> no military background, no political background and no aerospace engineering background
You're presuming a lot there.
You're presuming a lot there.
If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.
This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13189/chapter/4?term=...
Your question about delta-V is answered in that same report a few pages above.
That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”
As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.
Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.
Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.
Was absurd.