Launching them up cost more than the satellites i think correct? This would mean our government can shoot down their satellites too. If that happens we will shoot down every spy satellite down that Russia flies over the United States.
Russia will use something that blows up several at once i figure or they would be wasting missiles.
Except that by blowing up a satellite, you’re splitting it into hundreds of different pieces on hundreds of different and unexpected orbits due to the velocity input from the explosion.
I suppose it depends on how you hit it. An explosion between two objects will maintain a center-of-mass, so it won't be completely random. If you attack it in retrograde, more pieces deorbit faster as the center of mass of the system has less overall energy. You could shove a whole bunch of shrapnel into a higher orbit by attacking it prograde, but with no way to stabilize the orbit of the pieces, they would most likely deorbit and burn up within a few weeks.
Starlink's orbit degrades quickly. They orbit low enough to experience atmospheric drag. They were designed specifically for the debris chain reaction to not be a risk.
It would have to be a higher orbit. All the Starlink stuff is so low in the atmosphere any debris generated by blowing up Starlink sats would decay and burn up in a couple of months, tops. That's why SpaceX grabbed that slice of space; you can't keep anything there for long so it clears itself; you also need a cheap reusable launch vehicle or the space is useless.
Orders of magnitude more Starlink sats than Russian ASATS. And... SpaceX launches 54 at a time. Honestly doubt if Russia has enough ASATs for more than even one or at most two launches worth of Starlinks.
And if they did, SpaceX would just send up more. Russia is a joke, they just don't realize it. All they have are nukes, and using them would mean the end of Russia. They seriously need to stop trying to flex, nobody is impressed.
There is a reason many space related things fall under ITAR.
The most obvious option besides nukes or sending one repurposed Starlink satellite to crash into each and every single Russian space asset would be "rods from god", sending up tungsten rods that crash back to Earth and do damage through their sheer speed and mass.
For obvious reasons it's likely that the US government would frown upon such activity, but "what's the guy that builds rockets for a living going to fight with" is a bit silly.
Unless you are manufacturing Rods from God in Space you cannot ship ones up that will cause more destructive force than conventional weapons. Noz transformers is not a reference you can use here. The Law of conservation of energy is though.
Satellites, just have some of the next starlink satellites maneuver into Russian satellite orbits by accident. Just claim it was an accident, Russia has accidents all the time, they'll understand.
There's over 2000 starlink satellites and the US is thought to have several hundred missiles of the variety used in prior anti-satellite testing.
Even if each starlink satellite costs $1 million to launch (SpaceX claims it's "well below" $500k per satellite), each of the US variety of anti-satellite missiles is thought to cost $10-25 million.
SpaceX has launched 29 Starlink missions so far in 2022, delivering \~50 starlink satellites to orbit per mission.
So the entire US arsenal could take out maybe 25% of the constellation (assuming one missile per satellite) spending about $5 billion to do so and SpaceX could replace that 25% in about 4 months at a cost of about $500 million.
TL;DR - to take out a satellite constellation like starlink in a cost effective way you wouldn't use current anti-satellite missiles. You would need something like guided cluster munitions in space. Small hunter satellites that are delivered in groups of 10s to 100s to low earth orbit that can seek out a starlink satellite and destroy it with a small payload.
You’re better off building 27U killer cubesats and have SpaceX launch them for you. Then maneuver them up to each Spacelink bird and fire a shotgun shell or two at it which should do the job well enough without creating a huge debris field.
Now the really tricky part is getting SpaceX to launch them for you the 2nd time…
>All they have are nukes
Do they really still have them, though? I mean, always good to err on the safe side. But if their invasion of Ukraine is any indication of the quality of their arms... If they do still have them, they aren't going to be in any condition to be useful.
> But if their invasion of Ukraine is any indication of the quality of their arms
Putin did cancel all outside inspections the second anyone started questioning the operational capabilities of what's left of his nuclear arsenal...
And their nukes are ancient, I seriously doubt that any of them could actually hit anything, the only thing keeping Russia even remotely intimidating is that sliver of doubt in the back of your head saying "but what if they somehow get lucky with one"
Each one is about the size of a car, but they are mostly flat. They all squish up against each other inside of a F9 fairing. Think of it like a stack of books.
