Comment by nradov
22 days ago
Yes, this is why having a prompt satellite launch capability to replace attrition losses is now a strategic imperative. We need to be able to put up new ones in a matter of hours, not months.
22 days ago
Yes, this is why having a prompt satellite launch capability to replace attrition losses is now a strategic imperative. We need to be able to put up new ones in a matter of hours, not months.
Why is that? Undersea cables makes way more sense - the issue is we have maritime law that allows any nation state to freely roam over important cables. During wartimes this is a complete different story - ships won't be allowed near the lines, and if they do get close they will be destoryed without prior warning. No more anchoring "accidents".
> maritime law that allows any nation state to freely roam over important cables.
I'd like to see your version of maritime law that doesn't allow freely roaming over important cables. Your country's enemies would gladly drop cables totally encircling you and say "uh uh uh, important cables!" if you tried to leave your perimeter
This assumes people are very stupid, no? Like, as if they wouldn't know what was happening and just had to let it happen?
I realize US politics may suggest otherwise but I can't imagine the military is just gonna stand by and entertain such a farce..
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It isn't either/or. Satellites and undersea cables serve different use cases. Cables are great for high bandwidth communications between fixed points but they aren't very useful to mobile military forces and they can't be used for anything beyond communications. We don't have enough ships and patrol aircraft to realistically defend undersea cables outside the littorals.
Satellites can serve multiple purposes including communications, navigation, overhead imagery, signals intelligence, weather, etc. They are also vulnerable, but it's possible to launch replacements faster than repairing damaged cables.
Inofficially Europe is already at war, whether it wants to or not. Maybe someone needs to inofficially keep a close eye on those cables and take inofficial countermeasures against inofficial sabotage acts.
Europe is not at war with another nuclear power, no. Ukraine is at war and Europe is giving support to Ukraine as that's aligned with its interest. This support is neither unconditional nor total and doesn't include going to war with Russia.
No we're not. Nobody in the EU has transitioned to a wartime economy. We are helping out a strategic ally. If Ukraine falls tomorrow an cedes add territory to Russia, the EU is not going to continue fighting, because the war will be over.
That of course assumes that Putin stops at Ukraine. The point is that this isn't our war.
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The exercise left for the reader is to choose two countries that are not adjacent,
and try to plot a path between them without crossing an undersea cable:
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
Looks like you can get between Costa Rica and El Salvador without crossing any cables.
We are at war. The United States guided an ATACMS missile into Russian territory yesterday. Imagine the absurdity of if China put missiles on the Mexican border and guided them into missile storage facilities 186 miles inside the border.
I think you'll find the ATACMS missile guided itself, based on inertial navigation and satellite positioning data. If your argument is that the United States guided the missile because the US provides GPS, that's a pretty flimsy argument.
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Why do folks like your self make such foolish analogies? If the US had invaded Mexico like Russia invaded Ukraine then yes, it would be completely fine for Mexico to fire missiles into the US.
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Imagine the absurdity of if China put missiles on the Mexican border ...
Imagine the US engaging in an invasion of Mexico as equally stupid and unprovoked as Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Then not only would Mexico have a perfect right to seek whatever help it needed to resist the aggression directed at it, we would -- unless we were damned fools -- fully expect Mexico to seek and obtain that help.
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As far as we know Ukraine both put them there and guided the missiles. Please provide proof otherwise.
If someone starts blowing up satellites it’s pretty much game over for space based communications.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Kessler is often overplayed. Kessler trashes a low orbit and you wouldn't want to launch more birds into the trashed orbit. But, loads of com sats live in MEO or GEO, which is far too high for the numbers to work. They're all fine.
You will even see Kessler cited as some sort of barrier to leaving, which is nonsense.
Imagine there's a 1x1m spot where on average once per week, entirely at random and without warning a giant boulder falls from the sky and if you're there you will be crushed under the boulder. Clearly living on that spot is a terrible idea, you'd die. But merely running through it is basically fine, there's a tiny chance the boulder hits you by coincidentally arriving as you do, but we live with risks that big all the time. If you're an American commuter for example that's the sort of risk you shrug off.
Likewise, Kessler isn't a barrier to leaving, humans won't be leaving because there's nowhere to go. The only habitable planet is this one, and we're already here.
GEO is safe for now. But... https://spacenews.com/intelsat-33e-loses-power-in-geostation...
The most likely explanation for the unexplained disassembly is that Boeing made it. Second, most likely, is a collision with a hunk of something invisible.
The latency on GEO orbits exclude them from many use cases.
GEO is very cramped. It's just a circle, not a sphere.
Edit: I guess I was assuming geostationary. There's a whole sphere of geosynchronous orbits to play with.
Edit2: I was right the first time, GEO (geosynchronous equatoral orbit) / GSO (geosynchronous orbit), apparently. Now my head hurts.
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LEO is where starlink is stationed. Really, there is no good scenario where LEO is unusable due to some dumb reason, like blowing up junk in space. I'm not sure our "world leaders" appreciate this.
Not true. China has taken down 2 US satellites in the last few years.
They shoot down their own redundant satellites, and it was in 2007 in 2010.
Really? Thats wild. How is this not seen as a military provocation?
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The military is shifting toward LEO constellations for communications such as SpaceX Starshield. Kessler syndrome isn't a serious concern for those because the orbits decay fairly quickly anyway.
That "quickly" is on the order of years (as opposed to decades, centuries, etc). If the Starlink constellation goes boom, you can't start launching new ones for several years -- and then the build-up would take years, from there.
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Could they place a giant electromagnet in space to collect debris?
Space is too big, and the field of even the world's strongest electromagnets are too small for this to be practical. And even if it did work, you'd only collect ferromagnetic material.
A large enough electromagnet could actually increase effective drag in conductive materials, which may help. All the non-conductive materials would still be there, and paint chips can be brutal at orbital speeds.
You can have the ability to launch 100 satellites in 10 days, but that doesn't really help if you don't have 100 satellites
Well obviously you need to have a supply of replacements in stock. From a military perspective, think of satellites as rounds of ammunition that will be expended during a conflict.
I think it'd be more apropos to compare them to fighter jets/tanks vs bullets
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"we" are not doing anything AFAICT. Various privately owned corporations might be, and that's very different.
Yes, I know the undersea cables are privately owned too.
At this point it's a distinction without much of a difference. For better or worse, SpaceX has now been fully integrated into the US military-industrial complex. They have huge DoD contracts to build out the Starshield constellation, including the prompt replacement capability. The US government is going to treat attacks on our critical communications infrastructure seriously, regardless of whether the hardware is publicly or privately owned.
Not clear how the world's richest man sees this situation. He certainly appeared to feel free to make his own decisions in Ukraine.
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weren't those cut exactly because they are the starlink backbone when over Ukraine?