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Comment by consumer451

12 hours ago

tone: I don't really understand orbital mechanics, but I do understand geopolitics a bit.

1. China is very concerned about Starlink-like constellations. They want their own, but mostly they want to be able to destroy competitors. That is really hard.

2. Many countries have single ASAT capabilities. Where one projectile can hit one satellite. However, this is basically shoot a bullet, with a bullet, on different trajectories.

3. > Sure, it'd take orbital launch capabilities to lift ... how many bags of metal scrap and explosives?

If I understand orbital mechanics... those clouds of chaff would need to oppose the same orbit, otherwise it is a gentle approach. In the non-aligned orbit, it's another bullet hitting a bullet scenarios as in 2, but with a birdshot shotgun.

My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD, as far as mass to orbit, all at once! If you blow up some group of Starlink, that chaff cloud will just keep in orbit on the same axis. It will not keep blowing up other Starlinks.

The gentle grenade approach was possibly tested by the CCP here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820992

6 comments

consumer451

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defrost  12 hours ago

> tone: I don't really understand orbital mechanics, but I do understand geopolitics a bit.

Thanks for the clarification, I guess that explains this (from you):

> Think about how hard it would be to practically take out Starlink.

and this:

> My entire point is that constellations in GEO

which you've now corrected.

Moving on:

> My entire point is that constellations in LEO take hundreds of Falcon 9's worth of mass to orbit and delta-v to destroy them, as in-orbit grenades which approach gently. This IS REALLY HARD

So let's not do that .. how hard is it to render the entire LEO zone a shit show with contra wise clouds of frag that cause cascading failures?

Forget the geopolitics of China et al. .. LEO launch capabilities are spreading about the globe, it's not just major world powers that pose a threat here.

  • consumer451  12 hours ago

    Ok... so, let's reset, please. I bet that we have very similar intentions, and yet on internet forums, we have perfected the art of users speaking past each other.

    Just to get on the same page here. My arugument is that prior to Elon Musk, the only human capable of launching >1M distributed solar powered inference nodes, if one accepts runaway AGI/ASI as a threat... prior to that we had a few hundred terrestrial AI inference mega-data centers. Most of them had easily disrupted power supplies by one dude with a Sawzall.

    Now, we are moving to a paradigm where the power supply is the sun, the orbital plane gives the nodes power 24/7, and the dude with the Sawzall needs to buy >10,000x (not sure of the the multiple here) the Sawzalls, and also give them escape velocity.

    Can we not agree that this is a much more difficult problem to "just unplug it," than it was when the potentially troublesome inference was terrestrial?