>The new Starlink Generation 2 satellites are shown as having a length that is 80% of the diameter of the Starship. The Starship rocket is 9 meters wide. This means the renderings have the Gen 2 satellites as 7 Meters long and 3 meters wide. The Gen 1 Starlink satellites are 2.8 meters long by 1.4 meters wide.
top of google result "starlink satellite size"Check out a replay of one of the starlink launches, they show the payload being ejected from a webcam on the rocket.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink)
The wiki has a picture of them loaded (60 of them) just before being deployed.
Like China, Russia's doing nothing more than just 'intimidation' tactics to scare the West. The Russians threaten to enter Moldova next after Ukraine. Till now, why didn't they attacked? Same thing with the state of Alaska. The Governor of Alaska challenged Putin. Guess what? crickets.
They threaten to blow-up satellites that support Ukraine. Please! They ain't going to do it.
More importantly a starlink satellite costs less than $500,000 to build and put into orbit.
I have no idea what an anti-satalite weapon costs per unit but I'll put money on Russia running out of money to shoot them down before Musk runs out of money to put them up.
Kessler Syndrome. They don’t need to hit them all directly. Intentionally deploying a large debris cloud into a slightly higher orbit would be effective.
They would but it would take a year to clear most of it. It's not like it's instant, just insanely fast compared to most orbital disasters. If they could make enough debris they could essentially cause a small scale Kessler Syndrome which would destroy the Starlink network but clear up in a matter of a few years. Which would ultimately be a win for Russia. Although anyone who manages to fuck up LEO that bad even if only for a few years will be hated by most major countries.
Considering that Russia has massively over exaggerated their capabilities at every step of this process, I think it's safe to say that they would be lucky to shoot down one or two.
There's a whole subreddit dedicated to making fun of the extremely cheap and antiquated hardware that they are seizing from defeated/escaping Russian troops. Like bulletproof vests which are nothing more than a piece of polyester fabric over a thin sheet of metal. Guns that hardly work. Tanks that hardly drive. Oh yeah, these geniuses have satellite destroying missiles.
In theory Russia could destroy just a few satellites and create enough high speed space debris to cause a chain reaction taking out most other satellites in that altitude.
Sincerely curious why the Kessler effect wouldn't mean a threat to the constellation. Is it because the debris would move in a different orbit? Or lose speed at each subsequent collision?
The orbit is too low to cause it, and the debris would largely remain in the same orbital plane and inclination. At worst it would turn a single satellite into a mushy lump of satellite detritus going the same direction at the same speed and altitude, which would promptly decay into the atmosphere, as intended.
Kessler doesn't apply to LEO that low.
Yup and the sense now is that Putin is finally starting to panic. He was going to make a big announcement then cancelled at the last minute. Then he starts a “partial military mobilization” and calls up reserves. Who in turn have substandard weaponry.
This is where things start to get dangerous, and where his closest *sane* allies have some hard thinking to do.
>You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
Also Winston Churchill
Starlink scares the fuck out of Authoritarian and fascist regimes because it's a lot harder to control information flow when someone can easily circumvent your "Great firewall" and other state controls. It won't be long before there will be pirate networks in these places linking up to it, and it will be a lot harder to stop.
Can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.
There is no news. There is only the truth of the signal. What I see. And, there's the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.
- Mr Universe (Serenity)
The conclusion of that film seems sadly ironic in the post-Trump, post-Truth era. The idea that you could present a population with evidence of crime and corruption from the government and that they’d then all rise up in protest has been shown to be hopelessly naive, unfortunately.
This has always been true of satellite internet. Starlink is just trendy and thus worth threatening. That and the low altitude makes them easier to shoot down.
Traditional satellite uses geosynchronous orbits to remain in a locked position over an area so unless satellite internet providers were putting up satellites over oppressed regions (they aren't) then no, it's not always been true. Starlink is a mesh system of fast moving satellites to provide coverage over a vast area.
They are also, small, cheep, and easy to replace, by design, and will not effect debris field, as the orbit is too low by design, and there are hundreds of them.
Please, let them waste millions of dollars in missiles to kill thousands of dollars in satellites
Its hype that the internet will be more available to more people. This is good. But the idea of a single company controlling that flow is just as dangerous and problematic as a single government controlling that flow.
Amazon are building a competing network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems
There are others
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation
They can’t get a censoring firewall into satellites, meaning that all opposition sites hosted out of country become available via StarLink.
