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Comment by poszlem | Hacker News Reader

One thing that people miss is the fact that in the event of any type of a "big" war between superpowers satellites are going to be heavily affected and probably one of the first targets. Having something like this, having that kind of speed in deploying new satellites is going to be a superpower to the USA.

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Any "big" war between superpowers is going to be over in a day because it's sheer utter hubris to imagine surviving with any quality of life afterwards.

Sure the the elites will have their billion dollar bunkers but the modern life is over otherwise. Pandemic was a model of 1% of what fallout would be like.

It seems warmongers have found an end-run around that though, proxy wars like Ukraine which is horrifying.

The Ukrainians, whose country was invaded, might take issue with your characterisation.

What counts as big, and what counts as a superpower?

By any reasonable measure, Russia is losing in Ukraine, and the USA lost in Vietnam. Really awful for both victim nations, but despite various hawks in both aggressors calling for the use of nukes, that didn't happen.

At this point, Russia appears to be cannibalizing their nuclear arsenal into conventional weapons, so I don't think they're a threat. That leaves China and NATO (as a bloc, three nuclear powers), because although I don't know how big Indian and Pakistani militaries are, that isn't going to spread, and North Korea is small enough that if it was dumb enough to strike at the USA I doubt it would manage to be worse than Covid (and similarly with Israel and it's neighbours, but I don't have enough appreciation for their geopolitics to call them dumb even preemptively about a hypothetical like this).

Kessler Syndrome notwithstanding.

Such low orbits should prevent that being a long term problem. I also wonder how much more difficult it is to target satellites going this fast than say the one China destroyed a few years ago?

Seems like speed wouldn't be that much of a problem when the satellites all move in a highly predictable manner.

What's basis for thinking it would be much harder? Still has highly predictable trajectory. Recall the US destroy one a few months later in 2008 with a modified SM3, from a boat. That sat was in a ~ 244km×261km decaying orbit -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost.

If the thing China shot was on orbit, there isn't much difference in orbital velocity vs other objects. If it's below ~7.8km/s it's suborbital, and if it's above 11km/s it's on escape trajectory.

> Such low orbits should prevent that being a long term problem.

Wouldn't a military power be more willing to trigger Kessler syndrome for 5 years than 500?

Probably. In a war I don't think they'd hesitate, since they've already demonstrated their willingness to cause huge clouds of LEO debris with simple tests. But the upside is that it's much less of a problem for the rest of humanity. Losing access to space for a few years is certainly not something we want, but in the context of a major war between two space powers it will be among the least of our worries.

Note also that "Kessler Syndrome" is not a binary condition. As debris gets worse, the expected lifespan of satellites in those orbits drops, and as does the success rate of launching rockets through the effected altitudes. However these don't drop off to zero immediately. If the satellite is important enough to justify the elevated risk and additional expense then you can simply plan to launch several of them to get one of them through. Manned missions would be a bad idea, but odds are good that vital weather satellites and the like would be kept aloft.

That depends on whether that military thinks they rely on space less than the other military. But likely there will always be at least one military that thinks it would be to their advantage.

Kessler Syndrome is overused and isn't even relevant in a war context.

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