4 ms·
A friend of mine tried, no signal.
by methou 1y ago
A friend of mine tried, no signal.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoIf war breaks out, it'll likely be enabled.
- andrewinardeer 1y agoEntirely speculation.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoOf course it is entirely speculation. But there are previous datapoints you can look at (i.e. iran).
- andrewinardeer 1y agoElon doesn't sell cars or Powerwalls in Iran.
- Helmut10001 1y agoStarlink are very low orbit. Easy to bring down.
- Zacharias030 1y agohow though?
- 4gotunameagain 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi... Every major power has polluted near Earth space as a show of power.
- cyberax 1y agoOne missile for one satellite? This gets expensive really fast.
- therein 1y agoThey follow well defined orbits and propellant limited. You could easily cover their trajectory with some shrapnel and attack it one lane at a time.
- perihelions 1y agoNot 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 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).
- rtkwe 1y agoIf 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.
- wkat4242 1y agoYes 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.
- perihelions 1y agoVery 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/china-military-needs-defence-against-potential-starlink-threat 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!
- ceejayoz 1y agoEMP?
- perihelions 1y agoIf 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.
- lazide 1y agoAt the point anyone is using nukes in LEO, things have gotten really out of control already.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- progbits 1y agoNo 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.
- senectus1 1y agopotentially 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.
- audunw 1y agoI’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
- baq 1y agospace is huge and the orbit is low. I'm not so sure debris would be as effective as on higher orbits.
- esseph 1y agoVery easy to jam. Also, fairly easy to find from the air.
- maxglute 1y agoDepends on if Elon wants to be sanctioned by PRC or not.