What I wonder about the Starlink constellation is, how secure it is physically? There are people burning down 5G towers. How plausible would be for a conspiracy nut to create a rocket to take out the satellites? Maybe starting a cascading effect?
USC students just broke the non-government, non-corporate rocket launch altitude record, reaching 143.25km[1]. But that is still a long way from the ~500km that Starlink operates at.
On top of that the person would have to develop a guidance system and payload capable of targeting and sufficiently damaging one of these satellites - not an easy feat.
Finally, it seems unlikely that a single hit would cause a chain reaction. There aren't that many satellites that are part of Starlink. Imagine 6000 cars spread over the surface of the Earth. Except that they're even more sparse than that because many of them are at different altitudes.
Additionally, SpaceX has already had to deal with the result of the debris field from the Russian Cosmos satellite that was destroyed by a Russian anti-satellite missile.[2]
Starlink has a lot of protection compared to other constellations since the satellites occupy such low orbits that most debris spontaneously deorbits in 5-10 years.
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1. https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2024/11/usc-student-rocke...
2. https://spacenews.com/starlink-satellites-encounter-russian-...
And then that kills 1 sat. SpaceX has many 1000s of sats.
So a small rocket like Electron cost around 8+ million $, lets say 6 million $ in cost. Plus lets say 1 million for the anti sat.
So you need to invest a couple 100 million $ into the development and produce many rockets. So you can calculate 7 million times * 6000, that gone be around 42 billion $.
Of course you would need to launch them from somewhere without a government that can stop you. Taking out vital infrastructure used by the US military tends to make people a bit angry. And neither China, Russia or Europe will want you anywhere close to them. This is likely gone make this much more expensive. Maybe you can make a deal with the Taliban? But they likely don't want that heat either.
So this is just a pure fantasy scenario.
> Maybe starting a cascading effect?
That's not gone happen. Far to low in orbit. As soon as they don't have propulsion they will drop lower. Until then the others can slightly raise their orbit.
There is not even a single nation state who has the capability to take out Starlink.
And no amount of people who burn down 5G towers could ever pull this off.
Rockets are a military technology, and are treated as such.
Military tech or not, its just atoms. Very interesting people are quite rich now, they will have access to precision machining advanced materials and chemicals if they have the motivation.
Some bitcoin bro with a net worth in the millions is not building orbit reaching guided missiles in their garage. And if they were the satellites would be the least of our concerns.
not plausible at all. Most /countries/ aren't able to launch a rocket to orbit.