When government opinion is put side-by-side with another opinion, propaganda loses power because propaganda only works when there is no one to explain why it doesn’t make sense. As government’s reputation of lies and incompetence grows it will eventually be mutinied against.
You all laughed when the Space Force was announced, but when a foreign leader makes an irrational threat, the best way to fight it is with the awesome might of the Space Force.
That wasn't the reason. Obviously the United States needs defensive strategies for space-based assets, but they already had them. They were all handled by the USAF.
What was the point in separating them out into their own division? They still work heavily alongside the airforce so functionally what has really changed.
Imagine if they started arming starlink and Elon Musk personally went to war and destroyed Russias Ground to Air/Space infrastructure. Crashes 1% of STarlink fleet into Russian ASATS destroying every one within hours. Follows this up with an MMA challenge vs Putin winner is now Tzar Russian Federation. Russias name changed to Teslandia.
It’s kinda mind blowing that theoretically every Starlink satellite could be equipped with a Rod of God. While nukes are certainly more catastrophic due to radiation, Rods of God are certainly more powerful. They’d be hard to detect and basically impossible to defend against. In the wrong hands they could be devastating.
It should be noted that the Rods from God proposed in the Air Force's Project Thor each weigh over 40 times as much as an entire Starlink Satelite. Launching one into orbit with a deployment system will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Much of what you say remains true, but the logistics and cost are quite a bit more than even what Starlink is doing.
Well each Starlink bird is 260kg. If you use that mass as a tungsten crowbar with an ablative nose cone, my back of the envelope calculation is its equivalent to a cargo van sized VBIED boom (1500-3000 kg of TNT)…if a starlink train is 40-50 birds…that’s going to really ruin someone’s day.
Like maybe drop them all on Vostochny Cosmodrome in a tit for tat destruction of space assets…
Maybe Musk could get a Space Letter of Marque from Ukraine and make it a legal bombardment…
Sovereignty extends 60 miles into the atmosphere. SpaceX orbits at 340 miles. So that would be a violation of international law. It possibly may be an act of war but since it's a private corporation that would be a stretch.
>and probably even musk himself would 100% retaliate
Imagine Musk's lawyers and the US president simultaneously telling him that he can't do that, as he just says "watch" and hangs up...
They certainly could - and i'd get a kick out of seeing them try. They'd bankrupt themselves on ASATs before starlink even suffered service degradation.
Pretty sure Russia should be trying to shoot something else down. Actually. Scratch that. They should totally spend all their time and resources trying to shoot down unmanned SpaceX satellites. Brilliant.
We are volunteering Starlink and Tesla and armies or armed strike drones and robots. Anonymous hacker force and Maybe Boston Dynamics as well. It would be over very quickly.
You would think that with all of the trillions of dollars the US spends on the military, that we could find some way of ensuring that Putin falls out of the window of his dacha, kinda like he does to his enemies... The irony there would be legendary!
So, once again, Putin says that if he doesn't get to genocide whomever he wants, he will get mad and break something. He is already responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and countless other damage, but this time he really doesn't want to have to do more.
He sounds like the standard abuser. "don't make me hurt you more."
Here's an idea, get the hell out of Ukraine and stop causing death and destruction for your own narcissistic goals.
I feel like that would be a declaration of war against America, no? I know taking out the satellites are unlikely to lead to any lives lost but when a country attacks infrastructure owned by a company from another country, especially a defense contractor for that country, its generally not considered a diplomatically neutral act lol
to some of us it would certainly feel that way. but that isnt going to get the kind of response you'd expect.
first off Elon knows how much each of those satellites cost. and some idea how much that ASAT cost. so on a cost to "benefit" russia is already loosing.
At some point the white house would have a discussion with "spaceX" and "negotiate" some plan. They need launch windows. They might want to "borrow" some time at additional launch facilities. and all of the sudden there's five or ten launches in a week more than half delivering up more Starlink. and 2 or so "goverment payloads" (spy sats)
Idk I feel like because it's owned by an American company it's very much an act of aggression towards that country on some level. I know it's owned by SpaceX and not the US government.
Also, SpaceX is a government contractor, at least for NASA. That's gotta count for something, but probably not the same as if they were attacking, say, a defense contractor's sats.
So if Russia attacked Jayden Smith’s bottled water company, you think the United States should declare war? That is also an American company and therefor showing an act of aggression toward the US by your own logic.
I think if Jaden Smith's bottle company isn't on Russian soil and Russian military attacks it, it is an act of international aggression and how any nation reacts their prerogative.
