Persephone6h ago
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.
Show threadbazkie šŸ‘©šŸ¼ā€šŸ’» bitplanes šŸŽµ5h ago

@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

Show threadPersephone5h ago
@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)
Show threadvxo5h ago
@mindpersephone @bazkie oh gods. kessler warfare.
Show threadKevin Karhan 5h ago
@vxo @mindpersephone @bazkie the only reason this hasn't happened is because every competent power able to do it directly or indirectly would basically "glock leg" themselves and their ability to do anything.
Show threadbazkie šŸ‘©šŸ¼ā€šŸ’» bitplanes šŸŽµ

@kkarhan @vxo @mindpersephone hate to be a party pooper but the thing is, space is LARGE. causing kessler syndrome takes A LOT of destroyed satellites, and then still a lot of time (years) for any meaningful number of other sats to collide with the debris.

and finally, the starlink sats fly in low orbit, so debris simply de-orbits and burns up in the atmosphere within years, so even if you'd blow up a 100 starlink sats, the debris wouldn't cause that much of a problem.

12:01pmWeb
Show threadvxo5h ago

@bazkie @kkarhan @mindpersephone that's a relief to think about... at least in the low orbit, we won't lose the ability to access space forever if we gunk that up.

Still not a necessary evil by any means.

Show threadKevin Karhan 5h ago

@bazkie @vxo @mindpersephone relative...

Already there's a shitton of evasive maneuvers in low earth orbit and millions of objects measung 8.000t weight in total are being tracked.

  • And the frequency of said maneuvers isn't going down as #billionaires keep polluting it with absurdly huge megaconstellations that only achieve sabotaging the ROI calculations for rural #FTTB / #FTTH rolloutsā€¦
    • Plus actively causing #KesslerSyndrome is kinda making one an international Pariah, just beaten by NBC warfare and -terrorism.

Anyone else remember #Iridium 33 and #Cosmos2251 crashing into each other at 11,7 km/s at an almost 90Ā° angle?

Satellites: Crimes Against Space

YouTube