Why do we have to launch tens of thousands or even more satellites?
Your underlying question as to why some of those are launching satellites is much easier. They are apparently quite useful for things like communication, providing internet, etc. And people are willing to pay for that kind of stuff. It's not more complicated than that.
You're right that the majority of Einstein's theories were ultimately thought experiments but getting the parameters correct involved a lot of measurements and experimenting, to get to where tech like GPS and StarLink can be accurate. We were also looking at far away stars for centuries before Einstein so that he could have the environment for his ideas to be discussed, which I was including in my phrasing "looking at things light-years away."
I wasn't saying it to start an argument, though. I wanted to counter the rather dismal view of "why do we need radio telescopes."
Because they provide data that other types of telescopes do not. We have X-ray telescopes. We have infrared telescopes. We have optical telescopes. Also as a bonus, for ground based radio telescopes, we can use them 24/7 instead of waiting for nighttime.
Yes, some of the premiere radio observatories have radio transmission exclusion zones around them, but they are also typically away from that exclusion zone impacting as few as possible. Starlink on the other hand is not attempting to do anything of the sort. It would be interesting of Starlink could respect a geofence kind of idea so that they stop broadcasting when over certain areas, especially since they do this over geopolitically exclusion zones.
Starlink is nothing compared to the value Starshield provides, and the civilian product drives costs down.
With drone warfare being the next thing, the US probably can't afford to not have a company running a major LEO ISP.
Humanity is what humanity is, not what we wish it'd be, so key military capabilities need to be developed or you get razed by the guy who did develop them. Doubly so now that we've rediscovered that culture is much more resilient than we'd thought, and that different people want Earth to look in different ways.
Do we all wish we'd stop ecological collapse instead? Yeah. But it's not going to happen so it's irrelevant.
To have internet everywhere you need to either accept bad latency (300-500ms round trip) or have closer satellites, which means they’re moving faster, which means you need more of them.
Then whoever has the most sats will say "that's it guys, LEO is full and you need our approval to launch more" and if someone raises a stink you guessed it, they can get nuked from orbit
Improved first strike capability is worthless íf it isn't crippling, and "devastating enough" first strike capability from orbit is completely unaffordable, and impossible to build up unobserved.
Being in orbit is a hindrance more than anything, really, because maintenance becomes ruinously expensive, everything is trivially observable for all your adversaries and you have to align the orbit with your target beforehand, too (which, again, everyone can observe).
> It doesn't even have to be rational though, combinations of graft and brinkmanship would be enough.
Enough for what? Threatening to nuke some satellites? Because anything else you can do easier, cheaper and on a larger scale from the ground. Why would you bother with nuclear warheads in space when you can just build/maintain like 10 ICBM silos for the same cost?
No. Your missiles have further to fly from geostationary orbit than a missile silo on the ground, not to mention the additional complexity of designing your ICBM for reentry
From GEO, no. From LEO, still probably no.
There may be a bird positioned just right so a small deörbit burn pots Moscow quicker than an ICBM could. But the moment you start burning, you’re caught. (Same as an ICBM.) And unless you have a really obvious orbital configuration that bunches a bunch of birds in a way useful for practically nothing but such a strike, you only get one or two such “early” shots before a wall of ICBMs would have landed.
Nukes in space aren’t about nuking the ground from space. It’s about space area denial through EMP.
"Elements within the Soviet space industry convinced Leonid Brezhnev that the Shuttle was a single-orbit weapon that would be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, manoeuvre to avoid existing anti-ballistic missile sites, bomb Moscow in a first strike, and then land. Although the Soviet military was aware these claims were false, Brezhnev believed them and ordered a resumption of [satellite destroyer] testing along with a Shuttle of their own."
Nukes from LEO aren't impossible. They're just impossible to do better than the current triad. Any breakthrough in propulsion that would make a plane change easier or less visible confers the same advantages to an ICBM. There is a narrow window in which orbital nuking can outperform, and that's almost entirely taken care of--and exceeded, in stealth--by SLBMs.
Space-based missile defence is not what’s implied by weapons that are “already up” and thus “give a lot less warning in a first strike situation?”
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nuke+it+from...