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Comment by methou | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine tried, no signal.

If war breaks out, it'll likely be enabled.

No it won't but if it did would take just few hours for china to shoot a bunch of them down and with how tightly packed their orbits are the debree would take care of the rest.

I’m not so sure debris would help take down other satellites in that orbit. The orbit is very low so much of the debris that ends up with a deviation in its orbit will fall down. Even if it doesn’t there’s still air resistance up there which may cause more of the debris to deorbit before jt has time to hit other satellites.

And I doubt China would want to make LEO impossible to move through anyway. It’d affect China badly as well

potentially very dangerous for everyone if they did that. could make it impossible for even them to make a launch. Kessler Syndrome is nothing to toy with.

space is huge and the orbit is low. I'm not so sure debris would be as effective as on higher orbits.

Starlink are very low orbit. Easy to bring down.

Very expensive to take down 10-100k at once. No one today has that many antisat-capable missiles stockpiled.

Relevant, Chinese domestic media reporting on China's own perspective:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... ("China military must be able to destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites if they threaten national security: scientists" (2022))

> "Researchers call for development of anti-satellite capabilities including ability to track, monitor and disable each craft / The Starlink platform with its thousands of satellites is believed to be indestructible"

"Easy to bring down" vs. "believed to be indestructible"—some tension there!

EMP?

At the point anyone is using nukes in LEO, things have gotten really out of control already.

If you're talking about nuclear weapons, their major effect on satellites (Starfish Prime as the reference point) isn't EMP effects, but ionizing radiation—creating a persistent radiation belt of MeV electrons. (A physical process that took months to disable some satellites). Beyond that I don't know much.

how though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...

Every major power has polluted near Earth space as a show of power.

One missile for one satellite? This gets expensive really fast.

They follow well defined orbits and propellant limited. You could easily cover their trajectory with some shrapnel and attack it one lane at a time.

Not feasible. That would entail putting shrapnel into orbit (unlike extant anti-sat weapons which are short-range suborbital), which would mean a full orbital launch for every satellite target orbit. There's hundreds[0] of Starlink orbital groups already, so that'd require hundreds of independent orbital launches in a short timescale—far beyond China's launch capabilities today.

[0] https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/planes.html

(On general principles, you could argue you'd need 1:1 launch vehicle parity (number, not payload) to defeat a satellite constellation this way. For each satellite launch, you'd need one corresponding anti-satellite launch into that same, newly-defined orbit).

If you make a dense-ish cloud that cuts across the Starlink orbits you'd eventually intersect them all if you could make the artificial debris field last It wouldn't require that many different counter orbiting fields to cover most of the orbits.

Yes but there's so many starlinks that you're going to get lots and lots of collateral damage to sats from allies and enemies alike. It's going to be a huge footgun.

Not much else uses those orbits right now. Other comms satellites and surveillance birds are all higher up. The debris would in theory also clear pretty quickly and should be fairly contained so the cascade of additional damage might be relatively small too. Hard to know that without a huge simulation budget to see how high the shattered satellite bits might get tossed.

Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford ?

For your shrapnel to hit the satellite, it needs to be at the same height and inclination. Otherwise, your shrapnel will likely miss the targets.

Starlink satellites are pretty low and experience a lot of drag, with square-cube law working against you. Your shrapnel's orbit will likely decay pretty rapidly.

Tiny propellant burns turn into thousands of kilometer changes quickly.

Entirely speculation.

Of course it is entirely speculation. But there are previous datapoints you can look at (i.e. iran).

Elon doesn't sell cars or Powerwalls in Iran.

Very easy to jam.

Also, fairly easy to find from the air.

Depends on if Elon wants to be sanctioned by PRC or not.

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