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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

>I wonder if we can do something now that we know the source.

Russia signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) in 1967, this may be a treaty violation of this or other treaties, something like that or retaliation regarding it may be possible.

You can hack the satellite, or use other electronic warfare options to jam or interfere with it's operations.

You can shoot it down with a missile.

The X-37B is in space right now and interfering with space assets is a pretty obvious possibility for why it exists at all, but it's secret so nobody says these things.

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So Russia may be in violation of a treaty, treaties. I'm shocked.

They were in violation of the INF treaty too years before the US pulled out...

source? trust me bro?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novator_9M729

A claim and "is believed" is not a fact. A fact is that many years prior introduction of that missile (no evidence of being mid-range), the US blocked all discussions about their heavy attack drones which effectively serve the same tasks as mid-range missiles. And the very ridiculous explanation about their mid-range missiles they claimed were built for training purposes, a.k.a "target-missiles". Then it came the question about MK-41 launcher of otherwise air or naval borne Tomahawks, which turned it immediately into a subject of INF (and thus forbidden). The fact that the Russians openly introduced the named missile (9M729), which nobody has seen or have proven has a range more than 500km, AND invited US to a demonstration and inspection of that missile, which US declined, because of course they had other plans ongoing and have already stated they want to leave INF. More can be added, but please stand the high-ground of a real research on that topic, before repeating the hollow US narrative. A dangerous one as always.

Russian Armed Forces have practically demonstrated a range of at least 1200 km, see this news report that was linked from Wikipedia.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-us...

There's more interesting stuff on Wikipedia; this gives the impression that both Russia and USA wanted to exit the treaty because China wasn't bound by it or any similar treaty and thus has been stockpiling exactly these kind of missiles for a long time now, so the treaty puts both Russia and USA at a disadvantage. Then follows some theatrics where Russia and USA point finger at each other while never talking about their true motivation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

Like the USA, I don't think Russia codifies treaties into law. Like in the USA, treaties for Russia are mere suggestions used as a geopolitical tool until inconvenient.

This does not follow my understand of treaties signed and ratified by the US.

    > Domestic Enforcement: If the treaty is self-executing, its provisions automatically become part of federal law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. If it is non-self-executing, Congress must draft and pass implementing legislation to establish domestic enforcement.

I know much less about treaties signed and ratified by Russia, but I found this:

    > Russia codifies international treaties into domestic law through the formal ratification process. Under Article 15(4) of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, ratified treaties are considered an integral part of the Russian legal system, provided they do not conflict with domestic constitutional principles.

If you start shooting down stuff in orbit, it'll invite retaliation, but even without retaliation there's a huge risk of a Kessler syndrome (especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years).

I've thought about this before - do you actually need to "shoot it down" (make it explode)? What if you just nudge it a little and either make it spin or change its orbit? If your missile can reach the satellite then these seem like things that should be possible, no?

Depends, if you nudge it only a little, its own onboard stabilizers / thrusters should be able to correct it. It'd have to be more than its own systems can correct for.

Nudge it long enough to deplete it's fuel reserves? Or just wrap the emitting antenna in tin foil...

There are tug boat style satellites now, one could grab it and force it to Earth.

A missile intercept for explosions or a kinetic destruction the relative velocity will be measured in kilometers per second.

A little nudge doesn't do much, it's still a satellite in a substantially similar orbit. Any sort of nudge requires intercept, go up there and match its velocity so you can grab it and push. And still you have to push on it a whole lot to make a meaningful difference. Spin it up? You'd have to do enough to exhaust it's fuel it uses to orient itself.

You're sort of saying if you can chuck an apple hitting a car on the highway, surely you can tow it away to get it off the road. They're significantly different problems.

An apple at highway speeds can break the windshield and make the car undriveable. People throwing things from highway overpasses is a serious (and deadly) problem.

>A missile intercept for explosions or a kinetic destruction the relative velocity will be measured in kilometers per second.

The satellite will also be going kilometers per second. You have to almost match the orbital velocity to have a chance of hitting it anyway.

To the contrary, for the 1 satellite missile strike we have public information on, not only did it not catch up to the orbital velocity for intercept, it hit it head on (going the other direction) adding to the relative velocity. A satellite with an ~8 km/s orbital velocity was struck head on by a missile adding to that by ~2 km/s for a total just under 10 km/s.

It is indeed not that hard to intercept something in orbit. Because the orbits don't change and can be predicted to high precision months in the future.

I see. I'm actually more impressed by a head on intercept for the current anti-satellite missiles and that definitely makes the idea unworkable.

No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.

> especially with all the stuff that SpaceX has put into orbit in recent years

I've heard this repeated a lot but I've never seen anyone do the maths. StarLink satellites are all in very low orbits, so intuitively it seems like most debris from a collision would just end up deorbiting.

90% of starlink satellites are >400km in altitude. They aren't in very low earth orbits where that intuition even might be correct. They're above the space station.

I've definitely seen math done - though I'd have to dig it up again. I think in FAA filings.

I agree with part of your response.

The best sources that I can find say that Starlink sats orbit around 550 km above Earth. By all accounts, this distance is well within Low Earth Orbit definitions. However, you used the term "very low earth orbits". I never heard before and needed to research it. It is a neologism from 2017 and does not seem to have a precise definition. Most uses indicate less than 450 km above Earth.

The International Space Station flies around 400 km above Earth.

LEO is crowded enough (mostly with Starlink) that satellites have to actively maneuver to avoid collisions [1]. There's research [2] arguing that we're probably already in runaway territory in some orbits — that is, debris from 1 collision likely produces more than one secondary collision — we're just way over on the left of the hockey stick curve. A bit of bad luck, or two megaconstellations that don't perfectly coordinate their operations with each other, could move us to the right pretty quickly.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

[2] https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

If you americans start shooting down russian stuff, russians start shooting down american stuff, and there's only chinese stuff left.

> You can shoot it down with a missile.

Obviously a bad idea, but frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability.

I wonder if the US already has such weapons in orbit.

Kessler event oops, you know. I guess I know someone with several disposable satellites, I wonder if they could be bothered (but I guess not)

> frying it with some sort of high powered electromagnetic pulse would seem the smartest option with plausible deniability

Realistically, how many people could do this ?

If you gave me a million dollars, I could do it. Someone else would have to aim it, but it shouldn't be that hard to do.

From what distance? I would have thought $1M wouldn't go far

This is not something individuals should be doing.

But it's also not really plausibly deniable if there's only one actor with the means and motive to do it.

I assume that satellites have protection against that - because of solar flares.

X37-B it's a tiny robot space shuttle launched by the military.

Why WOUDLN'T one of its possible payloads be an electronic warfare package? Go up to an adversarial satellite, do some signals intelligence capturing things, have a jamming package, or a stronger EM output to fry circuits.

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