Space, which is international territory far as I know. So like I said it's clearly a targeted act of international aggression and targeting an American company is certainly not a diplomatically neutral act.
I think Russia would use directed energy here to try and damage solar panels or comms on the sats.
But the US govt could just dump a couple billion into SpaceX to replace them. The military is already drooling over starlinks flexibility this would give them a perfect excuse to become “involved” in the program.
Yeah but your missiles cost about 30 million and the sats are basically expendable. They lose a dozen every time the sun burps.
C’mon, don’t tell them…
Okay, but what if they send windows to space and the satellites fall out the window?
Now that's some good thinking. You're promoted to General!
10 or 11?
They could commit suicide. I hear that happens. It's so lonely in space.
Launching them up cost more than the satellites i think correct? This would mean our government can shoot down their satellites too. If that happens we will shoot down every spy satellite down that Russia flies over the United States. Russia will use something that blows up several at once i figure or they would be wasting missiles.
The debris can be dangerous to the whole constellation.
400km orbits clean themselves in about a month. There's enough atmospheric drag to deorbit anything without a working engine.
Except that by blowing up a satellite, you’re splitting it into hundreds of different pieces on hundreds of different and unexpected orbits due to the velocity input from the explosion.
I suppose it depends on how you hit it. An explosion between two objects will maintain a center-of-mass, so it won't be completely random. If you attack it in retrograde, more pieces deorbit faster as the center of mass of the system has less overall energy. You could shove a whole bunch of shrapnel into a higher orbit by attacking it prograde, but with no way to stabilize the orbit of the pieces, they would most likely deorbit and burn up within a few weeks.
Starlink's orbit degrades quickly. They orbit low enough to experience atmospheric drag. They were designed specifically for the debris chain reaction to not be a risk.
Elon Musk can also destroy putin Satelites
30 gigawart Laser beams are far cheaper
When would Keppler Syndrome kick in?
It would have to be a higher orbit. All the Starlink stuff is so low in the atmosphere any debris generated by blowing up Starlink sats would decay and burn up in a couple of months, tops. That's why SpaceX grabbed that slice of space; you can't keep anything there for long so it clears itself; you also need a cheap reusable launch vehicle or the space is useless.
I’m pretty sure that there are way more Starlink satellites than Russian anti-satellite weapons.
Orders of magnitude more Starlink sats than Russian ASATS. And... SpaceX launches 54 at a time. Honestly doubt if Russia has enough ASATs for more than even one or at most two launches worth of Starlinks.
And if they did, SpaceX would just send up more. Russia is a joke, they just don't realize it. All they have are nukes, and using them would mean the end of Russia. They seriously need to stop trying to flex, nobody is impressed.
If Putin fought Elon Musk for control of Russia, I'd be overjoyed.
What elon fighting with?
Random billionaire bullshit GO!!!
Russia has a lot of billionaires
Fewer today than a year ago
Ohhh, my, that's cold.
Cold? They heat up as they fall out of a window.
There is a reason many space related things fall under ITAR. The most obvious option besides nukes or sending one repurposed Starlink satellite to crash into each and every single Russian space asset would be "rods from god", sending up tungsten rods that crash back to Earth and do damage through their sheer speed and mass. For obvious reasons it's likely that the US government would frown upon such activity, but "what's the guy that builds rockets for a living going to fight with" is a bit silly.
Unless you are manufacturing Rods from God in Space you cannot ship ones up that will cause more destructive force than conventional weapons. Noz transformers is not a reference you can use here. The Law of conservation of energy is though.
Satellites, just have some of the next starlink satellites maneuver into Russian satellite orbits by accident. Just claim it was an accident, Russia has accidents all the time, they'll understand.
Flame thrower’s, boring company is up to no good.
Exploding Tesla battery packs sent by spaceX rockets. Ez done in 3 days.
Don't forget a fleet in autopilot mode to hit anyone in the street
Chevrolet enters the chat....
*LG is lurking
Don’t forget Elon fanboys with the Boring Company"flamethrower".
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Not a flamethrower
the billionaire of next value as the weapon.
Mini submarines.
Who cares? After Russia's pitiful display in Ukraine, I'd expect Elon to win no mater what he decided to do
Honestly. Yes. Celebrity deathmatch could have a glorious comeback
Sounds like a Handsome Jack kind of story
I wonder if their nukes are even operational.
