[Jean-Papoulos]

From a comment :

>The first move in the coming WWIII, where the emperors try to expand their empires militaril,y will be to wipe out any orbit with Starlink satellites.

I find this highly unlikely, given Starlink is soon to reached 10k satellites and will continue to grow. Why expand 10 000 ballistic missiles to bring down one of many communications networks ?

[bell-cot]

If it's WWIII, and you're using ballistic missiles against satellite constellations, then either:

- You are not targeting individual satellites; you're setting off nuclear warheads in space, and relying on the EMP to disable all satellites within a large radius of the blast - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

or

- You're nuking the ground-based command & control centers for those satellites. Again, nothing like 10,000 missiles needed.

(Or both.)

To target 10,000 satellites directly, the "obvious" weapon would be a few satellite-launch rockets, lofting tons of BB's (or little steel bolts, or whatever) - which would become a sort of long-duration artillery barrage shrapnel in orbit.

[jeroenhd]

> - You're nuking the ground-based command & control centers for those satellites. Again, nothing like 10,000 missiles needed.

With Starlink's peer-to-peer capabilities, hitting every single ground station and keeping the satellites from working through new ground stations may actually be quite difficult.

Starlink orbits close enough that they're looking into offering LTE coverage from "space". You don't need a giant dish to access the satellites, which means building new ground stations and reprogramming the network from an unassuming-looking ground device to use them is quite feasible.

The paths of the satellites are rather predictable, though, so your shrapnel attack executed with some precision should clear out enough of them.

The moment you launch a nuke (even if just to set off an EMP), you can expect nukes to come your way in retaliation before your nuke even detonates. Unless whatever war is going on has already gone full nuclear, I don't think nuclear weaponry is a viable move to take out satellites.

[NetMageSCW]

The BB idea doesn’t really work either- if they are in orbit they circle with the satellites and don’t hit anything, if they are at different speeds they are in different orbits and fly above and below the satellites and miss, if they cross the orbit SpaceX just moves the satellites to miss.

[TOMDM]

Because Kessler syndrome means you don't need to hit all 10k yourself.

Lowering the orbits just means that we get back to normal faster, not that the it's impossible.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Kessler syndrome means you don't need to hit all 10k yourself

Kessler is useless for LEO constellations. The timeframes of the cascades exceed the useful lives and dwelling times at those altitudes.

I am not aware of a military solution to prompting a cascade over even a limited area. Instead, you’d use repeated high-atmosphere nuclear detonations to fry birds in a region.

[lijok]

Does Kessler syndrome also mean ICBMs become nonviable?

[NetMageSCW]

Stop trying to make Kessler syndrome a thing. Kessler syndrome isn’t a thing, and it will never be a thing.

PS The original paper expects the cascade to take decades to centuries. No one can afford to shoot down Starlink except SpaceX.

[Cthulhu_]

Or why try to shoot them down when you can also go to the command center and turn them off? Or do a targeted strike on said command center. The sattelites are plentiful and redundant, but the network will collapse very quickly when they're no longer controlled from the surface.

In fact, if SpaceX can no longer do any launches due to whatever reason, Starlink will no longer be feasible after a few year - if I'm reading it correctly, the sattelites have a lifetime of only 5 years, meaning they will have to continually renew them at a rate of 2000 new sattelites a year.

[tlb]

You could launch some missiles, blow a few satellites into smithereens, and gradually over the next few months they would take out the others. That's a poor kind of war weapon. An effective weapon is one where you can inflict damage continuously, and are able to stop immediately upon some concession. If you can't offer to stop in return for concessions, you won't get any.

[RealityVoid]

You don't take down satellites in order to force someone to negotiate, you take them down for denial of capabilities.

[panick21_]

Its not really that easy, to cause such a chain reaction, specially if the other person reacts.

And its also really expensive, each sat you take down costs you far more then what you hit. So unless you can actually cause a chain reaction its a losing proposition.

[ViewTrick1002]

Not really. That’s more science fiction than reality. You should try some Kerbal Space Program and explore how orbits are affected by thrust = collisions, in different directions.

As soon as a satellite is hit the rest of the fleet can start thrusting and raise their orbits to create a clear separation to the debris field.

Following such an attack the rest of the fleet would of course spread out across orbital heights and planes to minimize the potential damage done by each hit, leading to maximum cost for the adversary to do any damage. Rather than like today where the orbits are optimized for ease of management and highest possible bandwidth.

[LightBug1]

What was that game on old PC's? ... Minesweeper ...

[aucisson_masque]

You don’t need 10k missiles. You need just one to blow up all of starlink satellites.

This is like bowling, you hit one, it hits the other one etcétéras.

[NetMageSCW]

That is not how it works at all.

Imagine using a rocket and blowing up one car on a highway - how many other cars will actually be affected? How many cars on other highways will be affected?

[jdiez17]

You would likely need at least one per orbital plane, of which there are about 24.

[GuB-42]

What kind of pictures can starlink would take? When I look at pictures of starlink satellites, I don't see a camera. Maybe they have one, but if we can't see it, it is most likely useless for observation, except for taking pretty pictures of the Earth, or maybe other passing satellites.

Spy satellites are more like space telescopes, but pointed at the Earth. As an example, Hubble is designed after a spy satellite, the "camera" is pretty massive and obvious.

Starlink can probably be weaponized for a variety of thing, like for communication, obviously, but I don't think earth optical observation is one of them.

[DrScientist]

It's also been used for regime change attempts - part of the internet that's harder to shutdown, though apparently jamming GPS currently appears to be quite effective.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-in...

[ben_w]

Looking at the price of industrial lasers, right now the only thing stoping a random 3rd world terrorist cell from being able to afford to destroy all of them is the adaptive optics to compensate for atmospheric turbulence.

Well, that and the fact that so much of the stuff on Amazon etc. that's listed as "welding laser" is actually a soldering iron.

[NetMageSCW]

I think you severely underestimate the amount of power you would need to damage some Starlink satellites in the 4 minutes they would be visible while tracking them at ridiculous speeds.

[laughing_man]

When people attack satellites with lasers, what they're trying to do is blind surveillance sats. To actually physically damage a satellite would take enormous amounts of power and accurate tracking tied into powerful radars. That's something a state might do, but too many resources are involved for terrorists.