Spy satellites have always been valid targets. I don’t think they’re any more likely to shoot these ones down than any of the others.
For real. This seems like something that threatens musk and space x more than anybody else. The CIA effectively has unlimited money to replace whatever Russia takes down, but musk needing to pay to replace satellites to maintain starlink will hurt his bottom line. I don’t think tin foil hat wearers would be all that unreasonable to make the assumption that this is a veiled threat to keep musk in line. I frequently hear the argument that “billionaires can’t be bought” but I believe the exact opposite. They care more about money than morals and ethics, and can therefore be coerced by it either through hurting their bottom line or rewarding them with more of it. A dragon’s hoard can never be too big for the dragon to accept more, and nothing hurts the drain more than reducing its hoard.
I’m not sure anyone really needed a reminder about how that works, but it’s fair enough to point it out.
Yeah. Targeting SpaceX might be less provocative than a DoD-operated satellite, but either way Russia would be crazy to do it.
What would be crazy, is considering it off limits just because it has partial civilian use.
It wouldn’t be more or less provocative than targeting any other spy satellite.
okay putin. why don’t you attack another country like your role model that lost ww2 like that
Can’t wait to hear about space X satellites falling out of a window.
Hell yeah bitches!!
I Fucking Love the same joke for 3 years straight!!!
You seem stressed, would you like a cup of tea?
Only 3? I thought we were closing on a decade with this joke now.
We’d stop, if the joke wasn’t relevant anymore.
But I doubt Putin will fall out of a window himself anytime soon.
Win-win
On one hand, I really, really want those idiots in the Kremel to cause a Kessler Syndrome…(In theory it could also prevent ballistic missiles)
On the other hand, that would be quite bad for the rest of us.
Kessler syndrome is only a threat to satellites that are orbiting within the debris, it’s not really a danger if you’re only passing through (as a ballistic missile would).
Starlink birds fly too low for that, they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead.
I’d be worried about debris flung into steeply elliptical orbits, though. It wouldn’t take much to do some real damage to sats in higher orbits and once the cascade starts there’s not much we can do but wait decades for the worst of it to fall into the atmosphere.
Those steeply elliptical orbits would probably deorbit even quicker since a random impulse that boosts the apogee is likely to lower the perigee even more.
Musk supports Russia so what’s the play here
That CIA - SpaceX combo to make spy satellites mentioned some days back.
Huh, found that news on Google. So Musk is quite publicly doing something in secret, with the CIA and Russia. Definitely fishy
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You know they both are. Why come in here and lie? The LARP isn’t convincing.
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Both Trump and Elon have body counts. Trump killed thousands upon thousands. Elon has killed dozens at least. Which has nothing to do with both of them slurping Putin’s talking point alphabet soup down.
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Far right and the rest of the capitalists are pro each other until it no longer benefits them
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Fascists collaborating with fascists claiming to not is not very believable
As neonazis commonly say that antifa are the true fascists, how many truly believe and why
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So…Goldeneye part 2?
There are more sats than asat missiles. The math doesn’t work out. Unless they use nukes or shotgun blasts or something to make the entirety of leo unusable.
Don’t give them any ideas
It’s okay, Starlink is in a low enough orbit that it’s basically Kessler-proof.
The math doesn’t work out.
You only need enough asat missiles to create enough debris. Kessler handles the rest.
Hense making the entirety of leo unusable
Eh, not for long. LEO everything falls eventually. HEO… that can take a long hot minute.
LEO we’re still talking the better part of a decade, especially the derbies that get kicked to higher altitudes by the collisions. It’s not as permanent as higher up, but it’s still a strategic level capability, not tactical.
The numbers I’ve heard for LEO are like 4-5 years. But that point is whatever.
Kessler’ing the LEO means it’s now harder to retaliate in HEO. It would be an easy win for Russia to knock out Starlink if the US government is actually relying on it in any meaningful capacity.
It sounds like they are using it as a backup for their geostationary sats which would be much higher resolution and data rate. But there aren’t as many of them, so they’re feasible to shoot down.
And also affects China and India, both nations that Russia relies on. Doubly on China who is developing their own LEO internet service.
Asat are cheaper to manufacture and deploy than it is for a satellite.
Really? Where are you getting that info? This estimates a starlink costs about 1M to build and launch. The SM-3, the US asat missile, costs at least 10M each. I think it’s more for the asat variant, but I couldn’t find numbers for that. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-estimated-cost-for-Starlink-satellites-to-provide-high-speed-internet-across-the-United-States#:~:text=According to one source%2C the,be around %2415-30 billion. https://missiledefenseadvocacy.org/missile-defense-systems-2/missile-defense-systems/missile-interceptors-by-cost/
My penis will fuck any Russian in front of me is my penis a target too?
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It is… for gonorrhea.
Blast Lonnie’s bullshit out of the sky and see if I care.
Starlink launches forty-ish Starlink sats every other week, Russia could deplete it’s entire arsenal of missiles and, if they’re lucky, cause a hole in their coverage.
Starlink needs deleting too, so that would be perfect.
As someone who spends a lot of time in the outdoors, I have to disagree with you. I’m very excited about how this will simplify logistics, and make getting weather etc much easier.
