Is there any indication this thing will be able to do anything current methods cannot for a fraction of a fraction of the cost?
You can have an extremely high end satellite in LEO but it may only pass over the desired target once per day. You can put it in GEO and have it see the whole area but it's going to be so far away it's going to be limited in what it can see. You can build more satellites so that one of them passes over areas of interest more frequently but you can't make a Starlink sized reconnaissance satellite constellation if you're putting super high end hardware in each one. Those sensors cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each.
Reconnaissance aircraft are a dramatically more economical way of finding mobile targets than massive LEO constellations of super high end sensors. Instead you just put the high end sensor in an aircraft and have it overfly the area you're trying to surveil. This is why many countries are dramatically increasing investment in them. Actually knowing where things are is critical to destroying them.
I really don't see how they could be reality. Do you have any specific arguments or sources for this claim?
> Those sensors cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each.
What sensors are you talking about that cost hundreds of millions and requires multiple?
>What sensors are you talking about that cost hundreds of millions and requires multiple?
Nearly all sensors worth putting on a satellite in a military context are going to cost at least $10 million and those would be pretty low quality and of limited usefulness. The NRO regularly launches individual satellites with sensors which cost >$1 billion dollars. Their yearly budget is >$6 billion despite having almost no personnel. High end sensors are very very expensive. You need multiple because, as previously stated, if you only have 1 you might be waiting an entire day for it to orbit over the correct place on the earth. You can build 1,000 of those and get near real time tracking but it's going to be absurdly expensive. Much cheaper to just fly a single aircraft over the correct part of the earth you're interested in. The sensor payloads that RQ-4s carry still cost >$100 million but you can just fly them exclusively over areas of interest meaning you don't need nearly so many of them. They're also a lot closer to the ground meaning that an equivalent quality sensor can see a lot more than it would be able to from LEO.
Plus the people you're surveilling might discover its timing, and just put everything in garages or under tarps at the necessary times.
If you want to somehow alter the timing, you have to burn irreplaceable fuel and reduce the lifetime of the satellite-investment.
And while satellites have obsoleted spy planes for many purposes for a while now, one thing they can’t do is go on demand to any arbitrary location
You have a point there, but only marginally, as current rocket tech is making rapid deployment of satellites a breeze. I'm not talking about Musks or the Chinese reusable rockets - the military doesn't care as much about economics and had the ability to rapidly launch satellites from planes for a long time.
This is also almost certainly unmanned.
But there have also been lines of satellites created for doing radio captures, also pointed down.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquacade_(satellite)
what's the benefit of a supersonic missile system vs a high subsonic missile platform, what are the drawbacks, cost, availability, size, handling.
Also what are the drawbacks - operationally - like increased visibility, decreased range, decreased payload?