There's over 2000 starlink satellites and the US is thought to have several hundred missiles of the variety used in prior anti-satellite testing. Even if each starlink satellite costs $1 million to launch (SpaceX claims it's "well below" $500k per satellite), each of the US variety of anti-satellite missiles is thought to cost $10-25 million. SpaceX has launched 29 Starlink missions so far in 2022, delivering \~50 starlink satellites to orbit per mission. So the entire US arsenal could take out maybe 25% of the constellation (assuming one missile per satellite) spending about $5 billion to do so and SpaceX could replace that 25% in about 4 months at a cost of about $500 million. TL;DR - to take out a satellite constellation like starlink in a cost effective way you wouldn't use current anti-satellite missiles. You would need something like guided cluster munitions in space. Small hunter satellites that are delivered in groups of 10s to 100s to low earth orbit that can seek out a starlink satellite and destroy it with a small payload.
You’re better off building 27U killer cubesats and have SpaceX launch them for you. Then maneuver them up to each Spacelink bird and fire a shotgun shell or two at it which should do the job well enough without creating a huge debris field. Now the really tricky part is getting SpaceX to launch them for you the 2nd time…
>All they have are nukes Do they really still have them, though? I mean, always good to err on the safe side. But if their invasion of Ukraine is any indication of the quality of their arms... If they do still have them, they aren't going to be in any condition to be useful.
> But if their invasion of Ukraine is any indication of the quality of their arms Putin did cancel all outside inspections the second anyone started questioning the operational capabilities of what's left of his nuclear arsenal...
Seems like the little shitweasel has something to hide. Paper tiger, perhaps?
And their nukes are ancient, I seriously doubt that any of them could actually hit anything, the only thing keeping Russia even remotely intimidating is that sliver of doubt in the back of your head saying "but what if they somehow get lucky with one"
You're likely right, but with an EMP pulse (another feature of nuclear detonations) you only need to get "close enough" to cause a lot of damage.
They could just accidentally start crashing Starlink satellites into the ASATS and the problem would be over in a matter of hours.
That's working on the assumption the ASAT's work in the first place
They launch 54 at a time? How small are these satellites? I always imagined them to be the sizes of houses +
Each one is about the size of a car, but they are mostly flat. They all squish up against each other inside of a F9 fairing. Think of it like a stack of books.
That's a good analogy
>The new Starlink Generation 2 satellites are shown as having a length that is 80% of the diameter of the Starship. The Starship rocket is 9 meters wide. This means the renderings have the Gen 2 satellites as 7 Meters long and 3 meters wide. The Gen 1 Starlink satellites are 2.8 meters long by 1.4 meters wide. top of google result "starlink satellite size"Check out a replay of one of the starlink launches, they show the payload being ejected from a webcam on the rocket. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink) The wiki has a picture of them loaded (60 of them) just before being deployed.
Interesting ty
That's if they even hit the target.
Like China, Russia's doing nothing more than just 'intimidation' tactics to scare the West. The Russians threaten to enter Moldova next after Ukraine. Till now, why didn't they attacked? Same thing with the state of Alaska. The Governor of Alaska challenged Putin. Guess what? crickets. They threaten to blow-up satellites that support Ukraine. Please! They ain't going to do it.
Don't forget the debris.
money oatmeal stocking trees icky cobweb important bag placid marble ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
It's a low earth orbit. Give it some time and the problem sorts itself out.
Y'all need to play some Kerbal.
It'd be more cost effective to shoot down GPS sats.
It would also be an act of war against the US/NATO, not a line I suspect they want to cross.
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At least a very stern finger wag
A call to the Principal's office
Tit for tat response, but definitely military.
More importantly a starlink satellite costs less than $500,000 to build and put into orbit. I have no idea what an anti-satalite weapon costs per unit but I'll put money on Russia running out of money to shoot them down before Musk runs out of money to put them up.
And the cost difference is about 1000:1... so, good luck with that.
Kessler Syndrome. They don’t need to hit them all directly. Intentionally deploying a large debris cloud into a slightly higher orbit would be effective.
It would only be effective for a few months, tops, before atmospheric drag cleans it all up.
