No idea if this is plausible at all, just raising the question for anyone who knows more about this system than I do.
But Russian low-intensity hybrid warfare, including infiltration and sabotage, is very real. Particularly in Europe and especially so in eastern Europe. There's a lot of nasty things going on in border areas that isn't widely reported.
Thus using the weakness to launch a coordinated summer offensive now for a decisive breakthrough before US weapons supplies reaches full speed again seems like a reasonably good choice.
Conquering Ukraine is the key for restoring the USSR, Belarus is already under the yoke and Khz,etc won't dare resist after Ukr falls. P sees a victory here as moving the linchpin that makes him immortal in historybooks.
Ensure Starlink hires an agent. Establish skills / access permissions. Push an update which bricks both the update system and the running system, so the satellites become useless.
Potentially you could burn the constellation with reentry.
Just put them into a spin with a strong propellant burn while compromising ground stations. Even if the fleet recovers, its lifespan will have been significantly reduced by the propellant expenditure.
If you can get schematics or source code, you can put it to use as well.
And then you can also use communications logs and HR to find other human targets.
The agent getting the right access or finding the right people on the inside and exploiting them successfully without trigger counterintelligence is the hard part.
Cyberattack is the only plausible way to take down Starlink.
Few big nukes are enough to take out all satellites.
That very article says "The damaging effects on orbiting satellites are usually due to factors other than EMP". Also "for equipment to be affected, the weapon needs to be above the visual horizon". Given how low Starlink orbits and the fact that they are dispersed evenly over the whole Earth, the number of weapons you would need to detonate just to ensure line of sight to every satellite at a range short enough to be effective is absolutely enormous.
Except for military satellites like GPS, most satellites aren't hardened to deal with that much radiation. My guess is that the range would be thousands of miles.
Assumption: all energy of the nuclear explosion is radiation uniform in every direction.
The energy E would be spreading in a sphere with area 4*pi*R^2. Area A being a part of that sphere would capture E*A/(4*pi*R^2) of energy. So with:
energy E = 209 PJ (Tsar bomba for an extreme example)
area A = 1 m^2
radius of the sphere R = 1000 miles (1609 km)
2.09 * 10^17 J * 1 m^2 / (4 * pi * (1.609 * 10^6 m) ^ 2) = 6.4 kJ
From what I'm reading about high-altitude nuclear testing, it can cause artificial radiation belts around the Earth (composed of high-energy electrons). I think that may be more dangerous to satellites at distances like 1000 miles (or at any distance) than the immediate gamma/x-ray radiation.
I found that satellites get 100-1000 rad per year. Getting that much in a moment would cause problems.
It's measured in a lot of different ways depending on the need, and the unit "sievert" is Gy times a conversion factor that depends on the kind of radiation (for equivalent dose) and which body parts (for effective dose): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Radiation_type_weighti...
But also, beta radiation (electrons) will be stopped by a thin sheet of tinfoil, while alpha radiation (helium-4 nuclei) by paper or the outer layer of dead skin on your body and therefore only matters if you eat a source of it, and a significant fraction of any gamma radiation you're exposed to will pass right through you without getting absorbed.
Um, no. Not even vaguely remotely. "Thousands of satellites" is a lot by historical human space standards, but compare that to the number of cars you see every day and then remember these are spread out over an area bigger then the surface of the entire planet. Don't be fooled by the simulation maps you can find online, where the satellites and tracks are shown thousands of times bigger then they would be to scale because otherwise they couldn't be seen. They are very, very far apart. Even on the ground, "a few big nukes" wouldn't do diddly. And nukes do less, not more, damage in space. A lot of the damage enhancement effects of nukes comes from their interaction with atmosphere. In a vacuum, it's only direct radiation which falls by the square of the distance, and satellites are of course designed to handle plenty of thermal and ionizing radiation all the time already by virtue of being designed for space. But Starlink sats aren't so high that Kessler syndrome is a concern either, there's plenty of atmospheric drag to bring debris down without active boosting.
GP is correct and I don't understand the downvotes: as far as physical resilience goes the Starlink constellation is a pretty damn hard target on an absolute basis, even before we get into the geopolitics of some country trying to shoot down US property that is also a US strategic asset.
Of course, purposefully detonating nuclear weapons to create large scale NEMP effects might well still disrupt Starlink to the degree that it'd effect any piece of ground electronics, because the ground effects would be far, far worse. The satellite constellation could be ok enough to still be functional at reduced capacity, but if terminals and ground stations get toasted that's not immediately helpful. But that directly leads, again, to the fact that you're talking about LAUNCHING A NUCLEAR WAR ON THE ENTIRE WORLD here. No internet is going to be doing very well!
So yes: Starlink is pretty darn robust.
not saying it isn't. I was the evangelist of it in 2022 and seen the pentagon salivating at what they've seen and rightly so.
what it isn't is indestructible, though - and we don't know the capability of nukes designed specifcally to cause the Kessler syndrome in LEO for a few years. if I was China I'd have a project for this commissioned by Jan 2023.
I wouldn't even consider a nuke for that. Energetic plasma ball resulting from nuke is not effective method to do so and any debris that survives the explosion isn't going to still be in LEO, but also no plausible deniability because it's obviously a nuke.
Try "we launched a satelite and it RUDed (honest we pinky swear it wasn't just a loose heap of ball bearings like it appears on radar) and now LEO is marginally more dangerous".
They famously did not want to get involved in the war.
I imagine DoD having their own constellation with equivalent tech was the deal set up to give the Russians and whoever else a different set of targets to retaliate against, push comes to shove.
Starlink launches reduce costs by launching a bunch of satellites with similar orbits on the same vehicle, replacing one or a few satellites is going to cost a lot more per satellite. So just disrupting the network is a lot cheaper than fixing it.
Thought the cheapest is still probably paying an existing employee to break some stuff.
And in a few years when Starship is launching Starlink, the economics will be tilted even more wildly in SpaceX's favor.
User terminals rely on GNSS for timing and position and I wouldn't be surprised if the satellites did too.
So it would make sense to combine this with some other offensive action where hampering communication would help them. Otherwise they are just poking at something just to do it... unless this were a more serious attack with long-term consequences.
Either exploit existing employees or take years to seed an agent into the company.
State level persistent attacks are well funded and have long timelines.
Easier and safer to go after unknown employees with access.
If not and this was a cyber attack the this an attack on the USA.