If there were more third-world people here they’d probably agree with you as well. Last I checked there’s like one or two cables going into the entire continent of Africa.
It’s actually a really good idea, with the main exception being the impact on astronomy. That Musk happens to be the guy behind this first network is just an unfortunate coincidence.
As a person who lives in the third world I absolutely do not want the internet to only be controlled by American corporations from space and would much rather fund proper fiber optics and connections.
Ah. Yeah, I guess that’s true. It is an American thing. Would you feel better if it was European or Chinese?
Wire infrastructure is great, but it’s just damn expensive, and manufacturing+laying it can be very specialised labour. Even here in Canada not everyone has it in rural areas. Meanwhile, small satellite swarms pass over everywhere by force of geometry, and are actually still pretty fast internet.
Not really, but of that list only China hasn’t directly colonized the country I live or send storm troopers into the forest to murder people in the past decade. I would like the taxes we pay here to go towards developing ourselves, we can pay to educate networking engineers and subsidize the work ourselves and hook into the internet as a peer instead of as a subscriber. Third world countries aren’t poor because we have no money, we’re poor because we’re trapped in bad loan agreements, have lopsided international investment and bad interior planning which prefers plantation cash crops over food security.
Yeah, development is a “sticky wicket”. I didn’t mean to speak on your behalf when you’re there to speak for yourself, so sorry about that.
Starlink is probably a stopgap measure for areas that still have to build up the physical infrastructure for the real solution.
It’s more of a solution for having internet available just about anywhere. Probably good for various emergency/rescue scenarios.
I still don’t want the Americans to be controlling literally anything I use or interact with. They will harvest that data to execute military operations against leftists where I live. No fucking thanks, keep your Starlink.
Sad American upvote for that. I can’t imagine how this country must look to people around the world.
The skies are already polluted with Starlink satellites and there’s even more coming. I agree that is does solve some situations, but it’s being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas. Sticking more shit in our skies for money is really sad, I am surprised there’s not more international regulations for this kind of satellite spam.
but it’s being done for profit, not for undeveloped areas.
This is such a Lemmy comment, there’s nothing evil about providing a service for a price.
Providing a service for a price is not the problematic part.
The problem with serial killers isn’t that they want money in exchange, either.That makes absolutely no sense.
Oh it does, despite you not understanding it. The point is that even though someone does something fun money, that does not mean what they do is not harmful.
And before you
asksay this does not have to do anything with this topic, the reason I said that, is that I think what spacex is doing here is harmful.
What’s evil is what that incentivizes. It’s not solving problems but building profit.
Not on its own. Polluting the skies for profit is the problem. Why the cherry picking though?
Do you also think cell towers are “polluting the landscape”?
Of course cell towers are an eye sore. Though they are more necessary than starlink, often hidden by landscape or on top of buildings anyway. It’s not the “gotcha” comparison you think it is.
I’ve never had to do anything to get the weather. It just arrives and does its thing.
And we even made a whole movie about Kessler syndrome :|
Enjoy spreading misinformation online? There are valid criticisms against LEO constellations but Kessler syndrome is not one of them
??
Did you read the comment? It’s not about LEO satellites. It’s about a military arsenal destroying a fleet of LEO satellites. The satellites won’t do a Kessler, but a fleets worth of shrapnel would be a problem.
Which is exactly why Russia only needs a handful of rockets at most. You only need to make debris. The rest will sort itself out.
But that is a strategic capability, not a tactical one. It’s another form of MAD.
It’s another form of MAD.
Russia has nothing in that LEO orbit (that I’m aware of… I could be horrendously wrong). I don’t think there’s anything “mutually assured” here.
I’m pretty sure that starlink satellites are orders of magnitudes more expensive to manufacture and deploy than the weapons that can target them.
How do you know that? You’re launching an entire rocket to kill one satellite, that can’t be cheap.
Yes, it is probably expensive, but a satellite is probably even more expensive, and not just by a little.
I doubt it, not at the rate they throw them up.
I don’t think it is… one of the satellites cost USD 250k in 2019. it is likely cheaper now.
There have been Anti Satellite Weapon tests (for example from China) to see if it is feasible. The cost for such an attack would be much much higher than 250k (we are talking multiple millions)
Maybe, but one of the best traits about Musk is he’s willing to throw money at this regardless of profit. So he’s gunna keep throwing up more of these satellites, while Russia’s rocket supply is only going to get harder to resupply for the foreseeable future.
Really? You can put up 50 starlinks at a time for tens of millions of dollars, whereas asats need a more expensive an maneuverable kill vehicle and a launch for each one with lots more complicated targeting and maneuvering. It’s pretty hard to track and follow something down moving so fast through space and hit it. Plus Russia just doesn’t have the launch capacity to put up that much mass to orbit.
Not to mention that SpaceX has designed things so that they can piggyback starlink deployments on the back of other commercial launches. So, for example, AT&T pays them $25 million to launch a new telecom satellite, and they toss in another dozen or so starlink satellites along with it.
AT&T pays for the majority of the launch costs and starlink benefits from it.
