Comment by fc417fc802
9 hours ago
If the goal is to avoid various national jurisdictions, what about floating a barge out into international waters? Do it near the equator in the middle of the pacific to maximize the difficulty of humans getting there. Use the money saved by not needing to launch into orbit to purchase massive gun turrets to prevent piracy.
Instead of one large floating barge, make it a thousand smaller floating barges connected with Starlink. Monitor vessel activity near them and autonomously move the fleet to make intercepting them as difficult as possible. Rig them to explode upon capture to deter theft.
(Hint to the downvoters: I'm not being serious.)
A submarine comes by, says hi by torpedo, bye. Woe!
blub °Oo.
China already has a ground based laser array for military purposes (blinding more or less permanently spy satellites). Some think it could be upgraded to hard killing satellites, which I don't think is yet possible (the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy), but with something heavily constrained by heat dissipation like an orbital datacenter, that last array could overload it and fry it...
> the amount of energy to burn a sat is also enough to ionise air and thus waste and disperse the laser's energy
Why would you use a single beam? Place them far enough apart that they don't begin to converge until the atmosphere has thinned out.
Yes because when your infrastructure is Earth based, your staff is Earth based and your customers are Earth based, your company's legal registration and owner are Earth based, it would be absolutely impossible for a government to enforce any type of jurisdictional control if your datacenters were in space.
And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...
Absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy many hundreds of satellites (assuming that SpaceX wouldn't be a willing launch partner).
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As I understand it the idea is to have many of such sats. Literally clouds of them.
Not necessarily in orbits which are easily reachable for current ASATs, nor 'economical'.
For now...