and he voluntarily decided that defense isn’t a good business for SpaceX. Or maybe he’ll do what he did with Ukraine and advocate for china just to end the war (probably due to business risk of Tesla et al).
IMHO, I think would be more likely that Musk would divest his entire ownership of Tesla than do anything which would compromise the long-term mission of SpaceX.
My own guess is it is to get the US military dependent on him. Then he can write himself billion-dollar checks. NASA is just for practice.
25% of their factory output is a lot. Sure it’s an amount that won’t leave the company in ruin, but it’s a lot. Teslas growing stock price basically funds all of spaceX so divesting is unlikely.
Realistically, SpaceX filled the mission musk had. It proved that space is viable with better tech. They’re really beholden to the government and he won’t be able to shake that.
My point is that he would divest ownership of Tesla before allowing himself to be blackmailed over SpaceX. I’m not saying that he wouldn’t care if the factory in China shut, though I am saying he might prefer that over SpaceX being neutered.
No but musk owns Tesla shares and as they rise he can invest new cash into it.
Though the issue is that it is substantially harder to create the Kessler Syndrome than people claim.
Aren't we in agreement?
>> Though the issue is that it is substantially harder to create the Kessler Syndrome than people claim.