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Comment by tonic_note | Hacker News Reader

It's most likely space-based missile defense, perhaps DOD secretly revived the Brilliant Pebbles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) program?

People hear "space weapons" and think Rods from God (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment) but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard, like tying to hit a bull's eye from hundreds of miles away. The more practical application is missile defense or anti-satellite stuff.

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The more practical approach appears to be fully on-orbit activities, as those are currently far harder to attribute. The field of "Space Domain Awareness" is still nascent and rapidly evolving.

See my other comment for my expanded take on this, informed by being a peaceful space-nerd who cannot seem to avoid this topic, even if I tried:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49711876

> but hitting a precise target on the ground from space is really hard

Guidance systems exist. Kinetic != unguided.

It probably felt really hard decades ago. But we are already well into the era where you can target a particular seat of a car driving on a highway with a nonexplosive kinetic weapon.

That doesn't mean you can hit it too. The only case which I remember was well documented was for a turret gun "controlled by satellite" hit the passenger of a standing vehicle from the back of a truck in front of it (nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, killed in Tehran in 2020 while his wife, sitting immediately beside him, was unharmed). Also those reports were pretty questionable at the time, there were multiple competing narratives, and I'm not sure the satellite gun story was ever independently verified.

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