cyberax 4 days ago

One missile for one satellite? This gets expensive really fast.

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  • therein 4 days ago

    They follow well defined orbits and propellant limited. You could easily cover their trajectory with some shrapnel and attack it one lane at a time.

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    • perihelions 4 days ago

      Not feasible. That would entail putting shrapnel into orbit (unlike extant anti-sat weapons which are short-range suborbital), which would mean a full orbital launch for every satellite target orbit. There's hundreds[0] of Starlink orbital groups already, so that'd require hundreds of independent orbital launches in a short timescale—far beyond China's launch capabilities today.

      [0] https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/planes.html

      (On general principles, you could argue you'd need 1:1 launch vehicle parity (number, not payload) to defeat a satellite constellation this way. For each satellite launch, you'd need one corresponding anti-satellite launch into that same, newly-defined orbit).

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      • rtkwe 4 days ago

        If you make a dense-ish cloud that cuts across the Starlink orbits you'd eventually intersect them all if you could make the artificial debris field last It wouldn't require that many different counter orbiting fields to cover most of the orbits.

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    • cyberax 4 days ago

      For your shrapnel to hit the satellite, it needs to be at the same height and inclination. Otherwise, your shrapnel will likely miss the targets.

      Starlink satellites are pretty low and experience a lot of drag, with square-cube law working against you. Your shrapnel's orbit will likely decay pretty rapidly.

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    • kortilla 4 days ago

      Tiny propellant burns turn into thousands of kilometer changes quickly.

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