SpaceX pitches subscription model for Trump's Golden Dome | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX pitches subscription model for Trump's Golden Dome

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> The trio is pitching a plan to deploy 400 to 1,000+ satellites for missile detection and tracking, with a separate fleet of 200 attack satellites armed with missiles or lasers to neutralize threats. SpaceX will mainly focus on the sensing satellites, not weaponization.

I have a strong suspicion that SpaceX has been deploying and testing the sensor platform for a while now. The payload mass trend of the starlink satellite had large jumps in the most recent two iterations (doubled twice).

I have a strong suspicion that SpaceX has been deploying and testing the sensor platform for a while now.

That makes sense. Their first customer was the US Army. Civilians are great for stress-testing a new thing. Civilians were the first to test the internet but it was built for war even if the first iteration was a bit short sighted. Falcon-heavy seems like a great fit for putting heavy weapons in space whereas I think most here know how silly the whole mars discussion is.

200 kill sats is laughably little. The Earth is rather big and they will be uniformly distributed, putting closest sat at almost 1000km from target while whole boost phase of a solid fueled ICBM is 350-400km. So there's no chance it could work. It will take tens of thousands of sats, like Starlink.

It’s an ABM system. It is not supposed to _work_, it is supposed to lead to the transfer of money from government to manufacturer, much like previous efforts.

  >subscription model

Nothing about this is really new, except perhaps that it's being openly acknowledged.

For military aerospace the usual rule is "lose money on the product, make money on the service contract."

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