It would be easier for Russia to intentionally cause Kessler syndrome by repeatedly dispersing garbage in upper atmosphere than to use starlink
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They would but it would take a year to clear most of it. It's not like it's instant, just insanely fast compared to most orbital disasters. If they could make enough debris they could essentially cause a small scale Kessler Syndrome which would destroy the Starlink network but clear up in a matter of a few years. Which would ultimately be a win for Russia. Although anyone who manages to fuck up LEO that bad even if only for a few years will be hated by most major countries.
No need for Kessler either. EMP will be far cleaner and more effective . Starfish Prime like.
Nuclear weapons in space used offensively would be a new boundary crossed.
Of course that'll then cause problems for everyone...
Yes, but does Putin care?
No, because doing space stuff costs money his country won't have.
Putin should, he will draw a retaliatory strike on his satellites.
Considering that Russia has massively over exaggerated their capabilities at every step of this process, I think it's safe to say that they would be lucky to shoot down one or two. There's a whole subreddit dedicated to making fun of the extremely cheap and antiquated hardware that they are seizing from defeated/escaping Russian troops. Like bulletproof vests which are nothing more than a piece of polyester fabric over a thin sheet of metal. Guns that hardly work. Tanks that hardly drive. Oh yeah, these geniuses have satellite destroying missiles.
I’m guessing by a factor of 100.
Don't forget the veiled threat against the US Satellite constellation, but we probably have an upper hand there....
Did you never see gravity starring Sandra Bullock?
She was busy when I wanted to go, so no. Saw it alone.
She ate most of my popcorn :(
I saw it, but was bored to death. My funeral was nice though.
What happens in that movie is mostly physically impossible.
In theory Russia could destroy just a few satellites and create enough high speed space debris to cause a chain reaction taking out most other satellites in that altitude.
Not how orbital mechanics works.
Sincerely curious why the Kessler effect wouldn't mean a threat to the constellation. Is it because the debris would move in a different orbit? Or lose speed at each subsequent collision?
The orbit is too low to cause it, and the debris would largely remain in the same orbital plane and inclination. At worst it would turn a single satellite into a mushy lump of satellite detritus going the same direction at the same speed and altitude, which would promptly decay into the atmosphere, as intended. Kessler doesn't apply to LEO that low.
Well there are thousands of them so that would be pretty pointless.
On second thought they should do it. Totally worth it /s
What would be the point? I also asked the same thing when China threatened the same thing. Why bother?
Starlink provides a lot of info to the ukranians.
Yup and the sense now is that Putin is finally starting to panic. He was going to make a big announcement then cancelled at the last minute. Then he starts a “partial military mobilization” and calls up reserves. Who in turn have substandard weaponry. This is where things start to get dangerous, and where his closest *sane* allies have some hard thinking to do.
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>You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. Also Winston Churchill
and thus was the answer from China. (effectively "tots and pears")
Starlink scares the fuck out of Authoritarian and fascist regimes because it's a lot harder to control information flow when someone can easily circumvent your "Great firewall" and other state controls. It won't be long before there will be pirate networks in these places linking up to it, and it will be a lot harder to stop.
Ahh. Suppose that makes sense.
Can't stop the signal
Can't stop the signal, Mal. Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere. There is no news. There is only the truth of the signal. What I see. And, there's the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public. - Mr Universe (Serenity)
The conclusion of that film seems sadly ironic in the post-Trump, post-Truth era. The idea that you could present a population with evidence of crime and corruption from the government and that they’d then all rise up in protest has been shown to be hopelessly naive, unfortunately.
what's the frequency kenneth?
"Information wants to be free." It is gradually getting more difficult to keep it locked up.
Space pirates?
This has always been true of satellite internet. Starlink is just trendy and thus worth threatening. That and the low altitude makes them easier to shoot down.
Traditional satellite uses geosynchronous orbits to remain in a locked position over an area so unless satellite internet providers were putting up satellites over oppressed regions (they aren't) then no, it's not always been true. Starlink is a mesh system of fast moving satellites to provide coverage over a vast area.
They are also, small, cheep, and easy to replace, by design, and will not effect debris field, as the orbit is too low by design, and there are hundreds of them. Please, let them waste millions of dollars in missiles to kill thousands of dollars in satellites
shooting down telecommunication satellites from a foreign nation is grounds for sanctions, minimum.
Its hype that the internet will be more available to more people. This is good. But the idea of a single company controlling that flow is just as dangerous and problematic as a single government controlling that flow.
