Mastodawn

I'm actually kind of surprised iran has not lobbed a couple of their long range missiles up to low earth orbit and detonated them. They've clearly got some smart people over there, figuring out the timing to fragment a few star link satellites doesn't sound impossible.

A tone of ball bearings scattered in front of a train of satellites would cause a spectacular mess.

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bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵Mar 23

@mindpersephone I doubt it's viable financially - there's like a gazillion of those satellites up there. I guess it would cost millions to destroy just one.

I understand the feeling that you should be able to destroy a bunch of sats at the same time, but you gotta imagine those sats to be like little cars on the biggest highway ever, and with an added dimension too - imagine having to blow up a bunch of these cars, driving kilometers away from each other, with one frag grenade. that's nigh impossible :)

so I'm afraid the financials just don't really check out

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Persephone Mar 23

@bazkie I'm not imagining the financials here. If all we cared about were financials no war would happen, IIRC this war has already cost America more than a lot of countries' GDP. They wouldn't be throwing dozens of missiles at one of the densest air defense networks in the world if they cared about that.

If you managed to damage a single (1) star link satellite, the "oh fuck" from the rest of the world would be pretty immediate. There was that paper recently saying they are having to make orbital corrections every two minutes to avoid collisions. Adding a bit of dead satellite in those orbits would cause "problems" even if it's just causing shorter life from more adjustments.

And iran gets to shout about the win of damaging a extremely high profile american company they really don't like (allows routing around their censorship)

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bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@mindpersephone yeah good point it would definitely be a good PR move!