Comment by NitpickLawyer
Comment by NitpickLawyer 4 days ago
If war breaks out, it'll likely be enabled.
Comment by NitpickLawyer 4 days ago
If war breaks out, it'll likely be enabled.
I’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
Very 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/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!
If 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
Every major power has polluted near Earth space as a show of power.
Of course it is entirely speculation. But there are previous datapoints you can look at (i.e. iran).
No 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.