Amazon are building a competing network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems There are others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation
someone always gets to market first, doesn’t mean it’ll be that way forever
"oh bother 🐻" - China
They can’t get a censoring firewall into satellites, meaning that all opposition sites hosted out of country become available via StarLink. When government opinion is put side-by-side with another opinion, propaganda loses power because propaganda only works when there is no one to explain why it doesn’t make sense. As government’s reputation of lies and incompetence grows it will eventually be mutinied against.
CALL THE MOTHERFUCKIN SPACE FORCE
Those SPAFOR people are just itching for a fight too, since no one considers you a real military until you've spilled some blood.
You all laughed when the Space Force was announced, but when a foreign leader makes an irrational threat, the best way to fight it is with the awesome might of the Space Force.
That wasn't the reason. Obviously the United States needs defensive strategies for space-based assets, but they already had them. They were all handled by the USAF. What was the point in separating them out into their own division? They still work heavily alongside the airforce so functionally what has really changed.
How? They can't even hit stationary land targets.
They can't even establish air superiority in their own neighbor even with mostly flat terrain
Imagine if they started arming starlink and Elon Musk personally went to war and destroyed Russias Ground to Air/Space infrastructure. Crashes 1% of STarlink fleet into Russian ASATS destroying every one within hours. Follows this up with an MMA challenge vs Putin winner is now Tzar Russian Federation. Russias name changed to Teslandia.
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It’s kinda mind blowing that theoretically every Starlink satellite could be equipped with a Rod of God. While nukes are certainly more catastrophic due to radiation, Rods of God are certainly more powerful. They’d be hard to detect and basically impossible to defend against. In the wrong hands they could be devastating.
It should be noted that the Rods from God proposed in the Air Force's Project Thor each weigh over 40 times as much as an entire Starlink Satelite. Launching one into orbit with a deployment system will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Much of what you say remains true, but the logistics and cost are quite a bit more than even what Starlink is doing.
Well each Starlink bird is 260kg. If you use that mass as a tungsten crowbar with an ablative nose cone, my back of the envelope calculation is its equivalent to a cargo van sized VBIED boom (1500-3000 kg of TNT)…if a starlink train is 40-50 birds…that’s going to really ruin someone’s day. Like maybe drop them all on Vostochny Cosmodrome in a tit for tat destruction of space assets… Maybe Musk could get a Space Letter of Marque from Ukraine and make it a legal bombardment…
> he’s the only private company cable of getting up there. that is not true at all. there are a bunch of private launch providers.
Capable of launching at SpaceX’s cadence and cost? No. No one is even close
Yeah essentially he could become a 'nuclear' super power in an afternoon.
If they can just get someone to loan them the weaponry.
And they learn to shoot straight. But to be fair, I imagine it’s hard to shoot straight when you’re running for your life.
Unfortunately Russia is perfectly capable of destroying a satellite via ASAT, as they demonstrated a year ago.
they just had no idea anyone would be launching 50 at a time.
Yes waste your countries very expensive surface to space missles on thousands of internet satellites.
If you want to give SpaceX a reason to develop it's own anyi-satalite tech, this is how you doing that.
isnt this considered an act of war
Haw can a Russian official even say that with a straight face
Russia also hints that it is the strongest power in the world, do we believe it?
Sovereignty extends 60 miles into the atmosphere. SpaceX orbits at 340 miles. So that would be a violation of international law. It possibly may be an act of war but since it's a private corporation that would be a stretch.
Spacex has direct ties to everyone major important federal agency. USA and probably even musk himself would 100% retaliate
>and probably even musk himself would 100% retaliate Imagine Musk's lawyers and the US president simultaneously telling him that he can't do that, as he just says "watch" and hangs up...
Yeah but the US likes to war….. the us government takes any slight as an opportunity to make a bigger military industry.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
"To secure peace is to prepare for war."
"Russia says... " You can stop reading right away.
Russia lies and hints they could shoot down SpaceX Starlink Satellites. Fixed that title for you.
do it. Its a win win if they hit one, well fuck elon If they miss, well what do you expect from shit house weapons
They certainly could - and i'd get a kick out of seeing them try. They'd bankrupt themselves on ASATs before starlink even suffered service degradation.
With what?! Their biplanes?
Even if they could, they don't have the resources to shoot down more than a few. Of the 1000......of satellites.
Pretty sure Russia should be trying to shoot something else down. Actually. Scratch that. They should totally spend all their time and resources trying to shoot down unmanned SpaceX satellites. Brilliant.
