[uSoldering]

I like how the article glazes over the fact that this is drone swarm delivery tech. You are naive to think otherwise.

[throwup238]

What kind of drones are you thinking, other than just good ol' missiles?

Anything even remotely drone shaped would have to be covered in so many aerogel reentry tiles and thermal insulation I'm not sure there would be any usable weight left for a payload.

[mechagodzilla]

Why would I want a drone swarm in VLEO? That seems like a really hard place to effectively use drones from compared to pretty much any alternative.

[tomrod]

Quick deployment into a battlefield or disaster zone anywhere on earth is one idea.

Connection, remote sensing, and mesh networking are useful.

[uSoldering]

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is an aerospace vehicle capable of flying in the air indefinitely. How many drones can you fit on a vehicle? How many vehicles can you fly at once? 60 miles is already reachable by the cheapest and most deadly weapon class of short-range drones. And now all they need to do is fall down. At freefall that is 140 seconds until it reaches the ground.

[rsynnott]

It doesn't seem terribly practical as one? The 'drones' would still have to re-enter, at, well, impressive speed. So you're not talking about terribly practical drones; more something like an ICBM warhead.

Even if this were practical, why use weird expensive highly-visible VLEO satellites rather than conventional LEO satellites? I can't see what advantage the VLEO stuff would give you here.

[flanked-evergl]

Based.

[literalAardvark]

As long as "based" is taken to mean "confidently wrong", yeah.

Based af