Comment by perihelions
2 days ago
- "We still have 30+ nuclear reactors hanging over our heads in space that will come down one day."
To be fair that's multiple centuries away, so there won't be very much radiation left. And since they were relatively low-power reactors, there wasn't that much to begin with.
It is but these reactors use U235 which has a half-life of 700 million years. So yeah they will still be pretty much radioactive when they come down. Also, the decay products tend to be radioactive too and have their own half lives on top of that.
one good shove with a sattelite designed to sweep orbits free, will put one down. this could happen tomorrow, evil willing.
You think if someone was evil and willing, they’d design and launch a satellite designed to seek out another satellite and take it out of orbit in a way that causes it to drop randomly into the atmosphere?
All this instead of simply launching a satellite that does what they want? Or skipping the satellite and doing it with terrestrial solutions?
Some people’s threat models are very upside down.
its already in place, it only requires abuse for it to happen.
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A good shove being about 250m/s of delta v? Perhaps more to be certain of where you’re landing. Not exactly trivial or stealthy.
Why not just load up some nuclear waste on your “shoving device” and launch that exactly where you want?
kudos for the thinking cap--
its all up there already, all you need is access, haxd or authd, and you have a dirty bomb from orbit, and the requirement to orient to the threat.
and it could be done more than once if the killer satellite survives
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