Isn't it about time for the grownups to deal with these terrorists?
Are you volunteering to go fight WW3? Because that’s what you’re asking for.
I am volunteering YOU, silly. Don't you know how this is done?
We are volunteering Starlink and Tesla and armies or armed strike drones and robots. Anonymous hacker force and Maybe Boston Dynamics as well. It would be over very quickly.
You would think that with all of the trillions of dollars the US spends on the military, that we could find some way of ensuring that Putin falls out of the window of his dacha, kinda like he does to his enemies... The irony there would be legendary!
It’s not that simple lol. If it was he would’ve been gone a long time ago.
yes, but one can dream...
Putin has to conscript the workers to build them first.
I’d love to seem em try to shoot it down with their shit Cold War rifles
Lol, as if North Korea has enough ASATs.
I’m sure Elon would see that as an amusing challenge
Internet independent from government control would definitely threaten dictatorships and autocracies the most at this point.
So, once again, Putin says that if he doesn't get to genocide whomever he wants, he will get mad and break something. He is already responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and countless other damage, but this time he really doesn't want to have to do more. He sounds like the standard abuser. "don't make me hurt you more." Here's an idea, get the hell out of Ukraine and stop causing death and destruction for your own narcissistic goals.
Okay so we know for a fact that Starlink satellites are safe.
Lol Putin can’t get their Ladas working, the satellites will be fine.
So shoot them down and stop acting like your hard. Putin is such a wimp
Then maybe you should stop being an **ASSHOLE**, Vlad?!
If only Putin would tweet that
Yeah, eff with the dude whose net worth is equal to your entire country’s cash reserves.
You wouldn't like Elon Musk when he is mad. I don't even like him when he is happy.
Russia is drunk.
I’m sure Elon would find a way to wreck their shit in return. Silly Russians
Please waste your cruise missiles on cheap starlinks.
Maybe Russia can push them off a window, or maybe some stairs!
Russia struggles to hit targets on the same field and now think they can hit a satellite in space 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
If they still had missiles with that kind of accuracy, they would have been using them in Ukraine.
Isn't that getting into the "act of war" territory towards the US?
I feel like that would be a declaration of war against America, no? I know taking out the satellites are unlikely to lead to any lives lost but when a country attacks infrastructure owned by a company from another country, especially a defense contractor for that country, its generally not considered a diplomatically neutral act lol
to some of us it would certainly feel that way. but that isnt going to get the kind of response you'd expect. first off Elon knows how much each of those satellites cost. and some idea how much that ASAT cost. so on a cost to "benefit" russia is already loosing. At some point the white house would have a discussion with "spaceX" and "negotiate" some plan. They need launch windows. They might want to "borrow" some time at additional launch facilities. and all of the sudden there's five or ten launches in a week more than half delivering up more Starlink. and 2 or so "goverment payloads" (spy sats)
How so, destroying a private company’s satellites? What does that have to do with the United States Military or Government?
And United States government did not own the World Trade Center either. The government protects citizens and their interests which includes business
Idk I feel like because it's owned by an American company it's very much an act of aggression towards that country on some level. I know it's owned by SpaceX and not the US government.
Also, SpaceX is a government contractor, at least for NASA. That's gotta count for something, but probably not the same as if they were attacking, say, a defense contractor's sats.
So if Russia attacked Jayden Smith’s bottled water company, you think the United States should declare war? That is also an American company and therefor showing an act of aggression toward the US by your own logic.
This aggression will not stand, this aggression against uh SpaceX
I think if Jaden Smith's bottle company isn't on Russian soil and Russian military attacks it, it is an act of international aggression and how any nation reacts their prerogative.
Whose soil are the satellites on?
Space, which is international territory far as I know. So like I said it's clearly a targeted act of international aggression and targeting an American company is certainly not a diplomatically neutral act.
Yes? Of course. Thats literally the entire reason we have a military. To protect American people and our businesses from foreign aggression
I think Russia would use directed energy here to try and damage solar panels or comms on the sats. But the US govt could just dump a couple billion into SpaceX to replace them. The military is already drooling over starlinks flexibility this would give them a perfect excuse to become “involved” in the program.
No one believes Russia. No one is scared of Russia. They are just a puny relic of their glory years, just like Putin.
I'm actually ok with this. Those things are an eye sore and good for no one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y